Anthony Barnett (London, OK): A Today programme interview this morning opened with Jack Straw saying that, although he is Lord Chancellor there is no need to call him “my Lord”. For the first time, the holder of this 1,000 year old office who is currently the head of the Judiciary is a politician in the Commons. What does this tell us about the relationship between the judges and the executive?
Under Blair anyone who expressed an interest such a question would have been dismissed as “old fashioned”, perhaps even by Jack Straw himself. Now it is the government, and the ever skillful Straw, telling us we have to be interested in the constitution as a whole. One cheer for that alone!
The media in the personification of John Humphrys looks as if it will be true to form and become the die hard opposition to constitutional reform and other democratic measures that may help this country to enter into the modern world.
We are not “tinkering”, Straw protested at Humphry’s scornful diminutive, but looking for, “sensible ways that our overall constitutional arrangements can be improved and amended. It may sound technical and anoraky. Fundamentally it is about what kind of relationships people have with each other in terms of the rights and responsibilities they have towards each other, and what sort of relationship they have with the institutions of the state whether national or local”.
I am not sure that a constitution is, or should be, about what relationship citizens have with each other. This is surely a matter for us. There is a great debate to come. about this. However, what comes as a profound relief after the last decade is that we can at last have this discussion in public. Unless, that is, Humphrys and his ilk have their way.
In effect, his line is that it is all a load of nonsense. The rules are irrelevant. All that matters is that politicians behave themselves. In this way the media will try to keep how we are governed entirely personal - the zone where they exercise their perfect storms.
