Constitutional Convention

Lord Owen Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Owen (Ind SD)]

My Lords, I strongly support the Motion and the concept behind it. We cannot go on in this country, particularly in a post-Brexit situation, without doing more to bring together all parts of the United Kingdom. Postponing this issue is one of our most serious and grave errors. I also believe that the noble Lord has made the most realistic proposition. It will not be done by this Government. Therefore, it is much more sensible for all those other parties in another place to come together now and start to have a mechanism for building a great deal more trust. Of course it will be difficult because of differences between the Labour Party and the SNP in particular. Nevertheless, the most likely next Government of this country will be another one composed of more than one party. Those parties that aspire to come together had better start learning to talk to each other.

The problem is the asymmetry of the United Kingdom. It is very hard to deal with it. The population of England accounts for 84% of the UK’s population. Scotland accounts for 8%. The population of Wales is 5% and the population of Northern Ireland 3%. Therefore, we have to look at the UK as a whole and recognise this. It is a great tribute to the Conservative Party that it has started on a serious pattern of devolution for England. I welcome that.

I used to believe that it was possible to reform this place to elect it and make it a federal Chamber. The reality is that will never happen. It is not legitimate and most of us in our hearts know that a Chamber that purports to legislate has to be totally rooted in elections. This Chamber will go. I was looking back at some of Winston Churchill’s speeches when he was a Liberal in 1905, going onwards for four or five years, and the vehemence with which he said that this place had to be abolished. Unfortunately that has been dissipated by time, but it will be abolished. In the meantime, we will need to build federal structures.

I think it is important to take a completely different way over this and look at this federal mechanism as allowing elected Members at Holyrood, Cardiff Bay and Stormont, as well as devolved and decentralised government structures in England, to participate in a UK federal council. It is a very different and potentially more acceptable form of federal governance. It would involve a devolved London Assembly and the eight big cities emerging now with devolved powers in England. For the rest of the UK, it would have to rely on separate representation for county and borough councils and unitary authorities in England. These already have their mechanism for concerting their views.

It seems to me that we should be humble enough in this country to look at the one structure that actually works. It is not very far away; it is the Bundesrat in Germany and it had a lot of help from constitutional experts in this country in the aftermath of the Second World War, trying to help the German people devise a new constitution. Look at their problem: they faced the problem of asymmetry in the Bundesrat. Baden-Württemberg has a population of more than 10 million; Bavaria, more than 12 million; Berlin, 3,395,000; and then there are smaller Länder such as Bremen, with 663,000 people. This is a structure that has come together; it deals with the issue of asymmetry and the problem of elections, but they come to it from the Länder, so they were not creating another body to be elected. The House of Commons will not let this happen. Those of us in this place who have been in the House of Commons know perfectly well that they speak with forked tongues: they advocate elections for a second Chamber but they are never going to do it, because they know, quite rightly, that there will be a constitutional clash as soon as we have this.

We have to accept it, we reformers who thought we could live with this situation: it is not going to happen, there will not be an elected second Chamber. Eventually, this Chamber will be abolished and before that, slowly, we will build up a structure that creates a federal UK, and the sooner the better. Instead of waiting for the Government, I wrote to the Prime Minister as soon as she took office and asked her what she would do about this, and, basically, the answer was negative. This Government have enough on their plate. They are not going to do anything if they survive until the year 2022, when we will have a fixed-term election. In the meantime, the opposition parties should start a process of dialogue and discussion and I hope very much that it is along the lines of this. If any noble Lord wants to see the much more detailed proposals that I have put forward on this, I would be very happy to send them details of a federal UK council.

Chilcot Inquiry

Lord Owen Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Owen (Ind SD)]

My Lords, I will raise some of the issues that are going to face Parliament when this report is published, but first I will deal with the question of if this report gets delayed until next year, which now looks very likely, the appropriate way of determining when it should be published in relation to a general election. It would be naive to believe that in the immediate run-up to a general election there will be the sort of objective evaluation of the report that we have every right to do and the inquiry has every right to expect.

I have written to the chairman of the Electoral Commission, which is in my view the only real body that could objectively have a look at this, take the views of the different parties and come to a conclusion, and let the inquiry committee know before Christmas what its feeling is. Obviously, if it is published this year, that is fine, but since, because of fixed-term Parliaments, we know the election date, it would be very ill advised for it to go beyond January or the middle of February. It would be better, after we have waited all this time, to wait until after the general election.

I approach this from the viewpoint of the Suez crisis, which was one of the most emotional experiences that I went through as an 18 year-old. I have always believed that it was a terrible mistake not to have an inquiry into the Suez crisis. We would have learnt things from the handling of that crisis which would have been given greater weight in the counsels of government during the Iraq war. Then there is the question of how you treat the Cabinet in a time of war as distinct from Parliament. We know it is not possible to say everything to the general public in the run-up to a war, but I believe it is essential, if the authority of the Prime Minister is such that they have the prerogative to declare war, to understand that, provided they speak for the Cabinet, there is no way any Prime Minister can go to war in a minority in their own Cabinet. Therefore, the Cabinet discussions are extremely important.

