Labour and Constitutional Reform

✓ Labour’s Reforms ✓ The Changing Constitution ✓ Party Views and Manifestoes ✓ Assessment and Evaluation ✓ Evidence

1. Labour’s Reforms

o The constitutional reforms initiated by the Labour Government elected in 1997 together promise to transform the institutional structure of the United Kingdom. ▪ The Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly are the most tangible signs of this transformation but other constitutional reforms are either in being or well under way …… ▪ including the Human Rights Act of 1998 (incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights), ▪ a directly-elected mayor and assembly for London, ▪ a reformed House of Lords ▪ and Freedom of Information legislation. ▪ Although reform of the electoral system for Westminster now seems a somewhat distant prospect, the 1999 elections to the Welsh Assembly, to the Scottish Parliament and to the European Parliament were all conducted using electoral systems very different from the traditional first-past-the-post method. ▪ Referendums have been widely used, and more promised

o Lecture by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, to the Constitution Unit, Westminster. 8 December 1998 o No other Government this century has embarked upon so significant or wide-ranging a programme of constitutional reform as the New Labour Government. It is therefore my particular pleasure, as the member of the Cabinet entrusted with driving forward development of policy, to have been invited here to give the Annual Constitution Unit Lecture.

o We came to power with specific problems identified:

o a government that was over-centralised, inefficient and bureaucratic; o local government in need of reform; o a national crisis of confidence in the political system; o excessive secrecy that both encouraged and reflected the lack of clarity about individual rights, and a deficiency in ready and effective means of enforcing them; o Parliament itself at risk of falling into disrepute, with the House of Commons in need of modernisation, and the House of Lords with an inbuilt Conservative majority from the hereditary peerage which was unsustainable at the end of the twentieth century; o a country that was sidelined in Europe, for lack of decisive leadership and commitment.

Question
What did Labour say about its reform agenda when it came to power?

2. The changing Constitution
In the last two decades, constitutional change and pressures for further change have mounted steadily. From being considered a settled matter, the Constitution is now firmly on the political agenda.
a. Parliamentary sovereignty
Britain’s membership of the European Community (1973) has had a fundamental impact on this central doctrine of the Constitution. Acceptance of the European Treaties means that in areas covered by European Union law, that law is superior to British law. Thus, in passing the European Communities Act (1973), parliament entrenched a superior source of authority, which will last so long as Britain's membership of the European Union lasts
b.Relations between the Westminster government and the periphery
This question became an issue in the 1970s with the upsurge of nationalism in Wales and Scotland and the resumption of direct rule over Northern Ireland by the British Government in 1972. However, devolution proposals for Wales and Scotland were rejected in 1979 but accepted in referendums in 1997, and their effects, together with some devolution to the English regions, seemed likely partly to offset territorial centralisation. However, this particular solution to the problem of metropolitan concentration of power also unleashes a shoal of potential problems, including Scottish and Welsh over-representation at Westminster, the West Lothian question and relationships between the Scottish and Welsh assemblies and the UK government
c. Central-local relations
The existence of a vigorous local government as a counterweight to the power of the centre has no firm embodiment in the Constitution but was for a long time considered to be a check. Between 1979 and 1997, however, Conservative Governments by means of over fifty legislative enactments introduced sweeping changes in local government which weakened its constitutional status. The main changes included the abolition of the Greater London Council and the metropolitan counties and the transfer of responsibilities and functions of local government to non-elected institutions or commercial enterprises. Labour came to power in 1997 pledged to reinvigorate local government
d. Civic Society
Organisations as diverse as trade unions, the BBC, the universities and the nationalised industries were the subject of restrictive government intervention in the 1980s, having their influence pruned or, in the latter case, being largely eliminated. Some commentators believed that these developments cumulatively eroded political pluralism - the idea of the value of a range of vital intermediate institutions standing as buffers between the state and the citizen.
At the same time, the growth of what was described as the 'quango state' exacerbated this situation by producing a new range of unaccountable executive bodies disbursing large amounts of public money and massively expanding the patronage in the hands of ministers. According to one academic commentator, 'this hastily erected apparatus of appointive government lacks the essential democratic underpinnings of scrutiny, openness and accountability' (Weir)
e. Relations between parliament and the executive
Despite certain changes aimed at increasing the capacity of Parliament to hold the executive to account, such as the establishment of Commons Select Committees, the concern persisted that Parliament remained an ineffective critic of and check upon government. The large-scale hiving-of of civil service functions to executive agencies throughout the 1980s and 1990s undermined the principle of ministerial responsibility (answerability) to parliament whilst the aftermath of the Scott Report on the arms to Iraq affair (1996) starkly revealed the impotence of the House of Commons in holding to account a government determined to brazen out serious criticisms by an independent outsider. The House of Lords at times showed surprising vigour, but its hereditary basis continued to be widely criticised as an anachronism in a democratic society

