Dare to Be a Daniel (29 page)

H
OUSE OF
C
OMMONS DEBATE ON PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY
, 13
M
AY
1999

… I hope that the Hansard of today’s debate is not made available to our troops and airmen involved in the war in Kosovo. Most hon. Members know that, over recent years and for a variety of reasons, Parliament has become less and less relevant to decision-making in our society. To avoid following the pattern of the previous speakers, I should point out that the process of bypassing Parliament; the centralisation of power; the use of patronage; and the use of the royal prerogative to avoid serious debate began under earlier governments and is being continued under the present government.

I wish to speak about the relevance of this debate to next Tuesday’s debate on Kosovo. My hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow [Tam Dalyell] and I have asked on a number of occasions – the request has been echoed by Opposition Members –
for
the House of Commons to be allowed to express its view on this major war, which is involving not only our servicemen but their families, and which will cost the people of this country a great deal. The government have consistently refused to allow that.

I asked my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House [Margaret Beckett] – whom I have known and worked with closely over the years – whether we could have a vote. In reply, on 22 April, she said, Although I well understand the express wish of Members on both sides of the House for a decision-making procedure of the type that he describes and suggests, there is no precedent for that in the House [
Official Report
, 22 April 1999; vol. 329, c. 1053].

That is to say that the present government, who are committed to modernisation, are basing their decisions on the medieval principle that the question of going to war is a matter of royal prerogative – and so indeed it is.

I looked back to the journals of the House for 1621 – a month or two before I got here – when James I sent a direction to the House of Commons that it had no business discussing foreign or defence policy. The House passed a protestation, and the King then dissolved Parliament. The question whether the legislature has any role in the conduct of foreign and defence policy must concern people who take different views in this House.

Some of my hon. Friends are in favour of the deployment of ground troops and of stepping up the bombing, and should be allowed to express that view in the Lobby. Others, such as myself, think that the venture was ill judged, ill thought out and has failed. I should be allowed to express that view, on behalf of the
people
who elected me. A vote could then take place. If we are to discuss parliamentary democracy – as distinct from this debate between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, which may have been fun for them but was not for me – we ought to discuss that matter.

For our children, we describe ourselves as a democracy. I always attend state occasions and, in this House, we talk about a parliamentary democracy. When the Queen makes a speech, she does not mention either word – she says that we are a constitutional monarchy. There is all the difference in the world between a democracy, a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy … When we meet, I have to tell a lie to sit in this House – I must say: ‘I swear by almighty God that I will bear faithful and true allegiance.’

I do not believe that – I am a republican. Every minister must swear an oath of allegiance. The Privy Counsellors’ oath is even worse. They must say that they will defend the monarch from ‘foreign prelates, potentates and powers’. When they go as Commissioners to Brussels, Privy Counsellors take another oath, and say that they will take no notice of any nation that might put pressure upon them. These may not seem to be significant questions, but they become so when a war occurs and we are not consulted.

I wish to refer to the growth in patronage. All Prime Ministers appoint all the bishops; why cannot the Church of England have the confidence to choose its own leaders? Why cannot we select or vet judges in the way that the Senate does in the United States? The Prime Minister has just appointed a new Commissioner to Brussels who, I understand, is not even the choice of the Conservative Party. He has used his patronage to appoint a
Conservative
representing a different view, but that is the practice. All ministers are appointed and dismissed by the Prime Minister.

If the Labour evidence given to the royal commission on the reform of the House of Lords is to be believed, all the House of Lords is to be appointed. Some wonder whether it is not the intention to appoint the whole House of Commons, but we have not reached that stage yet. It is certainly true that the use of party patronage in choosing a First Minister in Wales or a mayor in London, or disposing of my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk, West [Dennis Canavan], shows a desire to control everything.

Everyone with power wants to do that, so we must ask not why they do it, but why we accept it. The House has the capacity to do something about it. I introduced the Crown Prerogatives (Parliamentary Control) Bill.

The Crown Prerogatives (Parliamentary Control) Bill was supported by my hon. Friends the Members for Linlithgow, for Preston [Audrey Wise] and for Nottingham, South [Alan Simpson]; by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Medway [Robert Marshall-Andrews]; by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland [Derek Foster]; by the hon. Members for Lewes [Norman Baker], for North Antrim [Revd Ian Paisley], for Aldridge-Brownhills [Richard Shepherd] and for Billericay [Teresa Gorman]; and by the right hon. Members for Haltemprice and Howden [David Davis] and for Caernarfon [Dafydd Wigley]. That is broad support. Even the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Huntingdon [John Major] signed an early-day motion calling for the Commissioners to be approved by the House of Commons.

Trying to be constructive, I consulted the seventeenth-century
precedents
, when the abuse of Executive power had reached similar proportions, and decided that we should send a humble address to Her Majesty. I have drafted it, and I would be grateful for support from all parties. I have written to certain Privy Counsellors.

The draft reads:

That a Humble Address be presented to Her Majesty praying that the Royal Prerogatives relating to the making of war and the commitment of the Armed Services to the present military operations in the Balkans be now placed at the disposal of the House of Commons for the purpose of permitting Members of Parliament to debate and vote upon a substantive Motion on the merits of that policy and any alternative Motions that might be moved designed to lay the foundations of a just and peaceful settlement in line with Britain’s international obligations.

