The really big issue in the 6 months left before the election is the restoration of Parliamentary democracy so that post-election the Commons can exercise its real role (which it has not done for years) of vigorously and effectively holding the Government to account. But despite the cross-party Wright Committee having just reported 4 days ago on their remit to examine the need for an elected Business Committee of the House, for elected chairs and members of Select Committees, and for members of the public to have their petitions seriously examined and responded to, there is no mention in the Queen’s Speech on how this should all be taken forward. That is not to say that many of the actual Bills presented do not have considerable merit – certainly the dismissal of them by the media and the Tories as insubstantial or mere electioneering is unfair and clearly wrong. Requiring parenting assessment of ASBO children, a mandatory social price support scheme for the fuel poor, the blocking of monstrous City bonuses and excessive risk-taking by the banks, free personal care for a third of a million pensioners in greatest need, and making 0.7% of GDP going to overseas aid a legal requirement are all significant advances. Even so, the Parliamentary accountability issue remains critical – and absent.

It is critical because all Governments are hostile to any attempt to hold them to account, preferring (as Baldwin once said so poignantly) power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages. But a small window opened up after the horrendous expenses scandal – not only should MPs pay back what they had wrongly purloined, but they should also, even more importantly, reform Parliament itself from the slough of impotence and feebleness into which it has fallen over the last three decades under the whip of aggressively authoritarian leaders, first Thatcher and then Blair. That window is however time-limited, and it is absolutely essential it be acted upon quickly before the evanescent will to reform dissipates.
To give him credit, at least Nick Clegg has got the point, arguing that the time before the election should be devoted to getting decisions on fixed-term four-year Parliaments, PR, elected House of Lords, and sackable MPs. These are of course LibDem regulars (though none the worse for that), bu tthey don’t get to the heart of the Parliamentary dilemma: where should power lie as between the Executive and the legislature? As it is, it is overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the Executive as a result of No.10 patronage, the insidious and growing power of the party whips, and the constant chipping away at MPs’ rights ( which, to their discredit, MPs have wholly failed to contest). So how can that power be rebalanced?
The Wright Committee is due to report quickly on the three important issues they were commissioned to consider, as above. But they were denied access to several other key issues. These include: the right of Select Committees to cross-examine (as in US Congressional hearings) Cabinet and other top appointees before they can be ratified, and to recall them if they are manifestly failing; the right of Parliament to set up its own Commissions of Inquiry (as its Victorian predecessors did) into issues of great public importance where the PM fails to do so (not surprisingly when s/he is often the main target for allegations of failure; the right to vet, and if need be veto, chairs and members, and the terms of reference, of Committees of Inquiry set up by the PM; and the right of the Liaison Committee (composed of chairs of all the Select Committees) to put down a motion on a key public issue once a month for debate and vote on the floor of the House. This is only a start, but it would transform the effectiveness of Parliament and begin to make it what the public now desperately needs it to be.

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