King’s Speech

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 9th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the 2019 Conservative manifesto, on which this Government’s programme was based, devoted well over a page to constitutional reform, democratic accountability and the rule of law. This King’s Speech is entirely silent on the subject, except for the promise to focus on long-term decisions instead of the repeated short-term changes in policies and Ministers from which the UK has suffered in the past four years.

The Prime Minister’s introduction to the briefing on forthcoming Bills gives the game away. His reiteration that “integrity, professionalism and accountability” will mark his Government’s approach underlines the absence of these qualities under his immediate predecessors. Since 2017, the constitutional conventions that structure the way Britain is governed have been seriously damaged by competing factions and populist politicians within the Conservative Party. Boris Johnson claimed to govern by “the will of the people”, that dangerous phrase, rather than by parliamentary consent. Ministers challenged the rule of law. The Commons has been sidelined to a point where, in the last Session, it sat for fewer hours per week than the officially part-time House, this Chamber. Constitutional guardians established by former Conservative and Labour Governments have been ignored or overruled, or their independence threatened. These include the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, the House of Lords Appointments Commission and the Electoral Commission. The Covid inquiry is now informing the public of the chaos that has characterised this Government, the disregard for rules and due process, and the errors and corruption to which all this has led.

Decent Conservatives must be as worried about this move away from constitutional democracy as the rest of us, and I hope they share our concern around the decline of public trust in Westminster politics to which it has led. Multiple studies of public attitudes indicate that trust in national politics and politicians in Britain is now lower than any comparable advanced democracy except the United States, and that it has sunk further since the Covid lockdown and the Johnson premiership and now hovers between 5% and 10% in an otherwise disillusioned and disengaged public. The comment of the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, on the two most recent by-elections—that the winners on a low turnout were disengaged non-voters rather than the Labour Party—ought to concern and worry all of us.

It ought also to concern partisans of the current Government that, in answer to public opinion pollsters, voters say that they trust local government significantly more than Downing Street and Westminster, trust judges and courts far more than politicians and Ministers, and trust the Civil Service more than the Ministers who so often rubbish it. Oh, and a majority trust the BBC as a source of unbiased news a great deal better than they trust the Government’s information services.

The only Bill in the agenda set out for this Session that touches on our structures of democratic government is the Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill. That seeks to tighten even further detailed ministerial direction of what directly elected local councils may do. I suggest that this is totally unacceptable to democratic accountability.

Local government has been the nearest governing body to which most of our citizens relate, dealing with issues that affect their communities and daily life. Local government has been undermined, reorganised and starved of financial resources for many years. The Covid inquiry has heard that Ministers bypassed the network of public health officers across England’s cities and towns, who could have managed the response to the epidemic, in order to outsource Covid testing to multinational companies—with disastrous results. Any incoming Government should make the revival of local democracy an urgent priority to rebuild public trust and effective local administration.

This exhausted Government have abandoned their promise to strengthen our constitution, so it will be up to whichever Government emerge after the election to take up the task of rebuilding our constitutional safeguards and attempting to rebuild public trust. They should do their best to build cross-party consensus—I note that the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, talked about the desirability for good policy—on the changes that are needed, rather than impose the partisan perspectives that right-wing think tanks such as Policy Exchange have urged on this Government. In opposition, after all, Conservatives will discover again that electoral dictatorship is hateful when imposed against them, and may then support reform.

The Constitution Unit has provided a list of rapid changes that any new Government could introduce; for example, a cross-party business committee for the Commons to loosen the Government’s control of the timetable, statutory status for constitutional guardians, cuts in the size of the Government’s bulging parliamentary payroll, and tighter rules on political finance. The Institute for Government has also proposed a Joint Committee on the constitution to oversee executive adherence to constitutional rules. I am very glad to hear that our Constitution Committee will examine that proposal further.

If all the next election leads to is a change of government, without significant changes in how we are governed and our democracy works, public distrust of Westminster will fester. Where this King’s Speech is silent, the next Government must commit to a broad reform programme of our overcentralised and Executive-dominated structures, to rebuild competence and trust in constitutional democracy.