Constitutional Law

It is always a pleasure to follow the Minister. As he explained, this order has been in preparation for a considerable time and it forms the final part, I think, of the Government's response to the report undertaken by Ron Gould on behalf of the Electoral Commission following the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections. The length of the measure, at more than 200 pages, is explained by the fact that it is a consolidating measure, and much of its content is uncontroversial and, I am sure, will assist the various interested parties required to implement its provisions. However, we have concerns about the manner and timing of the measure's introduction to the House and about the fact that it is being manipulated to form part of a wider legislative change that has been marked by excessive speed, political opportunism and a concerning scarcity of competence. The measure—all 200-plus pages of it—should have been in place prior to the six month pre-election period as specifically recommended by the Gould report. I noted that the Minister in his opening remarks danced around the Gould recommendation about when it should have been in place by referring to consultation, but as the Minister well knows, the recommendation was that it should be in place, rather than it should have been published or made available to various individual electoral administrators. I also recall that the Minister was fulsome in his welcome for that recommendation in a previous life. We are considering this measure in the final week of November, despite the fact that the Government have had since mid-May to take it forward and, as the Minister said, much of the work on the measure was in train under the previous Government. The Minister failed to explain satisfactorily why that is the case, and perhaps I can venture to suggest that it may be something to do with the yellow rush of spurious and ill-conceived constitutional change the Government are rushing through before their implications are widely realised. It is therefore little wonder that solid and necessary measures such as this one do not get priority treatment, even though Government Members have been aware for more than three years that it should be in place six months ahead of the Scottish Parliament elections. In between reading this order in detail this morning, I read some of today's newspapers and learned that in what will no doubt come to be considered our esteemed Deputy Prime Minister's seminal Hugo Young lecture yesterday, he declared in his typically erudite, modest and understated way that he is the intellectual driving force of the ““new progressivism””, an idea that will, perhaps, eventually catch on. New progressivism is, it seems, a new name for the old expediency of rushing through constitutional change without draft Bills, without pre-legislative scrutiny and without consultation with affected bodies, all of which are also features of what is no doubt the old progressivism of which the Deputy Prime Minister and his small band of followers were supporters prior to the general election.