Repair the constitution, or let Labour destroy it
Where should the Conservative Party stand on constitutional reform? Silly question, you might think: surely the clue is in its name. The role of the Tories, down the years, has been to apply the brakes, as it were: to soothe transient passions, to ensure that tried and trusted institutions are not vandalised in revolutionary fits.
Yet that task is better understood as one of continuing repair and maintenance than as one of unthinking resistance. As Edmund Burke, the godfather of conservatism, observed, “a state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation”.
When the Tories stubbornly set their faces against any movement, they usually end up on the wrong side. It happened, for example, when they opposed the widening of the franchise in 1832. Their share of the vote in the general election of that year stands as their lowest on record.
In the 1860s, by contrast, when pressure was building for a further franchise extension, the Conservatives understood that change was coming and decided to take control of the process. The 1867 Reform Act was a temperate and measured piece of legislation and, though the Tories lost the 1868 election, they went on to govern for most of the next generation.
Have we reached an 1867 moment again? Plenty of Labour politicians – ranging from Gordon Brown to the hard-Left Clive Lewis – are calling for a constitutional convention, arguing that too many aspects of our constitutional settlement have become anomalous or unjustifiable.
Might they have a point? Should Boris Johnson, like Benjamin Disraeli, make moderate and judicious reforms today, so as to forestall hasty and ham-fisted changes tomorrow?
Consider, in turn, some of the areas where critics argue that the constitution has become indefensible.
First, there is the question of devolution. There was always something lopsided about the creation of assemblies with different powers in different parts of the country. That incongruity is known by pundits as the West Lothian Question, named for the constituency of Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP who raised it during a devolution debate in 1977.
The West Lothian Question is nowadays often wrongly taken to mean “Why should Scottish MPs be able to vote on English domestic matters when English MPs can’t vote on Scottish ones?” But Dalyell’s objection was a subtly different one. Why, he wanted to know, should he, as a Scottish MP, be able to vote on English domestic matters but not on those matters as they affected his own West Lothian constituents?
The question is no longer academic. Under the last Labour government, several laws were pushed through with the votes of Scottish MPs, even though they did not affect Scotland: tuition fees, foundation hospitals, the hunting ban.
There is, at the very least, a case to be made for further devolution in Scotland, reflecting both the narrowness of the 2014 referendum result and the SNP’s recent electoral success. When polled, a large majority of Scots say that their ideal settlement is some form of “devo max” – that is, further autonomy that stops short of independence.
The SNP is in the slightly absurd position of opposing fiscal autonomy, because it does not want to have to raise what it spends; but the case for a proper link between taxation, representation and expenditure north of the border is becoming inexorable.
Further devolution to Scotland might ease demands for separation; but it would also make the West Lothian anomaly even more unsupportable. There would have to be some balancing devolution in England. I have long argued for an equivalent decentralisation of power – including some tax-raising powers – to county and metropolitan authorities. I can’t think of any power exercised by the Holyrood Parliament that could not be handled by English shires or cities.
My home county of Hampshire has the same population as New Hampshire, which somehow runs its own laws, policing, taxation, schooling and welfare. But mine is just one idea. Others favour an English Parliament, or some sort of federal United Kingdom, with the House of Lords becoming the UK-wide chamber.
Which brings us to the question of the Upper House. Simply shifting it to York or Birmingham is the sort of thing that Tony Blair used to do: a change driven primarily by tomorrow’s headlines with almost no thought for the long-term implications ( qv the creation of the Supreme Court, the abolition of the Lord Chancellor, etc).
The location of the Second Chamber should be part of a larger conversation about its function and composition. The idea of sundering it physically from the House of Commons would, for example, be more defensible if it were a UK-wide chamber within a federal Britain.
I am not advocating that model.
I am simply saying that it and every other option should be on the table, if not as part of a constitutional convention, then at least as part of a wide-ranging Royal Commission.
We should also look, without predetermined conclusions, at the voting system. We might want a House of Commons with room for more parties. We might prefer firstpast-the-post for the Commons but something different for the Upper House. We might want rules on referendums. We might decide to leave things as they are. But let’s at least debate it all in a calm and comprehensive way.
Above all, we need to tackle the Blob. There needs to be a wholesale shift in power from Whitehall to town halls, from standing bureaucracies
Constitutional tinkering may be the only way many of our institutions survive a change of government
Above all, we need to tackle the Blob. There needs to be a shift in power from state to citizen
to elected representatives, from state to citizen. A task on that scale should not be approached piecemeal. We need real democratisation and diffusion of decision-making. Having taken powers back from Brussels, we should now push them outwards.
I know a lot of people have an aversion to constitutional tinkering. I feel it myself. But it is now clear that many of our institutions will not survive a change of government. When, as must one day happen, the Conservatives eventually lose office, there will be all manner of half-baked schemes involving quotas and the representation of favoured interest groups and God knows what else. Unless, of course, the issue is forestalled now.
We have an opportunity, following Brexit, to modernise our institutions. We can smooth out the various lumps and cracks now, tapping patiently with the finest of chisels. Or we can leave it to the next lot. They will come with sledgehammers.