Viscount Eccles
Main Page: Viscount Eccles (Conservative - Excepted Hereditary)Queen’s Speech
Viscount Eccles Excerpts
Viscount Eccles
My Lords, in expressing pleasure at following the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, I wish to follow up her theme of the loss of public confidence in our political system. Before that, I reflect that if this were a two-day cricket match and I could dictate that stumps are drawn at 6 pm, I would be able to continue on Monday afternoon, as I would not be out. However, it was not to be. I did not speak in the Richard report debate; nor do I want to refer to composition today, except to say that I may be an early example of indirect election. I was re-elected to this House by a vote of the whole House, and in being re-elected, I showed that you can be elected and enter this House twice, and can achieve sufficient accountability to get in the second time.
However, my interest is much more in the wider issue of public disenchantment with our political system. Turnout in the local elections was 31%. It was 24% in Nottingham, where there was also a referendum on whether to have a mayor. As has been pointed out, maybe that referendum was lost simply because of the thought that a mayor would cost money. It could of course be that the electorate could not see that the benefits would outweigh that cost.
In pursuing these matters, we within the Westminster system seem to think that changes to the constitution will work the oracle. That may well be the wrong target. It might be that it is not the structure which is at fault—here I follow my noble friend Lord Norton—but behaviour within the structure. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, said, the public may want more democracy, but they do not want more party politics. I just add to that, more three-party politics, because I defer to those who would like to analyse the BNP and UKIP, which I do not want to add in.
The question is: why do the public dislike the present three-party politics and are they sensible to be doubtful about it? I wish to make the case that they are sensible to be doubtful about it. The first thing that they see is that the possibilities of our political system have greatly changed. The big things have gone. We do not declare world wars any more. We do not have an empire. Instead, we see the global economy, the fall of communism, the rise of China and India and, as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, said, Europe. If I was a member of the voting public without the special ability to look at things in depth through the benefit of the committees of this House, I would say that we are in a dead muddle about Europe. We do not know what we think about Europe. That will not do, but that is the perception of a large proportion of the electorate.
As politics is about power, and as our power has been eroded in the past century, it is not so surprising that people get more doubtful about our political system. However, all the while, knowledge has expanded; all the while, science has marched gone, delivering material progress of an unprecedented kind. The average per capita income in real terms in the United Kingdom today is four times what it was in the depression of the 1930s. At the same time that the big canvas, the larger, simpler canvas, has shrunk, the smaller, much more complicated canvas has taken its place. The canvas of economic and social issues, human rights and all sorts of other issues has become much more complicated. We could not envisage making the simplicity of the speeches of, for example, Mr Gladstone or Mr Disraeli.
The electorate know that it is not the political system that has driven that material and scientific change. It may at times have added to it by being a bit clever here and there; or subtracted from it by being a bit silly here or there; but that has not been driven by the political system, because many political systems have achieved the same sort of material progress.
The majority, who are doing all right in general, who are not doing too badly, who are not the disadvantaged or—like me, by definition—the vulnerable, are uncertain about the political system and think that its propensity to make mistakes may outweigh its possible benefits. As there are always many things on which public money could be spent, there is one unforgivable achievement. That is to manage the national finances and run out of money. Is it any surprise that there is a degree of genuine and justifiable disillusion out there?
Of course, there has been another major change—the fall of socialist economics and the disappearance of Clause 4. The media still talk about right and left¸ but we talk about the centre ground. I do not know, in this muddle in the middle, where right or left are in our political system now. None of the three parties seems to have a unique set of core values that identify it as either right or left. The overlap is continuous, and you will find people all around this House and in all parties who have a value that they share. The electorate recognise this; they do not want politicians to keep talking to them about core values, because they do not believe that in any real sense they exist.
To return to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, what is the role or relevance of adversarial party politics? I do not think the public value it. Instead, they value sound management and administration—if I may say so, the politics of Boris Johnson rather than the ideology of democratic legitimacy. While the political elite enjoy argument, mostly based on theory—in the elite I include think tanks, lobby groups and special advisers—the public look for consensus solutions to mundane matters, such as which drugs the NHS should be prescribing and which it should not, the queues at Heathrow and even aircraft carrier decisions, and all to be done without running out of money.
What has Parliament’s response been to date to this pragmatism and common sense? Masses and masses of legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, reminded us in the debate on the report of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, that 10,000 pages come in and only 4,000 go out. That is an unsustainable trend. You cannot go on like that; it makes no sense to anyone. The assumption in the system is still that we can impose change, and changed behaviour, on the electorate. That assumption is out of date and the electorate do not believe it can be done, nor do they believe that that tax capacity is there to pay for the programmes. As we add to the law, we need Bills about litigation because there is more of it, which is hardly surprising if you have more law.
Are there any hopeful signs? We seem to be moving towards pre-legislative scrutiny and draft Bills. We are a long way from stabilising the length of Halsbury’s Laws of England or Tolley’s Tax Guide, but then politics is always the art of the possible, and maybe we recognise that we need a much deeper understanding of what realistically can be done and of how best it can be done. We need to slow down and deepen that dialogue because the centre ground, which I am sure we all agree we should be on, implies a search for consensus, whatever you may want that word to mean. I would want it to mean that something came through this House and the vote was not called, because everyone knew that if it were called it would be lost. In that search for consensus, it may be that there is not much wrong with our constitution—it is probably the behaviour within it that needs to change.