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However, the challenge for us in your Lordships' House is threefold. It is, first, not to accept the temptation to think that it is simply the other end of the building- the Commons-that is the problem. That would be complacent myopia. To coin a phrase, we are all in this together. It is, secondly, to respond not by chiding the media, but by challenging the culture and the way that
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Obviously, financial probity is a start, but it will not do on its own to restore confidence. We must show that we are more effective at doing our job: representing the country at large and holding the Government to account. This House prides itself on securing useful, constructive amendments to government Bills. It is right to do so, but the Executive still run roughshod over the settled will of Parliament.
Let me take one example with which I have been concerned: the Political Parties and Elections Act. On 15 June last year, your Lordships added a new clause to the Bill. It was tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, with my support. Incidentally, he told me that he would have liked to have participated in this debate, but family commitments have made that impossible. The clause, which sought to end offshore bankrolling of political parties, was passed by your Lordships' House, despite an unholy alliance of the Conservative and Labour Whips. The Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw, reluctantly accepted the measure, as he could never have persuaded his Labour colleagues to vote in favour of a tide of foreign Tory cash. However, immediately after the clause was refined by the Government's parliamentary counsel and the Bill was passed into law, the Ministry of Justice announced that it would not be implemented until after the general election.
The Government seem so bound up with their own demise that they are fated actually to accelerate it. Now, at the 59th minute of the 11th hour, Jack Straw appears to have noticed and regretted this folly. In the Independent newspaper, he published an article entitled,
"The Tories are trying to buy the election. Never before in the history of our elections has a party spent so much to help so few".
A revelation! I cannot see how that could come as news to the Lord Chancellor, as many of us-and, indeed, many of his own party-have been telling him that that was going to be the case. The vagaries of our electoral system may be so further exacerbated by the most ruthlessly targeted campaign in the history of British elections that we will see a distorted outcome. Whole swathes of seats will be ignored as respectively "safe" and "no hope", while the remainder-about 150 marginals-will be deluged with leaflets, direct mail, telephone calls, billboards; you name it.
More constituencies are in the process of being bought than at any time since the removal of the rotten boroughs in 1832. If any Members of your Lordships' House think that I am exaggerating, read the article in the Times today that shows that to be the case. The election will focus on a narrow band of voters in those seats, leaving millions of others in a democratic desert.
Your Lordships' House voted to stop the rot, but the Government have simply ignored the will of Parliament. Their excuses cut no ice. The Electoral Commission did not say that it would be impossible to police the safeguards against foreign donations, if Mr Straw had authorised their introduction as soon as
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Ministers' pursuit of some elusive consensus has in practice meant that the slowest reformers, the retrograde, have had a practical veto. The pace of progress has been as swift as only the most sluggish of drivers. Despite support for proper donation caps and for limits on spending in constituencies between elections, even from former national officers of the Conservative Party who sit on the Conservative Benches in this House, Ministers failed abysmally to respond to the challenge.
Now the Lord Chancellor has woken up from his lethargy and is complaining, but it is his fault. He has been shown to be a man of straw. The corrosive power of big money will, even more than before, dominate the coming election campaign and potentially determine its outcome. Potentially, that is corruption of our political process on a scale that will cause the expenses revelations of last year to pale into insignificance. Worse still, that is just one item in a catalogue of failures.
I have here a checklist of progress made on the Brown agenda, as set out in his first statement of purpose as Prime Minister and the subsequent Green and White Papers. On war powers, the proposed statutory right for MPs to vote disappeared. On treaty ratification, in the current Bill before the other House, the Lords has a very limited role, while Ministers retain wriggle room. No more is heard about even the very limited role that the Commons might have to approve the dissolution of Parliament, let alone a fixed-term Parliament. Recall of Parliament has gone. The promised review of royal prerogative powers has stalled. The proposal to increase the independence of the Attorney-General from the Government, as recommended by Commons Select Committee inquiries, to avoid rows such as those over Iraq and BAE advice, has been dropped completely. The disclosures at the Chilcot inquiry this very week show all too clearly that the office is too susceptible to political pressure, but that reform has gone.
