Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

This debate, I believe, illustrates what is so wrong with our constitution and demonstrates how dire things are, not because of anything that is being said, but by the manner of the exchange. Look how barely attended the Chamber is! We debate our constitution, yet the people's tribunes are not here. Whips scurry around outside desperate to gather enough speakers to try to keep things ticking along and running until 10 pm. The agents of the Executive try to create the illusion of debate—a debate with all the spontaneity of a Latin Mass. So moribund is our constitution, so monumentally useless our legislature, it is reduced to a talking shop, and it cannot even do that until 10 pm without prodding from the Executive. So much for our proud tradition of Parliament, so much for this legislature. There is much that is wrong with our constitution—a deep, deep malaise. The Justice Secretary galloped through some of the changes of the past decade, which he proclaimed as a blueprint for change. It is more like a blueprint to replace democracy with quangocracy. Power has shifted from those we elect to unelected officials. Those whose names actually appear on ballot papers no longer seem to have much actual say over public policy. Instead, key matters are decided, for example, by activist judges adjudicating on the basis of a bogus Human Rights Act. Public policy is formulated by an alphabet soup of quangos. We have the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the Child Support Agency and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency—the QCA, the CSA and the DVLA. In fact, there are so many quangos that they have run out of letters of the alphabet. FSA stands both for Food Standards Agency and Financial Services Authority; a food quango and a financial service quango. Nothing in the Bill will put any of that right. There is nothing to rein in the Executive, its agencies or the quango regime. There is nothing to restore purpose to this Parliament and nothing that will return dignity to politics. No wonder turnout has fallen in each election and no surprise that fewer bother to vote. It is not that the people are apathetic, but that the public have correctly clocked that our democracy is broken. The Bill ought to contain measures to renew our political system. What about a right of popular initiative? If people had a direct say over what the House debated, there would be fewer debates like this. There would be more time to consider issues that actually matter to people. Our agenda would be less the smug musings of a self-satisfied tribe in SW1. The Bill should contain provision for people's Bills to be included in each Queen's Speech. New Zealand has a right of popular initiative. It is compatible with, and complementary to, a system of parliamentary democracy. MPs would be obliged to vote for what people wanted them to debate, but they would no longer be able to ignore popular concerns. Constitutional change needs to include the power to recall MPs who are guilty of wrongdoing. I proposed a Bill to that effect last week, but the Justice Secretary did not actually support it. For all his smooth words, nothing happened. The Bill should address the balance—or, rather, it should address the imbalance of power—between the Executive and the legislature. Fiddling about with a Ponsonby rule will not do. We need to recalibrate the relationship between the legislature and the Executive—fundamental, radical change. It is not the Ponsonby rule that most explains how the Executive dominates this legislature, but the abuse of Crown prerogative over money and estimates, and over appointments and patronage. That is what has reduced the House. It has diminished hon. Members to being puppets of Whitehall and Ministers to being apologists to the Sir Humphrey Applebys. The House was given to understand that the legislature would approve key Executive appointments. Amid much fanfare, we were told how pre-appointment hearings would help to democratise the quangos. Yesterday, we saw a Secretary of State ride roughshod over legislative oversight. The Select Committee recommendations were just ignored. Pre-appointment hearings are, frankly, worthless. The Bill ought to provide for full confirmation hearings for quango officials and senior civil servants. No approval, no contract: that would rein in the quango state. Until that happens, there will be no meaningful scrutiny over Executive appointments. Likewise, we need in the Bill to reform how the House oversees finances. Estimates days are a charade. Supply estimates need to be more than just changed, as the Bill envisages. There is currently too little debate, too little oversight and too little scrutiny. Instead, Select Committees should be required annually to approve the expenditure of their respective Departments and the non-departmental public bodies associated with them. Proper legislatures in other parts of the world properly scrutinise tax revenue and how it is spent. Committees of Congress can go through budgets item by item. If we had that, those who we elect might at last be able to make good on the tax-and-spend promises that they pretend are in their gift now. Giving Select Committees real power and independence, power to oversee finance, and one even to confirm ministerial appointments, would lead us towards the separation of powers that we urgently need. The Bill does little to improve our constitution. It is a product of SW1. Is it not the proud boast of the British left that they were once the party of English radicalism and the party that dispersed power away from unaccountable elites? The Bill focuses instead on the petty concerns of those elites in SW1—demonstrations in Parliament square and such like. There is nothing in this Bill that invokes the spirit of the Levellers or the Chartists. It will do nothing to fulfil the incomplete English revolution. It will do nothing to provide us with the far-reaching radical reforms that we so urgently need.