Time for intensive care
Ronald Butt
PARLIAMENT UNDER PRESSURE by Peter Riddell Gollancz, £20, pp. 256 Wolf has been cried so often that it may be tempting to dismiss the latest account of the perils facing Parliament as another false alarm. But this time the danger is real and Peter Riddell has written a book which combines much valuable analysis of the erosion of parliamentary authority with some thought-provoking suggestions for remedies. He draws on over 20 years' experience as a reporter and commentator on politics and Parliament.
Rightly, he dismisses as 'a misleading over-simplification' the theory, fashionable in the Fifties and Sixties, of a falling away from some sort of parliamentary golden age. There never was one, and Parliament has always had its wrong-doers. In the Middle Ages several unworkable statutes even went so far as to forbid the election of any lawyers on the grounds that the petitions they brought to Parliament in the name of the Commons really benefited their private clients: a mediaeval equivalent of cash for questions.
Yet Parliament now really faces a new set of troubles arising from the fast-moving and radical nature of contemporary politics and Riddell has assembled a mass of information to assist the search for remedies. Unfortunately, he mars his own endeavours by making the prime target of his condemnation the doctrine of the sovereignty of Parliament. He asserts that this theory is 'one of the greatest threats' to Parliament because it exerts an 'intellectual stranglehold' which has left it 'isolated as other sources of power have grown up out- side the battlements', undermining them. Parliament, he believes, is no longer the absolute and sole repository of power and should 'cease pretending that it is'.
But, of course, no practical politician has ever made such an assumption. Through- out Parliament's history it has adjusted itself to changes in the distribution of power. What, otherwise, were the struggles over the distribution of power in the 17th century about, or the campaigns for the franchise from the 18th to the 20th centuries? Outside Parliament there always surge the realities of power, whether in the form of a mass electorate or of a powerful oligarchy, and Parliament accommodates them the more easily because nothing is entrenched and no written constitution exists to be torn up by revolutionaries. It was, after all, not a Parliament which made the great revolution of 1688-89 (none was sitting) but top people making use of an irregular Convention which only later declared itself a Parliament.
What parliamentary sovereignty means is simply that Parliament, the supreme legislature, is always at the apex of the power structure as the supreme legislator and its inability to bind its successors (which must face their own problems in their own way) is the great safety valve. It would only be weakened by any attempt to entrench constitutional provisions, which, however, is one of the cures Riddell favours.
The real danger to parliamentary power arises, as always, from unwise politics and it is in politics that its defences must be found. Some of the subjects in which Riddell finds threats to Parliament are marginal to its real problems, for example the accountability of quangos, regulators of privatised industries and officials of the new extra-governmental bodies who are not ordinary civil servants. These are important but not vital.
The gravest dangers arise from deeper political changes, above all from the power of the EU and its law over Westminster, the consequences of the haphazard moves towards devolution in Britain and the claims of the judiciary (some more than others) to be able not merely to interpret statute within the light of common law but even in some cases to be competent to fill a vacuum if Parliament has failed to legislate. Riddell's excellent chapters on these sub- jects are highly informative, showing a mas- terly grasp of the arguments, which are fairly displayed.
In the end, however, I do not think that the solution to Westminster's growing ills (which, as Riddell well describes, are both reflected and exacerbated in the way the media now treat Parliament) will be cured by the kind of constitution-building with which the book ends. The survival of Par- liament's authority depends primarily on whether we join a single currency and find that it is unmanageable without a central political and financial authority able, indi- rectly, to control fiscal policy as well as interest rates.
Parliament's decline, and our loss, will be that much worse if the process towards devolution breaks down the unity of Britain into smaller and relatively powerless component parts under the European imperium. No amount of constitutional reform will then restore what we have lost.
Ronald Butt is writing a two-volume history of parliament of which the first, The Middle Ages, was published by Constable in 1989.
Previous page