On accountability of Ministers, regional Select Committees have been a dismal failure, while Secretaries of State are still not confirmed in office after appearing before the appropriate departmental Select Committee. The ministerial code is now not to be approved by your Lordships' House or the other place; it is still to be effectively policed only by the Prime Minister.
On enhancing the role of Back-Benchers, having set up the Wright committee with a tight timetable, the Government Chief Whip is now delaying and neutering its recommendations. Any Member of your Lordships' House who managed to observe Business Questions a couple of hours ago in the other place will have noticed that, yet again, Harriet Harman is putting this issue into the long grass. That is outrageous.
There has been absolutely no progress on petitioning Parliament. On protests around Parliament, even the modest relaxation in the Constitutional Reform and
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On local government, there is no sign yet of real devolution to councils or of the production of a concordat, which is not even in draft. The Equality Bill has been left so late in this Parliament that it could be lost in an early dissolution. On a British Bill of rights and duties, Ministers have vacated this territory and handed it over to reactionary Tories. As I have already said, the regulation of political party donations and expenditure has gone out of the window after the hard work across parties in the discussions on Hayden Phillips's proposals.
Surely, constituents should have the last word on the recall of MPs. When an MP cheats, recall should not be for the party leaders, using some sort of Star Chamber process; it should be for constituents. The Prime Minister said that he was considering it, and then he conveniently forgot all about it. I dare not go into House of Lords reform. After 10 wasted years, we are getting nowhere. Some of my colleagues on these Benches will wish to say something about that.
Is there to be a deathbed repentance on electoral reform? We are told that the Cabinet was considering it this morning. Instead of a principled initiative to give electors a real choice with votes of equal value, timid ideas in the dying days of this Parliament run the risk of being seen as gerrymandering. If I may adopt a football analogy so dear to the hearts of noble Lords, I wondered this morning whether it was Newcastle Brown 2, Gordon Brown 0.
Mr Straw and the Prime Minister have said that they are in favour of a written constitution. Why not try to build up public support and encourage proper discussion among our fellow citizens in a citizens' assembly or convention to make progress? All the optimism of those early days, not just in May 1997, but in July 2007 as well, has evaporated. No wonder the public are so disillusioned and disenchanted.
However, not every reform depends on the will of Ministers. As the Lord Speaker rightly reminded us last month in her address to the Hansard Society, we could and should improve our effectiveness in holding the Government to account and raise our game. Indeed, the Hansard Society, in common with the Better Government Initiative and the Institute for Government, has been indicating ways in which we could do so. We need an urgent examination of the options along the lines suggested by the noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Butler, in the debate on the gracious Speech in November. It does not need to await the general election; indeed, a clear, agreed agenda for change in your Lordships' House before the dissolution is desirable. If we leave it to the initiative of the Government Front Bench, nothing will happen, or it will be skewed to
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As a member of the Procedure Committee, I frankly doubt whether it is the right mechanism for this urgent project. Instead, perhaps an ad hoc committee should take forward the agenda outlined in the seminar on strengthening Parliament convened by the Lord Speaker last year. Just because the Prime Minister and the Cabinet have dragged their feet so disastrously, there is no excuse for either House to neglect its duties. To regain any public respect, so essential for our democracy to work, we need to achieve greater transparency, greater accountability and greater identification with our fellow citizens when we make decisions on their behalf at all levels of governance.
After 13 wasted years, the Government have failed to clean up our politics and make Parliament more effective. The public expect better of your Lordships' House than they do of Ministers. If we fail them again, all hope of retrieving Parliament's lost reputation will be lost for good.
2.05 pm
Lord Parekh: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for securing this debate and for introducing it with considerable passion. Demands for reform in almost every aspect of our political and constitutional life are in the air and the question is how we respond to them. The noble Lord outlined a syllabus of reforms, and there are many others. We can approach and discuss these reforms in one of two ways. One way I find satisfactory, but the other I do not.
