Richard Holme 1936 - 2008

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Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Richard Holme, or Lord Holme of Cheltenham (being a peer suited him), who has just died, deserves a place in the pitifully meagre pantheon of modern British democrats. Trevor Smith’s fine obituary in today’s Guardian has already set out the important role he played in establishing the Cook-Maclennan pact in 1997 as well as assisting the agreement between the Liberal Party and the Social Democrats and his work in various bodies committed to democratic politics and constitutional reform, not least his own Centre for Constitutional Reform.

Richard gave me valuable assistance when I was setting up Charter 88 in 1988. I was committed then to persuading 88 significant and representative figures from all walks of life and all political parties to sign the Charter (the number grew considerably). Richard’s Centre was full of the “great and the good” – ideal signatories for a venture that began in the New Statesman. Richard cooperated from the start. While he was committed to the principle that we should be citizens not subjects, he was however alarmed by our demand for a written constitution and advised us in his silky rather pedagogic way that we should drop it. (It is I think to Charter’s credit that talk of a written constitution – just talk, mind – is now more or less routine. Then it was positively revolutionary.) Fortunately, Lord Scarman, the law lord and a member of the Centre, was absolutely for a written constitution – and that swung it. Thus began a series of breakfast meetings at the Aldwych hotel and Richard became a joint chairman of the Charter along with me.

Much later, Richard invited Democratic Audit to give evidence on war powers to the House of Lords Constitution Committee that he chaired. This was an experience to disabuse anyone who believes that the House of Lords is full of wise folk who give the nation the benefit of their experience of life. That committee was and presumably still is dominated by voluble ignoramuses. How on earth Richard steered the committee to a half-way decent report on war powers still staggers me, but it is clear that his invitation to the Audit was part of his overall strategy.

PS from Anthony Barnett: For me Richard Holme personified both the far-sightedness and frustration of the Liberal in Britain. Perhaps because he nearly became an American in California and was clearly at home there he was a modern person. He saw clearly the pre-democratic inadequacies of the British system and wanted to modernise them. But at the same time, as well as a love of effective influence (another American style characteristic), and a mandarin precision he did not want to shake the bars. He wanted modernisation from above and from within. Because he saw clearly, he understood the weakness and vulnerability of the UK should the democratic winds began to blow. In this sense his reasonable but far-reaching reformism was intended to be pre-emptive rather than in any way insurrectionary. Stuart reports here that it was Lord Scarman whose influence ensured that Charter 88 included the call for a written constitution - without which I'd not have signed it. I didn't know this. Good for Leslie Scarman! I recall when Scarman decided to launch the Charter's strategy plan a year later - which was designed to turn it from a protest into an organisation. The plan had the highly optimistic title 'We Can make it happen in the Next Ten Years'. Originally Scarman told me he could not make the launch, but after he read the document he telephoned and said "This is very ambitious. I'm coming". What he liked was that it was genuinely radical or, if you prefer, 'unreasonable'. For reform to have any chance in Britain it has to take a risk and run the rapids of Establishment scorn and our pernicious media. Richard didn't want this. I tried, even at the end to suggest he might want to add a call for a written constitution to his 'memo to Gordon Brown' then on the verge of becoming Prime Minister. He was elegant and polite in agreeing to put it onto the web, it must be one of the last things he published, but true to himself he retained his 'thus far and no further' approach to reform that I so associate with his Party.

In a sense he also left his own obituary in an advisory memo to Gordon Brown that he read out to a meeting convened by the Smith Institute and which was then published here in Our Kingdom in June 2007 (opens word doc), just before Brown's Goverrance green paper the following month. It is a masterly document from an experienced hand in these matters. If only Brown had taken it fully to heart. After all, it didn't call for a written constitution but it did grasp the fundamentals that had to be faced up for reform to hope to be effective.,

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