Parliamentary Democracy and Standards in Public Life

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Featherstone]

That this House takes note of the current standing of parliamentary democracy and standards in public life.

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, I have no doubt that this noble House knows right from wrong, believes in decency, wisdom, truth and honesty, and values our freedoms and way of life and the vital part that parliamentary democracy and standards in public life play. Inevitably, much criticism in this debate will be levelled at the current Government, but this is about principles that are for all time and all Governments and opposition parties—all of us in politics. We all need to do better.

In recent years, there has been an erosion of many of the cornerstones of British political life. Recent Prime Ministers and Cabinets have shown a disregard towards parliamentary process; a preference for journalists and broadcasters who support the Government’s position; an apathy for the rule of law; an overwhelming transfer of law from primary to secondary legislation; a disdain for domestic and international courts; a reduction within freedom of protest; and an undue influence on the operational independence of the police services, and indeed the electoral process itself. At the same time, we have witnessed a deterioration in standards of public life, particularly highlighted in the Covid inquiry, where we are seeing how poor standards at the heart of Government led to unnecessary amounts of human suffering at a time when the public needed those standards more than ever. Instead, the Government created a shoddy PPE procurement process, which allowed profiteers to benefit at a time of crisis.

I raised the issue of political preference in media coverage in my response to the gracious Speech. The guidelines for government communication services say that dealing with journalists

“should be objective and explanatory, not biased or polemical”,

and

“should not be—and not liable to being misrepresented as—party political”.

In 2019, a Freedom House report entitled Media Freedom: A Downward Spiral stated:

“The fundamental right to seek and disseminate information through an independent press is under attack, and part of the assault has come from an unexpected source. Elected leaders in many democracies, who should be press freedom’s staunchest defenders, have made explicit attempts to silence critical media voices and strengthen outlets that serve up favorable coverage”.


This is sadly now true of us.

When the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman flew to Rwanda, the Guardian, the Mirror, the i and the Independent were all excluded, and initially also the BBC. That happened less than a year after journalists from the Guardian, the Financial Times and the Mirror were blocked from joining the then Home Secretary Priti Patel’s trip to Rwanda to sign the original asylum deal. In 2020, political journalists, including the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and ITV’s Robert Peston, staged a walkout after Downing Street communication staff attempted to brief some journalists but not others. Those excluded by former Mirror and Sun journalist Lee Cain—and that revolving door itself is incestuous—included journalists from PA, the Mirror, the i, HuffPost UK, Politicshome and the Independent.

That got me thinking about the state of us, and not in a good way. It is clearly not just me. This debate is not the first on the subject, both here and in the other place. Many voices are now speaking out about the need for change, and many of us who went into politics are sad at what has happened to it. This is a cri de coeur from me and my colleagues, and, I would hope and expect, from many across this Chamber.

On the rule of law and independence of the judiciary, the extraordinarily wise and now sadly late Lord Judge believed that we were ceding too much power to the Executive, power that should and must be retained by Parliament. In a lecture he gave, he said that

“what Parliamentary sovereignty never has been is executive sovereignty, or ministerial or government sovereignty. Indeed Parliamentary sovereignty is the antithesis of executive sovereignty. The two concepts are mutually contradictory. The democratic process is not meant to give, and our constitutional arrangements were not intended to provide us with executive sovereignty. No Prime Minister is a monarch, or president, not even the head of state … At the heart of the development of our constitutional arrangements, Parliament is there to protect us from authoritarianism, from despotism, from an over mighty monarch, but also from an over mighty executive … in the last session of Parliament just over one hundred Henry VIII clauses had been enacted … proliferation of clauses like these will have the inevitable consequence of yet further damaging the sovereignty of Parliament, and increasing yet further the authority of the executive over the legislature … Henry VIII clauses should be confined to the dustbin of history”.

I could not agree more.

Only recently we have seen machinations to subvert the Supreme Court holding unanimously that the Government’s Rwanda scheme was unlawful, by bringing forward legislation declaring Rwanda a safe country. This move is scarily reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, when party member O’Brien tests Winston Smith’s allegiance to party truth, insisting that Winston sees five fingers when he holds up only four—that is, the truth is what I say it is. We have seen contempt for international courts, such as the ECHR, which is the embodiment of high ideals of internationalist values and constants that remain today hugely important in guaranteeing peoples’ fundamental human rights in law. It came as a surprise to some in government that it was nothing to do with the European Union.

The Government have acted to strengthen their power over the judiciary in the Judicial Review and Courts Act by reducing the scope of judicial review. The Government have severely restricted legal aid, making access to justice uneven and unfair. Members of the legal profession are exhausted and court backlogs deny justice. The breaking of treaties such as the Northern Ireland protocol was once unthinkable. Mrs May spoke for many when she asked

“how can the Government reassure future international partners that the UK can be trusted to abide by the legal obligations in the agreements it signs?”—[Official Report, Commons, 8/9/20; col. 499.]

This is not to mention the illegal proroguing of Parliament.