One way is to take an abstract, theoretical view of democracy, representation or this or that aspect of our public life, measure existing institutions against it, find them inadequate and criticise them. For example, we might say that democracy means election with a majority. The House of Lords is not elected; therefore, it must go or must be elected. We might say that we are a secular society; therefore, bishops have no place in the House of Lords. This is an a priori, theoretical way of approaching reform.
The second, much more empirical, pragmatic way of approaching reform is to identify problems, which institutions and practices are unjust or dysfunctional and how best we can put them right. For example, we might feel that an overbearing Executive are dominating Parliament. As a result, parliamentary debate and parliamentary control of the Executive are considerably diminished. What do we do about it? We think in terms of concrete suggestions. How did the scandal of MPs' expenses come about? Why was it not detected for so long, and what can we do about it? In other words, we can approach every institution in terms of whether and why it is unjust or dysfunctional and what we can do about it.
It is also important to bear in mind that reform in one institution invariably has consequences for another. For example, if we try to elect the House of Lords, we run the risk that the same party might be in power in both Houses, and therefore our concern to check the overbearing Executive would be frustrated. Every reform has a knock-on effect on another and cannot be
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That war led to massive civilian and military casualties, the breakdown of law and order, sectarian violence, profound mistrust, loss of property and profound damage to our national pride and self-respect. It is a deep, massive and indelible stain on our national conscience, and the question is how we got it. When we were talking about the war in Iraq, my noble friend Lord Morgan and I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister giving seven good reasons why the war was counterproductive. We were not taken in by the arguments on WMD. Anyone who knew his history would know that that argument was untenable.
How did this happen? Why was intelligence manipulated? Why was the Cabinet bounced into supporting this decision? Why was there no planning and post-war reconstruction? Why was there no check on prime ministerial hubris or sense of self-righteousness? We will have to wait for the Chilcot inquiry report, but in anticipation of what he will say-he might not say what I suspect he will say-I end by making three important suggestions.
First, in the light of the war on Iraq and the lead-up to it, I am increasingly convinced that there should be no declaration of war without majority backing in both Houses of Parliament. In the Commons alone, there is always the danger that the party in power has a majority. Your Lordships' House has the advantage of being free from party control.
Secondly, intelligence should be vetted and certified by an independent body of experienced statesmen drawn from all walks of life so that we can be reasonably sure that it has not been manipulated or skewed.
Thirdly, there must be some sanctions-formal or informal, legal as well as political-on those who fail to exercise proper judgment or who positively misjudge. In this context, it might be worth remembering the practice of classical Athens and Rome, where the roots of our democracy were planted. In classical Athens, those who were guilty of misjudging or who failed to exercise judgment were sent into exile. In classical Rome, they were disqualified and asked to withdraw from public life. We might have some lessons to learn from the practices of those two great societies.
2.11 pm
Lord Norton of Louth: My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my former colleague at the University of Hull, the noble Lord, Lord Parekh. Like him, I wish to call attention to a particular dichotomy.
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I have previously identified two types of constitutional changes: changes made to our constitutional framework and changes made within that framework. Changes made to our constitutional framework have been pronounced in recent years. They have been several and substantial. From the perspective of the constitution, they have also been incoherent: that is, they have derived from no clear view of the type of constitution deemed appropriate for the United Kingdom. Each has been justified on its individual merits and not set in a broader, intellectually coherent approach to constitutional change. We are therefore in something of a constitutional wilderness.
I have previously made the case for the creation of a commission, or a committee, on the constitution, not for the purpose of crafting a new constitution for the United Kingdom but rather for making sense of where we are and for ensuring that proposals for further change are consistent with the essential principles that underpin our constitution. Reform should not be divorced from first principles. We keep hearing about the reform of your Lordships' House-this has already been touched on-but reform is usually couched in specific terms, focusing primarily on composition, with no reference to first principles. We need to discuss this House in the context of Parliament and what we expect of Parliament in our constitutional arrangements. Discussing composition should be the end point, not the starting point, of a discussion about Parliament's place in our polity.
