Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): It was a frustrating experience, giving evidence to the Joint Committee on the Draft Constitutional Renewal Bill. The committee was packed with government and establishment figures, who disregarded the weight of expert wide-ranging evidence for real democratic renewal and defended the status quo. It was also frustrating for four members of the committee – Conservatives MPs Andrew Tyrie and Sir George Young, the Liberal Democrat spokesman, Lord Tyler, and the Labour peer, Lord Morgan.
They have just joined Democratic Audit in compiling, Beating the Retreat, a dossier of flaws and evasions in the draft Bill. This document is in effect a ‘minority report’ that details the disintegration of Gordon Brown’s bold promises to rebalance power between central government and Parliament. There is to be a Rowntree seminar today, at which Peter Hennessy, Lord Tyler and Alex Runswick will discuss the broader issues which the government’s retreat raises. The draft Bill itself has been relegated to the subs’ bench for the next parliamentary session.
The Joint Committee failed to expose measures in the draft Bill that could threaten the independence of the civil service and would prevent Parliament from having the decisive say on decisions over committing troops to war or military action. But perhaps the most perverse decision that the committee took was to endorse the status quo with respect to the post of Attorney General. The current arrangement, whereby an Attorney General is asked simultaneously to give independent legal advice to the government of the day, while being dependent on the Prime Minister for her or his appointment to a political position, can only lead to further embarrassing episodes like Lord Goldsmith’s infamous advice on the legality of invading Iraq and the halting of the investigation into BAE’s Al Yamamah arms deal and further losses of public confidence in the office and government generally.
Andrew Tyrie comments in Beating the Retreat that, ‘The Joint Committee’s decision to revisit the evidence on this and other issues, only recently examined by various Parliamentary Select Committees, was itself curious. In the case of the role of the Attorney General it was curious in the extreme. On this, the Joint Committee not only had before it reports, coming to unambiguous conclusions, from both the Commons’ Justice and Constitutional Affairs Committees, it also called largely the same people before it. Not surprisingly, they gave the same evidence. The fact that those who gave evidence in support of the status quo were almost entirely composed of former Attorney Generals . . . should have given the Joint Committee pause. [Instead, their views were accepted by the Joint Committee.] There was more than a whiff of establishmentitis about the Joint Committee’s conclusions and it is not, therefore, surprising that a minority report should have been necessary.’
The establishment of this pre-legislative joint committee represented a landmark in parliamentary and legislative procedure, since it examined issues beyond the parameters of the proposed law, considering part of the White Paper accompanying it and the broader constitutional context. This was meant to be a forum for shaping a Bill that would bring about Constitutional Renewal – but the process itself has been wholly unsatisfactory and only reinforces perceptions that the current culture of Parliament undermines its own constitutional role.
