Queen’s Speech

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, our democracy is ailing. The unity of our United Kingdom is in peril. It is entirely possible that by the end of this Parliament, we shall be heading towards a fragmented United Kingdom and a greatly diminished Britain. The responsibility on legislators is enormous, and the responsibility on Ministers in particular is enormous. The responsibilities that fall on the shoulders of the noble Lord, Lord Dunlop, are peculiarly difficult and sensitive. I congratulate him on his appointment and I wish him success in his work. As I listened to his speech, which I found to be of great interest—I look forward to listening to him on many future occasions— I was, however, made none the wiser as to the means by which the Government will go about achieving their strategic objectives of keeping Britain within the European Union and maintaining the integrity of the United Kingdom. I can anticipate that by the end of this Parliament, it is quite possible that the worst will have occurred. The English will have voted to come out of the European Union, the Scots and the Welsh will have voted to stay in; the noble Lord, Lord Dunlop, will be alongside his right honourable friend the Prime Minister and they will be both be scratching their heads, saying, “What on earth do we do next?”.

Many noble Lords have advocated a convention, commission, conference, conversation, convocation or whatever to review the clutch of interlocking, complex, difficult, sensitive and important constitutional issues with which we are faced. I favour such a discussion taking place. In fact, I favour a series of such discussions. It is a free country and no one needs to wait for the permission of the Government to set up a constitutional convocation. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, and my noble friend Lord Foulkes have already set up their own convocation. Important academic work is being pursued at Kings College London and University College London to examine this range of interlocking constitutional issues. I think it would be of immense help to us all, when the reports are forthcoming, for a public debate to be precipitated. We must hope that the media let us have a public debate of really high quality to match the seriousness and importance of the issues. But I would recommend that the political parties should keep their powder dry. They should be very cautious about commissioning such work other than within their own inward counsels and taking part in such work. Certainly there will be wise and experienced political elders who might wish to take part, but the formal position of the political parties ought to be reserved because it is extraordinarily difficult to get this right. All sorts of people will be able to produce grand notions about how we should reform the constitution, but one of the great features of constitutional reform is unintended consequences, as we saw in the case of Scottish devolution. My own view is that the parties would be wise to hold back, reserve their position and see what is needed.

In a gracious Speech that is heavily overloaded, I counted eight constitutional measures. The noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, whose witty, elegant and wise speech I, like everybody else, enormously enjoyed, counted only seven. The noble Lord, Lord Black of Brentwood, seems to have counted a number more. At all events, it is unbecoming and foolish of the Government, I think, to introduce gratuitous constitutional measures. Given the number and range of unavoidable difficulties, why do they add to them? A Government with a majority of only 12, if they follow the convention that constitutional measures are taken on the Floor of the House of Commons, are going to be in immense difficulty. Your Lordships’ House will of course wish to play a constructive and positive part in scrutinising these various measures that are proposed for constitutional reform, and no doubt the Government will be wise enough to heed our advice. Indeed, I hope that the Government will be wise enough to help us to perform our duties even better by following the advice of the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, and taking steps to at least legislate to set a sensible limit on the size of your Lordships’ House on a rational basis.

Some of the measures that have been proposed are unwittingly constitutional. There is at least one, which may be the one that I noticed and the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, did not count in his tally. I refer to the proposal that tenants of housing associations should have the right to buy their properties. Housing associations are charities, and it seems an extraordinary thing that a Conservative Government should take it upon themselves to distrain the assets, of charities—great historic foundations such as the Guinness and Peabody trusts. I cannot recall anything to compare with the pillage of the housing associations since the pillage by Henry VIII of the monasteries. Where will the Prime Minister turn his grasping hands next—to the endowment of Eton College, to the endowment of the University of Oxford, which has just raised an extra £2 billion to increase their charitable assets, or even, possibly, to the Hereford Cathedral Perpetual Trust? We all know that this would be outrageous. I think that we all recognise that charities are independent and are respected as such, and that it is entirely inappropriate that the Government of the day should help themselves to their assets for reasons of political expediency. Charities are a very important part of the fabric of our national life and, as such, are part of our informal and unwritten constitution.

A great deal has been said about the Bill of Rights and the intractable issues associated with that. The right honourable Dominic Grieve MP has posed to Ministers some questions that I think they will have great difficulty in answering. The noble and learned Lords, Lord Hope of Craighead and Lord Woolf, today similarly raised very serious and important questions. Mr Gove and the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, would not have been faced with this headache had not the Government foolishly, for populist reasons, sought to play fast and loose with the constitution. By the way, I very much welcome the return of the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, to his responsibilities on the Front Bench. There is nobody who can more charmingly and persuasively argue the unarguable: he is quite invaluable to the Government.

Among the issues that will fall to be considered in that context is the question of what citizens’ rights should be in the digital age—the updating of the panoply of human rights. Of course, the Government have promised us legislation on surveillance. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds, whose maiden speech was also a joy to hear, will be particularly well qualified, as a former staff member of GCHQ, to enable us to understand better the ethical and practical issues associated with surveillance and how to strike the right balance between security and civil liberties.

I want to make one final point, if I may detain the House for a moment longer. Most of us would agree that constitutional change is better made on the basis of mature consideration and consensus, but there is one constitutional proposal in the gracious Speech that is crudely confrontational: the requirement that members of trade unions should have to opt in to the political levy. That specific policy was not in the Conservative Party’s manifesto and this House is fully entitled to oppose it.

So much work has been done on the funding of political parties: the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000; the Hayden Phillips commission in 2006; a Ministry of Justice report in 2008; and the report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, chaired by Sir Christopher Kelly, which came out in 2011. It is a disgrace that since all the issues have been articulated, and all the options are understood, the political parties have not managed to reach a concordat on this very important issue because they fear to lose some element of political advantage.

Reform is needed. Had the Government introduced comprehensive reform of the funding of political parties, and done so on a neutral basis which was not biased in favour of any political party, it would have been extremely welcome, but what is outrageous is that the party of government should legislate crudely to disadvantage the principal party of opposition. My noble friend Lady Hayter spoke about this and the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, made a very useful practical proposal. Other parties are at least equally entitled to complain. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, spoke of the disadvantages that the Liberal Democrats face not only under the electoral system but in terms of funding.

Hitherto I have been opposed to the state funding of political parties. I have always taken the view that political parties are great voluntary associations and that members of political parties are citizens and democrats and it is right that they should raise their own money. But I now believe, regrettably, that it is necessary to have state funding of political parties. The old days of mass membership of political parties have gone, notwithstanding what may be happening in Scotland, and this is one of the reasons why a new politics is unable to break through. It is also one of the reasons for the cynicism that prevails so widely about politics and government.

There is a belief that money will buy political influence, influence on policy and, indeed, peerages. There is a perception of corruption that is widely pervasive at a high level among Britain’s power elites. That is something new. It is something very dangerous. It is something that we need to deal with. The Government missed a very important opportunity to address this in the legislation on lobbying in the previous Parliament. We have a position in which the parties are excessively dependent for advice on think tanks which themselves are funded by wealthy individuals with agendas of their own, and because of what the coalition did to the Civil Service in the previous Parliament we have an eviscerated Civil Service that is unable to provide the experience and expertise that government needs.

There is a clutch of issues here that needs addressing if we are to rehabilitate our democracy. It would be better, contrary to what Mr Cameron says, to increase the cost of politics, at least in this regard. To run our democracy on the cheap turns out to be exceedingly expensive in terms both of trust and of quality of government.