The biggest single underlying issue in British politics this summer is: how can the Government be made at least to take serious account of strongly held public opinion? Nearly 2 million people marched against the Iraq War, but the Prime Minister was not moved. We have had a national consultation on GM involving 675 meetings across the country with 37,000 questionnaires returned, 4-1 against GM, yet the Government decided to go ahead with GM crops in the UK. In the last two years the Labour Party Conference passed 2-1 majorities against PFI and foundation hospitals, but the Government immediately said it would ignore them.
With a majority in the Commons of 161, the Government won the top-up fees vote by only 5, yet immediately made clear it would disregard the depth of opposition. And now, in the face of the appalling local and Euro election results, the Prime Minister shows not a scintilla of readiness to change course over public sector reform, Europe or Iraq, or on any other issue for that matter. It is this malaise of powerlessness and resentment which is driving Labour’s misfortunes.
In the US, Government accountability is dealt with through checks and balances in the separation of powers between President and Congress. In the UK, where the Prime Minister’s writ runs from top to bottom of the Parliamentary system through strict whipping controls and patronage over appointments, can Parliamentary democracy be reinvigorated by amendment to existing powers? Clearly it can be, but it will require a sustained assertion of political will by Parliament to restore its traditional rights of accountability.
First it should assert its right to ratify top appointments. Senior Ministers, ambassadors, advisory committee chairmen, service regulators, and top policemen and military are currently appointed by the Prime Minister, and senior judges by the Lord Chancellor. Parliament should insist that all such appointees, as with Congressional hearings in the US, cannot take up office until their proposed appointment has been ratified by the appropriate Select Committee of the Commons. That would demonstrate their joint accountability, not only to the Executive, but also to the legislature. Equally, all such top appointees should be subject to the option of recall, cross-examination and report by the Select Committee where their performance and track record was seriously called into question.
That then raises how the Select Committees are constituted. At present the members are nominated by the party managers, who will want to ensure that the Government’s position is as well protected as possible. A more balanced spread of membership would be secured by applicants being voted on by secret ballot of the whole parliamentary party. There are precedents for the use of the secret ballot by the PLP in elections for the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and the Council of Europe, as well as for the Shadow Cabinet in Opposition.
Parliament also needs Select Committees with stronger powers and much increased expert research support. They should be empowered to subpoena Ministers and top officials, and to require disclosure of all necessary documents – the Attorney-General’s legal advice on the justification for the Iraq war being a recent case in point – subject to genuine national security requirements as independently assessed by the Information Commissioner. At present Parliament itself has no Legal Counsel nor the right to commission its own legal opinion That should be changed.
As the whole recent row over the use of intelligence has indicated, Parliament also needs to set up its own oversight committee on the intelligence services, reporting back direct to Parliament. And major decisions about holding the Government to account over issues of overriding national importance – for example whether to set up an independent judicial committee on the Iraq war, its membership and terms of reference – should be taken by a High-Level Parliamentary Committee selected by secret ballot of both the Commons and the Lords and perhaps including senior members of the judiciary. That should avoid any future whitewashings by the likes of Hutton or (we await to see) Butler.
Should political parties, now reduced to little more than vote-gathering and money-donating machines, have a role in policy-making? Should they, and members of the public, be able to participate between elections? I believe they unquestionably should, because the idea that democracy constitutes a single vote every 4 or 5 years, in elections where the politicians themselves try to control the agenda and where many key issues emerge for urgent decision between elections, is patently absurd. Nor is parliamentary democracy, in its present form at least, an adequate substitute when it is so dominated by patronage and whips’ discipline. Filling that void is the role for referenda.
That opens up several difficult, but manageable, questions. Who would decide when a referendum should be held? Would it be binding? What if you got an answer you didn’t like (on capital punishment, say)? What would be the interval before another referendum could be called to reverse it? Clearly the criteria for holding a referendum would have to be tightly drawn so that they were relatively rare, dependent perhaps on a petition demanding it from a given percentage of the electorate. The result would not automatically be binding, but a Government (or Prime Minister) that lost a major referendum would unquestionably have to change course to survive.
For all these reasons we now urgently need a high-powered Commission on Democracy to make detailed recommendations to open up our stifled political culture to the winds of reform and rescue it from its current asphyxiation.
