Jack Straw’s modest pot of constitutional scraps offered earlier this week is a depressing anti-climax after some of the most tumultuous upheavals in modern political history opened the gate to much more profound change. Constitutional reform, never a prospect to set the Thames on fire and ejected by the recession even from the mildly titillating platform laid out by Gordon Brown on the third day of his premiership, shot back into prominence as the means to redeem the expenses scandal. The party leaders vied with each other as to who was the most radical in transforming an anachronistic and moribund parliament. Now the opportunity for once-in-a-century root-and-branch change is in danger of dissipating. Nothing about bringing forward a written constitution which Britain, in company with only a few other countries like New Zealand and Israel, still lacks. Nothing about a Bill of Rights to begin to turn around the authoritarian erosion of civil liberties in the last three decades. Nothing even about an elected second chamber, electoral reform, or a fixed term for parliaments. Just a tidying up of a few odds and ends.

Straw proposes that the civil service code setting out the rights and obligations of officialdom be enshrined in law. That is welcome when previous Governments – Thatcher, Major, Blair – have all sought to harness the civil service for party political advantage. The restriction on protests in Parliament Square, added to a Bill late at night when nobody was looking, are to be ended. A victory for the lone protestor, Brian Haw, who stuck it out against all the odds and is now vindicated, along with a commonsensical view about the rights to public dissent. And Parliament’s right to a vote on any putative declaration of war is to be entrenched, but after the Iraq War saga it was in fact already de facto.
But there is nothing, either, about the parliamentary democratic reform that is so desperately needed – setting up an elected Business Committee of the House, electing chairs and members of Select Committees, the right of Parliament to set up its own Commissions of Inquiry irrespective of the attitude of Government, the right of Select Committees to ratify or reject the Prime Minister’s nominations to Cabinet and other top public sector appointments, etc. The Government has conceded that such reforms should now be considered by the Wright Committee which is to report in November, but Ministers never seemed to have their heart in it. Even the Government’s motion proposing a Business Committee elected by secret ballot of the whole House limited its ambit to non-Government business so as presumably to marginalise its impact, until it was overturned by a strong reaction from the backbenches.
The object of the Bill should be to strengthen accountability at every level of governance since the chaecks and balances have all but collapsed now in this country. It hasn’t happened however. The blatant conflict of interest in the role of the Attorney General as on the one hand a member of the Government subjec to collective responsibility, and on the other the independent upholder of the law – a conflict made manifest in Lord Goldsmith’s prevarication about the legality of the Iraq War in February 2003 – if left untouched. And the right of electors mid-term to call parliament to account – through a recall of a failed MP or the right through referenda to secure that issues commanding the necessary threshold of support must be debated and voted on on the floor of the House – finds no place in this Bill either.

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