UK Constitution: Oversight and Responsibility (Report from the Constitution Committee)

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Friday 4th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the fresh and humane takes of the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port.

The public see a collective political failure: that was the phrase used by the noble Baroness, Lady Alexander of Cleveden, in her excellent—indeed, outstanding—contribution. As she correctly says, that anger of the public, that sense of disillusionment, are exaggerated by the uniquely centralised nature of our polity. We have weaker local government here than in any European country except Malta, which in some ways is governed as a kind of continuous conurbation. When we have failures at the centre here, they are felt far more strongly elsewhere.

Here is the extraordinary thing: that sense of anger and alienation, that rage against a failing political system, have happened before we have got to a recession. I say “before” because I can read the numbers of Labour’s spending just like anyone else can. Let me put that more neutrally and say “without a recession”; we have been flatlining for a bit. It is not a response to bread lines and mass unemployment; it is simply a sense that things are not working. It is a very understandable sense. Taxes keep going up and public services are not improving. The state seems unable to discharge its most basic core functions, such as policing its borders.

What I think people do not understand until they have been close to politics, until they have seen the system in operation, is the extent to which this is not a failure of will on the part of the elected Ministers so much as a systemic failure, because the Minister newly arrived finds himself encased in an inert machine—a broken state machine. He is tugging at levers that have worked loose; he is pressing at buttons that are disconnected; he is giving instructions, and nothing seems to work.

Let us take as an example, because it was going on for a long time, the case of the Afghan hijackers who arrived at Stansted after diverting their flight at gunpoint in 2000. Six successive Home Secretaries, five Labour and one Conservative, including the noble Lords, Lord Reid and Lord Blunkett, tried to remove them. They had public opinion on their side, they had parliamentary support, and they were unable to do it. They were unable to do it because they were jabbing at that disconnected button. It is the same whether it is planning or energy policy. Ministers come in with all sorts of ideas, having sincerely made promises, and find that the machine does not let them deliver those promises.

Until we sort that problem out, the anger and disillusion of the public will increase to the point where, I fear, they may feel, in an irrational rage—like the man who takes a cudgel to his computer because it is malfunctioning—that they need to get something out of their system even though the net result will be worse.

We underestimate the extent to which this has happened in our lifetimes, specifically since 1997. There was a new juridical system created, both by international treaty and by national law, which has massively tilted the balance against the elected representative and in favour of the standing functionary. Any incoming Government who want to restore honour, purpose and meaning to the act of casting a ballot will need to begin by repealing a great many things, and not just the international treaties that prevent us delivering manifesto promises but a lot of the national legislation—the Equality Act, the Human Rights Act, the Climate Change Act and all the things that constrain Governments’ freedom to act—and a lot of the internal mechanisms of the Civil Service.

In a way, I find it shocking that we were not more shocked by what my noble friend Lady Coffey said about finding letters in her name on Twitter for the first time, because they were being written by officials on her behalf, without her knowledge. That we are so unshocked by that, that we take it so for granted, tells us a great deal about the feebleness of a Minister within this system.

The people who politically approve of all the things that were put in place are much more relaxed about the lack of democracy in the system than those who disapprove. I understand that; it is why the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, is giving me a funny look. Of course, she does not like the idea of repealing the Human Rights Act and all the rest of it. I get that, but is that not an argument we ought to be having democratically, in allowing people to make a decision? Win the case on its merits; do not try to constrain future Governments through judicial activism and judicial review.

When we were talking the day before yesterday about not allowing people to come here unless they have been approved by HOLAC, I made the point that this was enshrining the system of getting an ideological committee—if you like—to vet who is a proper person to be in government. This is a symbol for what has been happening since 1997, which is that certain points of view are disallowed regardless of their popularity in the country at large. In responding, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said that “That is the difference between popular democracy, which is what Hannan wants, and liberal democracy”. I want to interrogate that distinction a little.

Of course, we do not have absolute majoritarianism. Nobody is in favour of a system where, with a majority of 50% plus one, you could expropriate people or incarcerate them without trial. There are some basic defences of human rights that this country has recognised since the Bill of Rights and before. But I do not see how liberal democracy in that sense—a bunch of good chaps in HOLAC determining who is fit to be here—is any different from saying that democracy by Liberal Democrats or people acceptable to Liberal Democrats, or a certain kind of perspective, whatever its popular reach, is just not proper in these Chambers.

That has a great deal to do with what looks like the looming collapse of the two-party system we have had for the better part of a century, a commensurate feeling that the entire system has failed, and the sense one detects now in focus groups: this rather scary thing of people saying that we may need some kind of autocratic government to sort it out, just to get things to work, to make things happen, to get the public services and to make sure our borders are secure. That is the smashing-up of the malfunctioning computer and, unless we anticipate it, unless we restore power to elected representatives nationally and locally, I fear that the cudgel will descend.