Parturiunt montes, et nascitur mus, as the Roman epigrammatist said 2,000 years ago – the mountains are in labour and bring forth a mouse. That’s a fitting epitaph to New Labour’s Constitutional Reform Bill which will be considered in detail for two days in the Commons this week. Frankly, the Government’s blown it, on two counts. Gordon Brown announced within days of becoming prime minister that he intended a major reform to make government more accountable. This Bill is nothing of the kind: it is a minor and rather insignificant tidying up job. It proposes that restrictions on protest outside Parliament be ended, that MPs have greater powers over declarations of war (largely making de jure what they already have de facto), that the civil service code be given statutory force, that the attorney general’s inconsistent position as a minister responsible to the Cabinet and as an agent of the State independent of government should be maintained (a retrograde fix), and that elections to replace the 92 hereditaries in the House of Lords when they die should be abolished. Some of this is useful, but it’s pretty trivial stuff. Nothing about making the Executive more accountable to parliament, or about an elected second chamber, or about electoral reform. But there’s a second reason too why this Bill is a cop-out.

The best prospect flowing from the horrendous expenses scandal was the broad cross-party agreement that the public’s confidence in Parliament would only be restored, not only when MPs were made to pay back in full what they had worngly purloined, but also when the whole parliamentary process was radically overhauled to make it the institution it was always intended to be, which it certainly is not at the moment, i.e. one that holds the Government effectively to account. This latest Bill was the perfect opportunity to seize this initiative. Yet it isn’t so much that it has failed to do this as that it never even tried to do it. This is the feeblest de minimis attempt at constitutional change which entirely misses the tidal wave of demand for major reform thrown up out of the expenses mire.
The sole remaining avenue for genuine reform is the cross-party Select Committee set up under the chairmanship of Tony Wright, the chair of the Procedure Committee. That is currently looking into the selection of both the chair and members of Select Committees (it should be by secret ballot of the whole House), the establishment of a Business Committee to control the agenda of the House in partnership with the Government (who monopolise it at present), and a new procedure to enable petitions backed by very large numbers in the electorate to feed through into debates and votes on the floor of the House. But the timidity of the Government in the design of its own Bill on constitutional reform is not a good harbinger. It’s going to need some determined and persistent lobbying to get anywhere near what public opinion is now crying out for.

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