Constitution

My Lords, the fact that the Minister is able to say with a serious face that the proceedings of the cross-party working group are progressing well can lead one to only one conclusion—that the working group is manifestly unrepresentative of the diversity of opinion that exists on this topic. That statement brings to mind the clock that strikes 13 times and casts doubt on the reliability of the rest of its evidence. Turning to the more substantial aspect of what he said, the agenda that he has presented to us is hugely ambitious—in fact, I would say that it is hopelessly over-ambitious and potentially very dangerous. It starts off as a programme of constitutional renewal but that includes in some cases ““reviewing”” and in other cases ““building upon””, ““underpinning””, ““recasting”” and ““enshrining””—a whole range of propositions which, as he acknowledges, are fundamental to the working of our constitution and have evolved historically into conventions which are not always perfect but are well understood in practice. I suggest that there is very grave danger in seeking to transform all these enormously important and extensive matters into legislation—above all, astonishingly, for the most part in one Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, appeared to be disappointed at the modesty of this programme and was looking for a more extensive and exciting one. I take exactly the opposite view. It seriously underestimates what Lord Moulton, a distinguished Liberal Peer, said in, I think, 1920, when he stressed the huge importance of unwritten law to almost every aspect of every constitution of this kind—above all, given our history. I take one example—the proposal to produce a protocol which will set out how the Attorney-General and the prosecuting authorities are to exercise their functions in relation to each other. That reminds one of the protocol that emerged from the catastrophic legislation which led to the disappearance of the Lord Chancellor, as we had come to know that role. In that legislation, as the House will recall, describing the conventional relationships between the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice required 150 separate provisions in the appendices to the Bill. At the end of that, it was discovered that 50 further aspects needed to be provided for in additional statutory form. If that is an insight into the way in which these matters are to be handled, that really frightens me. I do not for a moment suggest that the questions addressed by the White Paper, the Green Paper and the Statement are not hugely important.