The other thing which is troubling most of us is the fact that the Commission stopped taking evidence over three years ago. This is the real issue and if it is postponed into next year it will be close to four years. This is an intolerable delay and we have to determine how this matter can be resolved in future. It is very difficult for the Prime Minister of a different party to make a determination about a document which basically relates to another Administration. So it has been decided to involve the Cabinet Secretary, but if you are the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary during all this crucial time from 9/11 until 2003, you ought to recuse yourself from making these decisions, or at least when it becomes a matter of such controversy you should bow out and find another person to deal with the issue. This is particularly important since this Cabinet Secretary is almost a new creation. Normally Cabinet Secretaries come to this position having been senior civil servants in major departments. Although they are often Private Secretaries to a Prime Minister as part of their overall experience, which is very helpful to them, they are not in the rough and tumble of party politics. The present Cabinet Secretary has been Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister for Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and now David Cameron. He has been almost constantly involved, both in government and outside government, in the party-political battle. This is not ideal. Since the job has been split, the present Cabinet Secretary having declined to act as head of the Civil Service, it would have been better for the head of the Civil Service to be the arbiter of this, or even the Lord Chancellor, as has been done on official secrets issues. I know the role of Lord Chancellor has changed, but some mechanism is necessary.

The other most troubling aspect about Sir John Chilcot’s letter to the Prime Minister was that it revealed that new information has been given to the committee only this summer—information that fills in gaps. What is the role of Parliament? It seems to me that one of the Select Committees, probably the House of Commons Administration Committee, should now look at why there has been this delay and come to some conclusions. It is no use leaving it until afterwards. But now that there is obviously a gap of four or five months, it should take a look at the administrative aspects, find out whether in future it is tolerable for a Cabinet Secretary to be the sole arbiter of this, and have some idea as to how much a Government, a civil servant and a Cabinet Secretary are obligated to follow the terms of reference and the explanation given by the Prime Minister.

When he was Prime Minister, Gordon Brown made it quite clear that all British documents would be made available to this committee. The record made by British civil servants of a British Prime Minister talking to the President of the United States is a British document. There should be no argument about that. Of course, if the exchange is taking place on the telephone, it is not reasonable to expect that an American President’s words in this conversation would be reported. It would be inappropriate and I do not believe anybody has asked for that. The Cabinet Secretary said that former Prime Minister Tony Blair has had no involvement in this delay. We are then told that the delay has come from America. Who is the person in America who is going to delay it other than former President Bush? It is not a matter for President Obama—again, it is difficult for him to comment. It beggars belief that former President Bush in his decision-making is not totally uninterested in, or unaware of, the views of former Prime Minister Blair.

This whole arrangement has been shown to be so damaging that it has already gravely damaged the credibility of the inquiry report. We need then to look again as a Parliament at how these public inquiries will be held in the future. They are a safety valve. The way in which the Cabinet Secretary has handled it, and the comments that seem have to been made, suggest that there is no understanding that a very serious situation has occurred that is far worse than was the case with Suez. This Iraq inquiry is probing into many things. I happen to agree that it would be a very good idea to probe economic sanctions. Economic sanctions ought to have brought the Saddam Hussein regime to account. After all, it was the intervention in 1991 that stopped the so-called turkey shoot, when an immense number of casualties were being made from firing on the troops as Saddam Hussein came back from Kuwait. A ceasefire was done under the authority of the United Nations. It was the breaches of those resolutions that were passed in the immediate aftermath that had been so serious. I shall not go into the merits or otherwise of the issue—we can discuss that.

There are aspects of this report which are bound to be parliamentary. The first of those will be: was Parliament told the truth? I happened to be in this Chamber in 2007 when the noble Lord, Lord Butler, who was in charge of the review of intelligence, stood up and read out a document, so these were calculated words, in which he accused the former Prime Minister of being “disingenuous”—we know what that word means outside this Chamber; it is the furthest that you can go to accuse the Prime Minister of lying—over the interpretation of the intelligence. I do not care whether the Prime Minister thought something—they were entirely his views—but, once he quotes the intelligence to Parliament, then that quotation has got to be accurate.

The Chilcot inquiry has already looked very carefully at this in terms of the foreword to the document on which much of the debate in Parliament was held, and one can take one’s own conclusions from those reports. Therefore, Parliament needs to have a procedure. We all know what happens with these reports. They are looked at 24 hours beforehand by the people who are criticised; there is great press briefing and distortion of the document; and most people find it very difficult to form a judgment on day one. I suggest that Parliament decides now that it will not have an immediate debate—letting the report be read for a fortnight or three weeks—but that it will ask a committee of the House to look at those aspects which relate to Parliament. Was Parliament misled? Was there a “disingenuous” interpretation of the intelligence? Did we know the full facts in Parliament before that debate? One draws on the report, but it is a parliamentary matter of great importance.

We rightly take very seriously perjury before a court, and many of us who have been in both Houses of Parliament take seriously a lie to the House of Commons. People forget that, in December 1956, it was because Sir Anthony Eden misled the House that it was inevitable that he would have to resign. When he said that there had been no prior sharing of knowledge with Israel and France over the so-called interposition of the British and other forces, that was known by then to be untruthful and it made it inevitable that he would have to resign very soon. In fact, he never came back to Parliament and resigned. I happen to believe that there were medical reasons why one needs to rather charitable in looking at Anthony Eden’s conduct over this whole thing; he was a sick man through most of it. However, that does not in any way diminish the fact that probity before Parliament is an essential question and one that we must face up to. In my view, contempt of Parliament is every bit as important as contempt of court.