No more Mr President

Constitutional renewal is central to Gordon Brown’s vision for the future of Britain. It was the subject of his first speech to parliament as prime minister, and his government’s first major publication, The Governance of Britain.

The difficulty facing the government is how to give legislative effect to Brown’s plans for constitutional renewal in ways that resonate with ordinary people. The big ticket items — Lords reform, a British Bill of Rights, possibly even a written constitution — must wait until there is stronger consensus about the way forward. So the Constitutional Reform Bill will contain a host of smaller items, worthy in themselves, but not vote-winners.

The main theme will be strengthening parliament. It will fulfil pledges made by the prime minister in his green paper on governance to give greater powers to parliament over going to war, on recalling and dissolving parliament itself and on ratifying international treaties. The main decision over war powers is whether to codify parliament’s future role in statute or in a resolution of the house. Giving the speaker the power to recall parliament in the recess will be a real transfer of executive power.

Under present conventions, recalls during recesses tend to suit the government’s book. In August last year, a demand was turned down for a recall made by over 150 MPs eager to challenge Tony Blair’s refusal to put pressure on Israel to cease shelling Lebanese villages.

Left to the speaker’s more or less sole discretion under the Brown reforms, similar requests would be more likely to succeed and could result in changing dramatically the stance of government in controversial situations. At the very least, recalls could become more frequent and boost the cherished aim of restoring parliament as the focus of national debate.

Parliamentary votes on sending troops abroad could be equally potent, but what constitutes an armed deployment that would require the permission of parliament? No decision has yet been reached. A consultation paper declares that ‘a clear understanding is needed’ and offers a choice of definition between deploying troops period, and deploying them with the clear expectation of using lethal force.

Under either definition, it seems clear that all of Tony Blair’s armed commitments from Kosovo and Sierra Leone to Iraq and Afghanistan would have needed parliament’s consent in advance. If permission had been granted once, would MPs have been as keen as the then prime minister a second time? Or a third? Or a fourth?

Other items in the Bill will be the long- promised Civil Service Act to put the civil service commissioners on a statutory basis, and the possible limitation or removal of the attorney general’s power to approve or refuse prosecutions.

A great many more topics in the project are open to short- and long-term consultation and debate. Pre-appointment scrutiny hearings for senior public officials will be a matter for individual select committees and the liaison committee.

The green paper proposed such hearings primarily for constitutional watchdogs such as the ombudsman, but some committees may want to range more widely. The recent consultation paper on judicial appointments raises the spectre of similar hearings for senior judges, but neither the judges nor Jack Straw have much enthusiasm for the idea.

The Bill must be seen as only part of an agenda stretching over more than one parliament, as heralded in Brown’s first major speech as prime minister. A few themes, like the political hot potato of ‘clarifying’ the powers of central and local government, are left enigmatically hanging in the air without further comment. But behind the initial caution lies a vaulting ambition to reinvigorate our democracy in the light of the perceived, progressive public disenchantment with politics. ‘Rebalancing power between government and parliament’ is a big part of the strategy.

Changing the Commons’ image from the weekly Punch and Judy show (where the prime minister has played Judy too often for his own good) is a key ambition, substituting it with a more effective and transparent ‘cross-party mode’ of Commons co-operation, where MPs play a more edifying role than a question time chorus.

If Brown is serious about giving the Commons greater autonomy, consideration should be given to a set of 60 proposals from the constitution unit which has already been welcomed by senior parliamentarians across the parties.

Briefly, we suggest that government should relax its virtual stranglehold on the Commons timetable, and hand over slices of peak time on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to be allocated by a powerful cross-party backbench committee. The committee would have powers inviolate from the party whips to schedule private members’ legislation, debates on select committee reports and other backbench-generated topics. Ministers would have to reply to debates and votes could be forced.

Wider themes, like a British Bill of Rights and further reform of the Lords, are already under debate and have been trailed and contextualised by that other enthusiastic reformer Jack Straw. But they are unlikely to reach conclusion in this parliament. The need to consult is great, and so the pace is inevitably slow.

Can the sought-after consensus be reached in the present fevered political atmosphere? If the main parties cannot agree on the issues of party funding, how likely is it that consensus can be reached over more wide-reaching matters, like a British Bill of Rights and electoral reform? The auguries are uncertain.

And then there are the upheavals over devolution to deal with. Wisely perhaps, Gordon Brown has not rushed to meet the challenges of Alex Salmond and the more subdued demands for legislative powers from Wales.

As for his personal hobby horse of Britishness and British values, he will need to develop a new narrative big enough to accommodate Northern Ireland dual nationality and the legitimate aspirations of the new governments in Scotland and Wales, rather than seeking to counter or neuter them.

The English — or at least the Tories —may be an even tougher nut to crack. With the Conservatives seizing on ‘English votes on English measures’ as a theme to play to English voters, the lofty ambition of a constitutional consensus reaching beyond the first stage is further compromised.

In the long run, reviews of the Barnett formula for funding the devolved nations and their level of representation at Westminster may be desirable and even inevitable, but to command acceptance they will need to be carried out by independent bodies with input from the devolved institutions.

Further down the line of renewal lie an elected element for the Lords, electoral reform for the Commons and the biggest blockbuster of them all, a national debate on a written (or codified) constitution. The last two at least are very far ahead indeed.

In the meantime forward progress can be made. For instance, if agreement cannot be reached on an elected element for the Lords, the link with the peerage should finally be broken and hereditary peers elections ended.

In the wake of the ‘cash for honours’ imbroglio, it is disappointing that the prime minister has not already surrendered his remaining power of appointment to a statutory Lords appointments commission and able to make a balanced selection of all new members from a long list submitted by the parties.

How far should constitutional reform go — and how far can it go, politically? It is far from clear but these are early days. Reform timetables are notoriously prone to slippage — often to the point of infinity. However buffeted by day-to-day politics, Gordon Brown has at least demonstrated that his commitment to constitutional renewal is the firmest of any prime minister’s for almost a century.

Brian Walker, the Constitution Unit.