Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

Well, it concerned me at the time. I have been a member of the Public Administration Committee for seven years, and we have discussed these matters on a number of occasions. I have made very strong criticisms of that mode of operating, which changed the nature of our constitution and the relationship between Ministers and the civil service. It was a great mistake. I have used stronger language than that many times, which I will not use now—my hon. Friends who are also members of the Committee have heard me use it—when talking about authoritarian regimes and the techniques they use to exert political control at every level. However, to an extent, we have rowed back from that position, which I very much welcome. I want to divide the role of ministerial adviser again. As my amendments point out, ministerial advisers come in two types: specialist advisers, who are experts who can give advice on technical matters that will help a Minister to do his job better; and political advisers or hacks—the sort of job that I might have done in a different regime. Long before I came into this place, I worked as a political adviser within the trade union movement. I used to use every opportunity to twist and turn politics as I wanted; that is what political advisers do. They act as advisers to Ministers—to one side; they do not instruct civil servants. That is why we want to use the term "ministerial adviser". Such people give advice to Ministers—they do not act as civil servants—and they are divided into those two categories. If I may say this, it is a good day to bury special advisers, to coin a phrase. We should restore the proper role of the civil service as independent, impartial, neutral and equally able to serve Governments of all persuasions. Also, I hope that within the civil service there will be a range of views, so that good advice can come from all sides—in fact, from different sides of the argument—within the service itself. That is how it operated in the past and that is how it should operate again. These amendments would restore the proper status of Ministers, whose role has been played down. The Cabinet has not been the power it was in the past. I would like to see Cabinet government genuinely restored, so that politics is really debated and thrashed out at Cabinet level, and does not just come down from the political advisers surrounding a Prime Minister—any Prime Minister.