Parliamentary Democracy in the United Kingdom

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I am very happy to welcome the right reverend Prelate to this House. He comes from an interesting background. Apart from being a priest in the south of England, Leicester and Staffordshire, he has also worked in Japan. He was involved in setting up the national Christian Muslim Forum and now chairs the Council of Christians and Jews. I gather he is also one of the Church of England’s team of bishops for prisons. That is a good range of expertise from which to speak with authority in this House. We look forward to that, and to him, as with his colleagues, bringing his diocesan perspective to this sometimes rather overly metropolitan House.

Anyone who has read Anthony Seldon’s account of the Johnson Government in the Times in recent days must doubt whether parliamentary democracy has been saved or strengthened since 2019. We should all be worried by the quality of democratic government in the UK and the damage that has been done to its conventions. The events in Washington two years ago have shown how delicate commitment to constitutional democracy can be.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Norton, I worry about the depth of public disillusion in the UK about democratic politics, above all about Westminster and how it operates. I worry even more about the depth of disillusion among the young, few of whom now vote, let alone join political parties, and turn to the streets instead to campaign.

I worry about ministerial attacks on the rule of law—that essential part of democracy. I worry about the colonisation of the Conservative Party by US Republicans, national conservatives and Christian nationalists, with their well-funded organisations, dragging the Conservatives towards an illiberal authoritarianism. I worry that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, has become more of a national conservative than a Conservative, although I am happy that the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, seems to have resisted some of that tendency.

I worry about the creeping spread of conspiracy theories, which inspire and energise anti-democratic fantasists, of allegations about a hidden deep state or a controlling liberal elite. I worry about the willingness of our right-wing media to help spread such theories. I worry about the fringe of right-wing extremists, fired up by social media, who talk about violence, some of whom, sadly, have gone on to kill politicians.

I worry about what would happen if we had a change of Government who then failed to change the way British politics works, leaving at the following election the only effective alternative: a Conservative Party that had drifted further to the right. None of us should be complacent about the strength of our constitution or democracy. We need more than a change of Government; we need a change of political culture and structure.