I wish that this debate was about our role. The media have taken over. The governor of a Central Bank, not elected by proportional representation, although one might have expected that from those who favour it, is coming along, as is Rupert Murdoch. They are squeezing us …

We must restore parliamentary democracy in Britain before it is ultimately squeezed out. I genuinely fear that, so I hope that the speeches that follow will not be a further exchange of hustings schoolboy abuse, but will try seriously to address the question that must concern us all: have the House of Commons and the people whom we represent any role whatever in the decisions that matter in our lives, or are we merely spectators of our fate, and not participants in the future that we want to shape?

H
OUSE OF
C
OMMONS SPEECH DURING THE PASSAGE OF THE
F
REEDOM OF
I
NFORMATION
B
ILL
, 5
A
PRIL
2000

First, I congratulate the Members of the House on both sides who have fought this campaign. I regard this as the beginning of a recovery of power by the legislature in dealing with the Executive. This debate and its conclusion will be seen as very significant in the development of parliamentary democracy.

Of course, there have been some moves towards this. The government of whom I was a Member introduced Green Papers to allow consultation. However, the Bill is a disappointment. The older I get, the more I realise how difficult past reforms were. I am not sure that the Home Secretary [Jack Straw] would encourage the publication of Hansard. He might well say – [
Interruption
] Hon. Members laugh, but there was a battle; Hansard was put in prison. I am not joking. The argument would be that it would not be in the public interest for the public to know what was said in Parliament.

We are approaching the heart of the democratic deficit. Ministers say, ‘The democratic deficit means that I must decide, not the House of Commons.’ However, the fault line in democracy does not lie in what ministers say. When we first arrive at the House as MPs, we all have to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown. As this is the High Court of Parliament, I always assumed that I should take an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That seems to be an appropriate oath for a Member approaching the High Court of Parliament. Privy Counsellors take another oath. The truth is that, at that moment, the Executive, in the form of ministers, are standing against Parliament and the public interest. That is what the matter is really about.

Ministers are often kept in the dark. When I was in the Cabinet, I once said that I wished we had freedom of information for Cabinet ministers – but that was seen as an inappropriate joke. However, I should be very surprised if the Home Secretary knows much about what the security services are doing. If he does, he is the first Home Secretary ever to do so. He is a manager and we are representatives. The division between the government and the House is the real division.

The longer I served in government – I was a minister for eleven years – the more I found that it was easy for people to confuse the public interest with the convenience of ministers. That is easy to do; if it embarrasses ministers, it cannot be in the public interest – but in fact, it is not in the interest of ministers.

That argument leads to another point: I cannot think of any secrets that I ever knew. I do not want to disappoint those Members who are hoping for office, but those of us who have held office know that there are few secrets in government. I knew what would be in the Budget twenty-four hours before it was announced, and was afraid that I should sleepwalk and tell somebody. I knew that we were going to devalue the pound forty-eight hours before we did so. I knew the government’s position on negotiations with foreign governments – that all came out when the negotiations took place. I knew what would be in the honours list before it came out – but everybody knows that.

In the old days, if the fact that a man was to be given a peerage was leaked, that ruled it out completely. Nowadays, the immigration laws have been amended; if one agrees to live here, one is put in the House of Lords. However, that is another question.

The real reason why I want to contribute to the debate is because of the nuclear industry, for which I had responsibility for
many
years. Recent events at Sellafield confirm what I learned by experience; even as a minister – let alone a Member of Parliament – I was never told the truth by the nuclear industry. For example, I found out about the fire at Windscale – now called Sellafield – only when I visited Tokyo. My officials had never told me about it. When I asked them why they had not done so, they said, ‘It was before you were a minister.’

When the Americans discovered that there had been an explosion at Khysthm, the major Soviet reprocessing plant, I was never told. I asked the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ He replied, ‘We were told by the Central Intelligence Agency not to tell British ministers, because it could create concern about the safety of nuclear power.’

It was not until I left office that I discovered that, while I had been making honest speeches about atoms for peace, all the plutonium from our civil nuclear power stations was going to America to make the bomb. The atoms-for-peace power stations were bomb factories for the Pentagon. I felt affronted by that. Had people known the facts at the time, the development of the debate on nuclear power and the nuclear industry would have been much better informed. We should not have had the problem at Sellafield, because the matter would probably have been dealt with earlier.

These provisions are probably the most important in the Bill. After thirty years, we can find out at the Public Record Office what ministers have done, but if we want the public to have an influence on their government, they must know about the debate before it is concluded. I realise that there are arguments about fact and advice, but I have never believed that information about the nature of government policy-making was damaging.

What is damaging are leaks, malice, and so on … People with
knowledge
of a situation could contribute. The trouble with the official secrets that surround the government is that they lock ministers in with their officials.

Some ministers are rather like constitutional monarchs. They can say yes or no to their Permanent Secretaries. However, once we let it be known publicly that we are considering a matter, we make available to ministers a range of advice that they would not be able to get from within Whitehall, and that allows them to become umpires between their civil servants and public expertise outside. I therefore make the case – I hope that it does not shock anyone – that open government and freedom of information are good for ministers, not just for Parliament and the public. That argument needs examination …

I hope that public opinion makes it clear to the Home Secretary and others that we are not prepared to accept that we should be treated as children and left outside the inner knowledge of what happens. It denies ministers the advice that they need, and the public the opportunity to participate in some way in their future, rather than being just spectators of their fate.