Jonathan SUMPTION

Government by ministerial decree is both contrary to our political tradition and thoroughly bad practice

Behind the spat about parliamentary control over the Government’s Covid measures, there is an older and more fundamental divide. It is the divide between an authoritarian model of government and a more deliberative and democratic model.

The authoritarians believe in the “strongman”: the boss who gets things done with the aid of a team of technicians, who surmounts crises by intervening swiftly and decisively, without wasting time in argument or debate. The alternative, according to this view of the world, is a bunch of squabbling politicians picking over the entrails while the sand runs through the hourglass.

There has always been a strand of political masochism in Britain which likes this idea: the sort of people who admire dictators because they make the trains run on time. From time to time there is a more widespread move towards authoritarian government. We are experiencing one of those times now.

Even before Covid came along, surveys published by the Hansard Society showed that more than half the public think that we need a “strong leader willing to break the rules”. Nearly as many believe that the country would be better run if “the Government didn’t have to worry so much about votes in Parliament”.

Harold Wilson won an election in 1964 by promising us “the slap of firm government”. Would people have voted for him if instead of slapping us in the face he had promised to kick us in the backside or sock us in the jaw, which expresses much the same idea? Perhaps they would.

The habit of making these strident pronouncements has not gone away. The present Prime Minister is fond of saying that he “will not hesitate” before imposing some aggressive interference with our daily lives. The Health Secretary likes to say that he will “stop at nothing” to beat the virus. But hesitation has its uses. Politicians surely ought to hesitate before making radical decisions that fundamentally affect the lives of every one of us. Perhaps their decisions would be better if they paused for long enough to think them through. As for “stopping at nothing”, this is the language of despots and fanatics.

Everything that has happened this year in Britain has shown up the cult of the strongman for the nonsense that it is.

Authoritarian government depends on fear. Ministers need to spread fear to justify what they are doing and achieve compliance. So we have the continual attempt to pretend that everyone is at risk, even if they are under 60 and in good health. We have the dodgy charts deployed last week to persuade us that infections were doubling every week. We have continual threats to lock us down. This kind of behaviour destroys trust. If the Government were trusted, it would not need to resort to coercion on the scale that it is doing. People are more likely to comply if the advice makes sense, is presented to them coherently, in calm language, and is supported by evidence which has not been crudely hyped up.

But if you tell millions of healthy, young people that they are risking lives by mixing, they will ignore you and do their own thing. If you tell them that they can go to shops, work and school on buses, trains and crowded streets, but cannot have half a dozen people round for a drink without spreading death and destruction, they will tell the pollsters that they approve and then do precisely as they please.

We are a parliamentary democracy in the most fundamental sense of the term. We do not elect our head of government. We elect MPS. Under our system, the Government’s sole source of legitimacy is the support of the House of Commons. We are only a democracy because ministers are answerable to Parliament for everything they do.

Government by ministerial decree, which is what we have had for the past six months, is not just undemocratic and contrary to our political tradition. It is usually thoroughly bad government. The concentration of power in a small number of hands and the absence of wider deliberation and scrutiny enables ministers to make major decisions on the hoof, without proper forethought, planning or research. Within the Government’s own ranks, it promotes loyalty at the expense of wisdom and experience. The want of criticism encourages overconfidence, which banishes moderation and restraint. The present leadership’s mishandling of Covid-19 exemplifies all of these familiar vices of strongman government.

Whatever one’s view about the merits of its decisions, it is impossible to think well of the process that produced them. It has been jerky, clumsy, unprepared, inconsistent and ill thought out. It is not efficient, and in the long run is not even popular. If ministers had to appear at the dispatch box in the House of Commons to explain and justify every decision that they made and back it up with evidence, we would have a better quality of decision-making. If they had to persuade sceptical MPS whose constituents are being propelled into misery and ruin by their acts, they might be more careful.

All of this, however, depends on the House of Commons itself being willing to rise to the challenge.

Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle was probably right to disallow the Brady amendment on Wednesday. It was a device designed to force the Government to consult Parliament about orders under the Public Health Act, by making it a condition of extending another Act which is irrelevant to the issue, namely the Coronavirus Act. None of the Government’s measures of social control has been made under the Coronavirus Act.

The Speaker was also right to accuse the Government of showing contempt for Parliament. But it will take more than schoolmasterly lectures to put this right. The real problem is the procedures of the House of Commons. MPS have to resort to devices like the Brady amendment, because the House does not have control of its own agenda.

Under the standing orders, its business is determined by the Leader of the House, a government minister, and by the Speaker. Backbenchers, however numerous, do not get much of a look in.

This seriously impedes attempts to hold the Government to account. In this respect, the Commons is unlike almost every other legislature in the world. Other legislatures determine their own agenda through bipartisan committees or rules which entitle members with a minimum level of support to move their own business.

In Britain, this did not matter when there was a shared political culture at Westminster which respected the institution. It matters very much now that we have a government which deliberately seeks to speak directly to the people, shoving their elected representatives into the margins. The people have no institutional means of holding them to account without Parliament, apart from general elections every five years.

One of the major reasons given by the Prime Minister and his allies for withdrawing from the European Union was the democratic deficit involved in subscribing to EU legislation over which Parliament had no control.

Parliament is already sinking into irrelevance in the eyes of public opinion. Unless it smartens up its act, we are in danger of creating an even bigger democratic deficit at the heart of our own constitution.