The phrase “free and fair election” is dashed off so easily, but it is the heart and soul of our democracy. The Government compromised that in the Elections Act 2022, by giving themselves the right to intervene and to direct or guide the Electoral Commission’s strategy and priorities. Those changes went through—of course—via a statutory instrument, the excess use of which is the preferred tool of a Government who will not be thwarted. The ability to thwart a Government acting in an overweening and injudicial way is the absolute strength of our democracy.

As to the operational independence of the police, it is a fundamental principle of British policing that sits alongside the important principle of policing by consent. The ex-Home Secretary did not approve of the Metropolitan Police’s handling of pro-Palestinian protests and went into print to criticise the police force for applying “double standards” and being “more sympathetic to the left”. To attack the police publicly is just not acceptable, let alone to accuse them of political bias. She is entitled to that view but, regardless of whether she was right or wrong, she was not entitled to say so publicly.

On the public right to protest, it has always been recognised that the right of people to criticise Governments, laws and social conditions is fundamental to democracy. Via regulation yet again we have a new definition of what “serious disruption” means: a new and astonishing threshold at which police can restrict protest for any obstruction which causes more than minor hindrance to day-to-day activities, meaning that police restrictions can effectively ban a protest. If those restrictions are breached, we are now in criminal offence territory. Exactly what does the right to protest mean when the enactment of that right is criminalised?

Britain is now a country where only 9% of people say they generally trust political leaders—that is the lowest since records began. How we do our politics really matters, both inside Parliament and in the country. Standards in public life, the Nolan principles, are not going well. Selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership are a crucial part of our responsibility and are literally the antithesis of Boris Johnson, our former Prime Minister. Before I get to the deleterious effect of his behaviour, I point out that the Financial Times published an article on 16 December about the loss of trust in Parliament. More than one in 20 MPs has been suspended from the House of Commons, left Parliament altogether or been stripped of their party whip in the wake of misconduct allegations—just since the last general election. I am sure your Lordships remember the expenses scandal. We have still not recovered from that low base. That rocked public faith in all of us. Whether innocent or guilty, we were all guilty. On the doorstep, we were all scum.

Our constitutional protections have been put under huge strain because of major breaches of the standards in public office, with concerns about corruption and conflict of interest at the most senior levels. Boris Johnson’s changes to the Ministerial Code were detrimental to standards in public life. His lying, obfuscation and belief that the rules did not apply to him were shameful. He blocked his independent ethics adviser from being able to initiate his own investigations, and he rewrote the foreword to the Ministerial Code, removing all references to honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability.

In recent days, thanks to the Covid inquiry, we have seen the scale of the PPE scandal. Yes, it was an emergency, and yes, abnormal procedures were needed to facilitate that urgency, but what is a VIP lane? I would have hoped that a VIP lane was a lane that gave priority to those who came forward to help because they had the know-how, not the know-who.

As for the charade in the No. 10 garden, and the absurdity of the Barnard Castle fairy tale, what contempt for the truth and the people of this country. We all saw Allegra Stratton, then the Prime Minister’s press secretary, laughing and joking during a mock televised press briefing about a Downing Street Christmas party. Anyone who saw that clip knew in an instant what was really going on in No. 10.

This is decline and fall. We have not even recovered as a country from the way Brexit was conducted. It harmed us as a nation. Truth was a victim, and people felt empowered not only to lie but to hate the other side. Political protagonists peddled dislike, disdain, denigration of other, and fear. We created an unhappy and angry nation. We are bombarded with hate. Hate sells; hate works; hate garners votes; hate strikes emotion in us. There is hatred of other—foreigners, immigrants, scroungers, Muslims, Jews, the rich, the lazy, the lucky: we hate them all. Years of the drip-drip poison of “enemies of the people” and negative political campaigning has taken its toll on all of us.

Politicians have become reductionist in order to find simplistic messages that focus groups tell us will win votes. To win, lies do not matter any more. Truth is fake news. Facts—who cares? Experts with real knowledge are disparaged. To win, the common good comes way down the list, after party good, and public discourse is driven now by heat, not light, with the media feeding a frenzy of the negative and the nasty, amplified by the Twittersphere but led by us politicians.

Fifteen minutes was inadequate—although I understand I am running ahead of my schedule—because I have not even touched on reform of our own House, the use of hate speech by politicians in the media, nor the part that the “winner takes all” nature of our Commons elections plays in our behaviour. Yet I am absolutely sure that noble Lords across this House will fill in any gaps I may have left.

There has not even been time to lay out a prospectus for us moving to happier territory, but we have an opportunity—with an election year ahead—to demonstrate change for the better. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, I would like to thank all noble Lords for their contributions; they were thoughtful and intelligent. The sense I get from the debate is that we are all struggling in a world where the old ways no longer hold sway, trying to think our way through to making it work for everyone. I also sense that this House really cares about the state of parliamentary democracy and standards in public life—so thank you all.

Motion agreed.