Governance of Britain

Not for the first time, I shall talk about something that I know absolutely nothing about, my Lords. The first issue that the Minister addressed was the decision-making power of Parliament to approve a declaration of war. The Statement rightly said that there was a long and constructive debate in your Lordships’ House last May on this topic. The difficulty that all Governments surely face on this issue is that they cannot be fully frank with Parliament. There is a whole range of intelligence information that is crucial to the decision whether or not to go to war that simply cannot be made public. Parliament will always be making a decision on trust. The issue about war-making decisions, therefore, is not actually Parliament’s vote, although that is now a crucial component, but rather the confidence that Parliament can repose in the recommendation of the Government to go to war. That in turn depends on Parliament’s confidence in the main actors in that decision: the Chiefs of Staff, the intelligence services and those ministries that have been involved in the build-up—in particular, the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office. Those of your Lordships who have read the Hutton and Butler reports on the events leading up to the Iraq war will recall that many sharp criticisms were made of the process by which the Government took advice from all these agencies before making their final decision. I think that the expression used by Lord Butler encapsulated that process: ““sofa government””. It was quite plain that many of those important institutions were not consulted in a full and objective way. What we need to hear from the Government in future is not so much the claim that they will consult Parliament; we need to be sure, before we can make a proper decision, that the Government have consulted all those agencies properly and that the Statement on this issue to Parliament reflects their view. On treaties, I am most unimpressed with what the Minister said about the Government’s intentions. The crucial thing about treaties is not the ratification but the signing process. What Parliament needs is an opportunity to engage with the Government about the process of negotiating before a treaty is signed. A classic example of this was the signing by Mr David Blunkett, then Home Secretary—in secret in the United States, without even telling his Minister of State—of a treaty on extradition that gave away the individual rights of citizens in this country. That was a particularly disgraceful thing to do when individual constitutional rights were involved. What your Lordships’ House ought to want to know is not what the Government are going to do about ratification but how they will engage Parliament in the process leading up to signature. Once a Government sign a treaty there is absolutely nothing that anybody can do about its contents; they are binding on the state under international law. So the Government have a great deal more thinking to do on the question of signing treaties. As I said at the beginning, I have not the faintest idea what the Government are going to say about judicial appointments. It was only two years ago that the Government declared themselves completely satisfied with what they had put in the Constitutional Reform Act. They removed the responsibility for selecting judges from the Lord Chancellor, accountable to Parliament, to an entirely independent judicial appointments committee. I think that there were some merits in that, up to a point: the committee presents its conclusions to the Lord Chancellor, but the Lord Chancellor has almost no room for manoeuvre about whom he or she ultimately appoints. Have we gone too far in the other direction? Do we have enough parliamentary accountability in making judicial appointments? In the United States, they have for senior judicial appointments an advise and consent procedure with the Senate. I have not yet met a Supreme Court judge who has not said that he values that process, because it in some way legitimises the enormously powerful role that he has under the American constitution. As a result of the Human Rights Act and other measures in legislation—and particularly because of the weakness of the House of Commons in controlling the Government—judges are being more and more drawn, ineluctably, into political decision-making. They are certainly perceived as being drawn in more and more. If they are to be drawn into political decision-making through their decisions, surely there must be a case for giving their appointment parliamentary legitimacy. Do the Government in this document—which I have not yet read—propose that, or are they on an entirely different tack, which is nothing whatever to do with what I have just said? I do not know. I was interested in the Minister’s remarks on national security. This is a matter of great complexity and delicacy. I would like to know more about the proposals before I give an off-the-cuff response—and likewise on the question of media. There is simply not enough content here yet for me to make a sensible observation. In closing, I was not surprised, although I was disturbed, to see that the Government intend to institute a programme of constitutional renewal. That sounds extraordinarily radical, and I invite the Minister to say a little more about it. No constitution is perfect; but, when one looks back on the past 300 years, I respectfully suggest that ours has done rather well if one compares it with almost everybody else’s. Ours has been endorsed by every single generation since 1688 and, on the whole, not found wanting. So why does this generation and why do this Government suddenly decide that the constitution needs renewal? I suggest that they should look much more carefully at why we have the constitution that we have before embarking on yet another round of radical change.