Westminster Corridors

Evere magnanimous Puzzle is prepared to look for something to praise in the constitutional outburst, or, to be more precise, the outburst on the constitution by Chancellor Hogg. For one thing it disproved forever the pedantic dictum of those Scotch Natural Philosophers who taught Puzzle to believe that every explosion must contain a little light amidst the heat and sound.

And Puzzle always has some affection for men of bottom which Chancellor Hogg certainly exemplifies. To be sure he is sometimes so pompous that other members of the Lords begin to notice, and perhaps a little melodramatic in reminding the lieges that Chancellors Becket and More were martyred. He need have no fear that his destiny will be the Tower of London; it is more likely to be the Tower of Blackpool.

The nation should have some gratitude that with the great exception of the other comic Lord Chancellor, Mr Martyn Green of D'Oyly Carte celebrity, he has caused more amusement than any other occupant of his high office. Who will forget the splendid fellow emerging from the depths of the ocean at Blackpool to show his skill as a bellringer; the demolition of placards at the hustings with his stout shillelagh; or his departure to deal with the grave unemployment in the North of England in a flat cap?

And even when he returned to sit upon the Woolsack, what Chancellor ever commented so continually, and robustly, on the speeches of lesser mortals, so that the Liberals on his left woke up and the obsequious Bishops of England waiting patiently on his right for further preferment joined them in complaint about his conduct.

Such men are rare so that 'tis more the pity that he now demands to be taken seriously. But alas there are serious aspects of his outburst. It seems right curiousto Puzzle that this arrogant fellow should claim to be speaking in the narrow sense of being the head of the legal part of the constitution when making such obvious party points. If a High Court judge chooses to make after-dinner speeches, complete with press handout, and administers a court sufficiently ham-fisted as to sequester the specific part of a trade union fund designated for a political party, then it seems to Puzzle that the Lord Chancellor should be more concerned about the conduct of the court and the judge than that of the Commons, which is none of his business. At any rate the Commons is the only place in the land where a judge can be upbraided and removed — which is wholly proper. But Chancellor Hogg has presided over a most extraordinary use of legislation, indeed in the creation of a new constitutional doc trine by which legislation unacceptable to a large portion of the electorate is passed and then used as a bargaining counter with the

group in dispute. (And Judge Donaldson himself has been in contact with the *Employers

Federation discussing the legal merits of the Act.) But what of Chancellor Hogg's new doctrine? Does it mean he would pass legislation threatening to kill the fourth child in any family as a useful bargaining counter in obtaining a deal with the Roman Catholic community on family planning by promising to withdraw the capital clauses?

And will not Chancellor Hogg go down in history as the major legal figure in a government which surrendered so many of the rights of Parliament to the Common Market in the teeth of the views of the electorate who have never been consulted in any shape or form? And in open, and blatant, contradiction of the pledge under which he was elected to the Commons to negotiate "no more and no less." What a strange fellow to preen himself on his constitutional rectitude and compare himself with More and Becket.

What is peculiarly sad, in one who prides himself in being a Fellow of All Souls. and the son of another Lord Chancellor (at the time of the General Strike), is his seeming ignorance of the way the Constitution has grown and developed. It has usually done so by men who defied unworkable laws, which authority — be it the King or the Lords — in their lack of wisdom tried to force on an unwilling Parliament and nation.

That was why Hampden defied the .Court ot the Exchequer in refusing to pay ship-money and was then justified by the Long Parliament. That was why Hampden joined with men like Hazelrigg, Holies, Strode and Pym (note well Master Francis Pym) to defy the King and it was the Monarch who lost his head. And that is why me.n like Charles Bradlaugh defied the absurdities of enforced religious oaths in Parliament, or even Master Wedgwood Benn fought through the reform of hereditary peerages.

Now Chancellor Hogg is keen that the letter of the law be observed, even a law which the Government is afraid to deploy, and which is totally unacceptable to a great majority of the people — and not all trade unionists at that. I advise him to read the writings of a brilliant young man on the workings of Natural Law. In particular the passage which reads:

To some partisans of the left, democracy means no more than a tyranny based on the counting of heads. Where fifty-one are opposed to forty-nine the fifty-one must always have it, however arbitrary or unjust their View.

The Conservative regards this doctrine as the reverse of justice and even the reverse of democracy. He is apt to judge the democratic quality of a country's government not by the extent to which government is by majority (even a twothirds majority) but by the liberties and tolerance allowed to minorities not happening to conform to the general social pattern but otherwise useful and law-abiding citizens ...

To the Conservative, therefore, the essence of democracy is not bare majority rule: the right to reform the law may be legally and in certain directions morally and politically unlimited in scope. but here and there a wall is fixed beyond which it is not lawful to go. On the wall is inscribed the words "Natural Law."

Those words Chancellor Hogg were written by yourself, as a young man, back in 1947 in a book entitled The Case of Conservatism. Puzzle now says to you that you are on the wrong side of the wall.

Tom Puzzle