Parliamentary Democracy and Standards in Public Life

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, we are discussing very serious issues, and therefore it is important that they are tackled in a meaningful way. One way would be to have some kind of constitutional convention, like the one that the Scots had, where we might debate these issues more sensibly and rationally.

I want to talk about parliamentary democracy and how we can steer our way out of some of the mess that we seem to be facing. When we say that we are a democracy, what do we mean? Minimally, we mean two things, which is why we desire democracy as a form of government: equal rights to all citizens and benefits to all citizens. It is a system of government where people decide things themselves and which promotes public interest and benefits to all.

Parliamentary democracy is one form of democracy. It is not the only one; there are many others. What distinguishes parliamentary democracy and makes the element of trust particularly relevant to parliamentary democracy is that power lies with the people, but it is not exercised directly by the people but through their elected representatives. It is a mediated democracy—a democracy in which power is mediated through Parliament. That means that to talk about parliamentary sovereignty would be a serious mistake. It would mean that Parliament replaces people and begins to take all kinds of decisions that should be taken by people. I suggest that what we want is a robust parliamentary democracy in which people are as well organised, alert and capable of controlling their destiny as Parliament itself.

My second point is that in a parliamentary democracy there is an expectation that Parliament will continue to monitor the system of governance and how the Executive exercise their powers. With parliamentary sovereignty, whoever controls Parliament is sovereign, so the party in power in the House of Commons becomes sovereign. That is exactly what we want to avoid. In my view, we should have a parliamentary democracy in which people control their own affairs through the mediation of Parliament and in which Parliament can control and monitor the system of governance—how Ministers behave, how public appointments are made, how government money is contracted out and so on. These have been the causes of recent troubles. It is very important that Parliament should be strengthened, but not at the cost of people themselves.