Queen’s Speech

Lord Phillips of Sudbury Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury (LD)]

My Lords, I propose to address a broad issue to which there is little or no direct reference in the Queen’s Speech, but which I believe is of fundamental interest and importance to this House. It is of course the state of our democracy. If one seeks to measure that by, for example, voting statistics or the number of our fellow citizens who are members of political parties, then the degree of crisis—I believe that that is an appropriate word—facing us now in terms of our political vitality and relevance is extreme.

I remember very well making my maiden speech in the debate on the Queen’s Speech in 1998 and referring to this subject then; it is not new. I believe that it is a continuing and deepening problem. I quoted then from the great John Pym who, your Lordships will remember, led the parliamentary cause into the Civil War before dying in 1643. He uttered a remarkable phrase, which has stuck in my mind ever since I read it 50 years ago, when he talked about the essentiality of what he called the,

“vigour and cheerfulness of allegiance”.

He remarked on the fact that such vigour and cheerfulness was not a feature of those years and on how Charles I had sacrificed that vigour and cheerfulness by his failure to involve Parliament et al. That lack of vigour and cheerfulness is dramatic today. If we add in the several million voters who did not even bother to register at the previous election, fewer than one in five under-25s voted. We need to ask why this is so and we need to address the complex causes of this state of affairs. They are mightily complex.

The Queen’s Speech refers to preparing “school pupils for employment”. How about preparing them to be active and engaged citizens and to have the knowledge, skill and will to engage as citizens in civic life? There are three further obstructions or challenges to the crisis, as I will call it. The first is the breakdown of community life, which continues unabated, as it has almost since the war. It is within community that we learn about citizenship. We do not learn it formally, but informally—involuntarily. We learn about mutualism and the common wealth, and so many things which then and for ever thereafter sustain us in our engagement with our local communities. Community life has broken down everywhere.

What about the complexity of our laws? We know enough about that in this House. We change the laws every few years, usually because we have not implemented the laws that we have. It is a common fact that the number of parliamentarians in both Houses who now engage in legislating is going down and down, which is why we have more debates. It is so complicated. You need to be a lawyer to get your head around half of it. What about the poor citizen, who is not consulted and certainly not informed in language that they can understand?

We need to refer to and remark on the lack of civic leadership, which is acute and impacts on public service, local and national. A number of speakers today have referred to the Bill on slavery. I was reading about the great William Wilberforce the other day and came across this remarkably contemporary quote. He wrote:

“The opposite to selfishness is public spirit; which may be termed, not unjustly, the grand principle of political vitality, the very life’s breath of states”.

How is public service in our time? It is in a dire condition. The natural elites of our communities are now largely opted out of civic engagement. There are wonderful exceptions, but take my own profession—the law. It is, I am afraid, a tragic fact that, from being pillars of the community at the start of my professional life, we are now largely absent. I think that the disaffection and disconnection to which this state of affairs has led, which I have had to sketch very briefly, has impacted devastatingly, particularly on the less able and the less—how shall I put it?—elevated. Of course, UKIP and the Scots Nats tap into the feelings of abandonment, of being outside the tent and of being ignored and overlooked. They have tapped into that with a will. We have to revitalise our national democratic vitality. I am sorry that time means that I have to leave it at that bare exposition.