f. Sleaze or the 'politicisation'of government

These phrase became increasingly used in the 1980s and 1990s to denote anxiety at what was felt to be improper use of governmental powers in the interests of party rather than nation. Fears expressed under this umbrella term include the alleged 'politicisation' of the higher ranks of the civil service, the use of patronage to 'pack’ quangos with politically sympathetic people and the employment of the honours system and the award of peerages to reward MPs for political services and company chairmen for donations to party funds. The 'revolving door' syndrome whereby ministers moved out of government into jobs in newly-privatised industries with which they had previously had dealings was a further example of lowered standards in public life. So, even more blatantly, was the apparent willingness of some MPs to ask parliamentary questions for money and more generally to augment their parliamentary salaries by paid services to lobbyists. These matters - appointments to quangos, ministerial moves into business jobs and MPs' outside interests - were all the subject of recommendations by the Nolan Committee (1995) before the 1997 general election .
g.Referendums and Parliamentary government
Traditionally, referendums had been considered an alien constitutional mechanism quite out of keeping with a -parliamentary system, an argument which was heard again in 1993 in opposition to calls for a referendum on the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty. However, in 1997 referendums were used on the Scottish and Welsh devolution proposals and further referendums were promised on new elected authorities for London and English regions, a change in voting system for parliamentary elections and the European single currency.

h. The electoral system

The British system has been described as one of the most disproportional electoral systems anywhere in the western world and 'just about as unrepresentative as it is possible for a voting system to become and still count as "democratic"' (Dunleavy, 1997). Labour entered office pledged to hold a referendum on electoral reform. i Civil liberties
Civil liberties as a political issue became increasingly prominent from the early 1970s as a consequence of a series of cases involving individual rights against the state. Controversy arose over such matters as the use of police powers, the banning of trade unions at the government communications headquarters (GCHQ), the prosecution of civil servants for breaching the Official Secrets Acts, restrictions on freedom of movement during the Miners' Strike (1984-5) and government pressure on the broadcasting authorities (BBC and ITV) over programmes involving state security. Political pressures from the opposition parties for more open government and for a more secure system of rights mounted during the long period of Conservative hegemony.
j. The Monarchy
Controversies involving the royal family have gradually led to the piecemeal reform of the monarchy.

Question

How has the constitution changed in recent times?

3.Ideological perceptions of the British Constitution
The political parties have differing perceptions of the British Constitution, both of how it works and of how - if at all - it should be changed.

a. The Labour Party o The mainstream Labour tradition has traditionally endorsed the strong executive embodied in British constitutional arrangements, but for a different reason from the Conservatives. It perceived the Labour Party as a vehicle for the parliamentary representation of the working class and argued that, once having gained an electoral majority for its programme, the party has a mandate to enact it without check or hindrance. o In addition to ideological reasons, as a major party, Labour possessed strong grounds of self-interest to support the constitutional status quo which guaranteed it and the Conservatives such great advantages. These advantages included an electoral system which both protected the two major parties from third-party competition and helped to hold them together; executive control of parliament which ensured the passage of party programmes; strong central control over subordinate levels of government; and virtual freedom from judicial interference. o However, during the 1990s, the mainstream Labour Party took up the cause of radical constitutional reform. The reasons for this dramatic shift were both ideological and pragmatic. Ideologically, as faith in the state to direct the economy and deliver services declined, Labour, in common with many left wing parties, renewed its interest in a pro-democracy, civil rights agenda. A growing individualism replaced the traditional collectivism in Labour's constitutional thought, a concern to protect the rights of the individual against institutions of government at all levels. o The main pragmatic reason for adopting constitutional reform was the declining legitimacy of the centralised Westminster state - at the periphery, where Scotland and Wales had not been ruled by a government of their dominant political persuasion for nearly twenty years; for individual citizens, forced to seek justice in Strasbourg rather than at home; and at Westminster itself, where political sleaze had brought parliament and government into disrepute. o On the grounds that a two-party agreement to constitutional reform would both enhance the chances of reform in the parliamentary division lobbies and give it a broader legitimacy with the electorate, Labour established a Joint Consultative Committee on Constitutional Reform with the Liberals. The Committee's Report (March 1997) formed the basis of both parties' 1997 manifesto proposals

