Parliamentary Democracy and Standards in Public Life

Lord McNally Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

We are out of order; it is me next. I am always eager to hear the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, but I would like to say a few words myself. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Browne, and to anticipate the noble Baroness’s speech. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Featherstone on her formidable speech. Do not take too much notice of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth—he has never been able to see a belt without wanting to hit below it.

I will first refer to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, and the noble Lord, Lord Browne. It is not the time for complacency by Parliament or investigative journalism when a television play achieves more in a week than other parts of our governance have achieved in 20 years. That is not to take any credit away from parliamentarians such as the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, who pressed for justice for those damaged by this scandal.

The noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, called his seminal political novel House of Cards. That is a good description of liberal democracy—the concept, not the party. We are all familiar with Churchill’s famous quote that

“democracy is the worst form of Government”—[Official Report, Commons, 11/11/1947; col. 207.]

until you have tried the others. It functions best when its various components—a democratically elected Parliament, a Government, an independent judiciary, a media that adheres to the highest standards of truth and accuracy, and a Civil Service selected and promoted on merit—deliver open government and are underpinned by a robust and wide-ranging Freedom of Information Act. Each of those elements stands alone in a functioning democracy, yet each gives strength to that democracy by helping to strengthen the others. At the apex of that house of cards are this Parliament and the determination of each one of us to protect a democracy that, at its most generous, can be described as fraying at the edges.

In my three minutes, there is no time to set out a detailed programme of reform. Like the noble Lord, Lord Browne, I refer the House to the excellent briefing from Transparency International UK and Spotlight on Corruption. It sets out a programme of reform against which all parties should be tested at the next election and against which individuals should be judged. I hope that, in his extended 20 minutes, the Leader of the House—I am glad to see that he agreed to respond to this debate—will assess the progress on the Government’s Command Paper that was published last July, Strengthening Ethics and Integrity in Central Government, and then promise us a full day’s debate on that document so that we may return to this issue.

It is a daunting agenda that faces the democracies. As so often, Shakespeare got it right when he wrote:

“The fault … is not in our stars, But in ourselves”.