We should thus view with extreme caution calls for further major changes to the framework of the constitution. In many cases, they are contestable on their own merits. Some are lemon meringue reforms: that is, they appear superficially attractive, but when you bite into them, there is very little there. That applies not least to the arguments for electoral reform. What is more, demands for reform tend to divert us from the real, often messy, problems that face us and that permit of no clear-cut answers.
There is scope for change in our existing constitutional framework. Our system is premised on a number of vital relationships, not least between the Executive and the legislature and between the legislature and the individual. For reasons of time, I shall focus on the former.
We have seen a number of changes in recent years, which have been designed to enhance parliamentary scrutiny of legislation. Some of them have been very welcome, but Parliament, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has already said, remains limited in the extent to which it can scrutinise legislation and call government to account. The Constitution Committee, in its 2004 report on Parliament and the Legislative Process, examined the process under the headings of pre-legislative scrutiny, legislative scrutiny and post-legislative scrutiny. Let me briefly identify some of the changes that we should pursue.
For pre-legislative scrutiny, the publication of Bills in draft should be the norm and not the exception. It should be a matter for Parliament as to which are then subject to pre-legislative scrutiny. Once legislation is introduced, there are changes that we should make in this House. We are in danger of being left behind by
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Several other reforms could be made to strengthen Parliament in scrutinising legislation and calling government to account. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, identified them in his splendid speech at the start of the Session; the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has already referred to some of them. We should also review the processes by which we determine our own structures and procedures. There is a long way to go, but my point is that we can at least make progress in strengthening Parliament. Implementing reform to achieve that is both desirable and achievable. Let us focus on that, where there is a clear case to act, rather than be side-tracked by demands for wider constitutional change that detract from addressing the real issues that face this country. Let us craft the means to enable Parliament to call government to account in tackling those issues.
2.17 pm
Lord Shutt of Greetland: My Lords, first, I declare an interest. I am obviously interested in democracy-I have 15 electoral contests to my name-but, to be specific, I am chairman of the Democratic Reform Company, a director of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, and a trustee of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, which has been funding the Democratic Reform Company.
Members of this House will recall the 2006 Power report, which made 30 recommendations. It was presided over by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and was well received-so much so, in fact, that one commentator said, "Will this splendid report just go on a shelf, or will people really take this thing seriously and take it forward?".
The Democratic Reform Company exists to build on the Power report. Power2010 has been launched to bring the public into the heart of the issues of constitutional reform. In the early autumn, the public, via the splendour of the internet, were asked for reform ideas. Some 4,200 such ideas were received by 30 November. With the help of academics from Southampton University, the 4,200 ideas were distilled into 87 and deliberated on at an event that was held on 9 and 10 January this year. More than 130 people of all backgrounds throughout the United Kingdom were brought together by YouGov, who further considered the 87 reform ideas over two days and came up with 29 that reflected the majority of the views of the 130. All were supported by more than half the 130. This whole process was overseen by Dr James Fishkin and his team from Stanford University in the United States. Since 18 January, these 29 ideas have been put out to public vote, again via the internet, with the aim of finding the five most popular reforms. They can be found on the Power2010 website.
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At 10.30 this morning, more than 25,000 votes had been cast from more than 7,500 people. Although people can vote for all 29 reforms, they are tending to vote for about three. At the moment, the leader board shows 3,900 votes for introducing a proportional voting system, 2,800 votes for scrapping ID cards and rolling back the database state, just short of 2,000 votes for a written constitution, 1,900 votes for fixed-term Parliaments, and 1,670 votes for English votes on English laws. Coming up on the rim in sixth place is a fully elected second Chamber and, in seventh, is stronger local government. Noble Lords will be interested to know that in 29th place, with only 113 votes, is directly elected mayors.
Peers are not disfranchised from this election, so everyone here can take part. This will be built up until the closure date of 22 February. It is the intention of the Democratic Reform Company to see that these top five proposals are promoted throughout the land in the ensuing months.
2.21 pm
The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for initiating this debate and for his continued pressure on us to look at and explore issues of constitutional reform. Any such reform must combine public accountability with that effective and detailed wisdom which is necessary to explore the way forward for legislation and the testing of government action. I want to explore that briefly in terms of three points.
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