b.The Conservative Party o Conservatives see authority as flowing from above: they emphasise strong government and accord popular participation a minimal role. So government, backed by a loyal party, governs; and the electorate, through Parliament, consents to this firm leadership. o By tradition and instinct, Conservatives are committed to the preservation of the Union and, in office, reluctant to disturb the historical constitution. o For most of the postwar period, their constitutional conservatism did not differentiate them too much from Labour but, with Labour adopting a programme of radical constitutional reform in the 1990s, the two major parties diverged sharply on constitutional issues o The Conservatives' position in the 1997 general election blended support for small-scale evolutionary change with opposition to Labour's radical programme. o The Conservative 1997 General Election manifesto strongly opposed the other parties' proposals for radical constitutional reform which included a Bill of Rights, a new electoral system, devolution to Scotland, Wales and the English regions, and reform of the House of Lords. After the election, however, as Labour's constitutional reforms proceeded, the Conservatives were forced to adopt a more pragmatic position on certain reforms - for example, to accept a Scottish Parliament as an accomplished fact by putting forward their own candidates for election to it and to refrain from defence of the hereditary peerage whilst attacking increased prime ministerial patronage over the House of Lords.

c. The Liberal Democrats o The Liberal Democrats have traditionally placed radical constitutional reform at the centre of their programme, seeing it as the major precondition of social and economic progress. o Strong supporters of parliamentary government, they consider that the role of Parliament has been downgraded in the twentieth century by the growth of executive power, the main contributory factors being the emergence of programmatic parties each with a collectivise ethos together with a massive bureaucracy. o In addition, they regard the electoral system as unfair because it produces minority governments and penalises the smaller parties. o Adherents of individual liberties and the rights of minorities, Liberal Democrats believe that political over-centralisation combined with the emergence of a multicultural society have eroded individual liberties and produced problems in the protection of national, regional and black minorities. In 1997, they advocated a far-reaching programme of constitutional reform including proportional representation, a Bill of Rights, the strengthening of Parliament, and large-scale devolution and decentralisation of power away from Westminster and Whitehall

Question
Explain the party’s ideas on reform and illustrate with evidence from their 1997 manifestoes (below)

4. The main manifesto proposals in 1997

LABOUR

General approach

Measured, sensible reforms of 'centralised, inefficient and bureaucratic' system of government.

Parliament

Modernise House of Commons.
Special Commons Select Committee to review House of Commons procedures.
Make PM's Questions more effective.
Fully implement Nolan proposals obliging parties to declare all donations above a minimum figure.
Ban foreign funding of parties.
Ask Nolan to consider how party funding can be regulated and reformed.
End right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in upper house as first stage in process of reform to make Lords more democratic and representative.
Review system of appointment of life peers with overall aim of ensuring party appointees as life peers more accurately reflect votes cast at the previous general election. No one party should seek a House of Lords majority.
Committee of both Houses to undertake wideranging review and produce proposals for reform.

Devolution and Local Government

Referendums on devolution not later than Autumn 1997, with simple majority of those voting sufficient to endorseScottish and Welsh devolution. proposals: Scottish parliament elected by additional member system with law-making powers and defined and limited powers to vary revenue. It will have power over the areas of responsibility currently exercised by the Scottish office.
Welsh assembly also elected by AMS, with power
Regional chambers to coordinate transport, planning, economic development, bids for European funding and land use planning.
In time region by region referendums to decide on elected regional governments.
Referendum to confirm popular support for an elected government for London, followed by a new directly-elected mayor and strategic authority.
New duty on local councils to promote the economic, social and environmental of their areas.
Proportion of councillors elected annually to ensure greater accountability.
Pilot schemes of elected mayors with executive powers in cities.
Retain reserve powers to control excessive rate rises.
Will require all councils to publish a local performance plan with targets for service improvement which they will be expected to achieve.
A Labour government will join with local government to mount a concerted attack on the multiple causes of social and economic decline - unemployment, bad housing, crime, poor health and a degraded environment.

Electoral reform

Referendum on electoral reform: early appointment of an independent commission to recommend a a proportional alternative to the first past-the-post system

Individual rights

Incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law to establish 'a floor, not a ceiling, for human rights'.
End unjustifiable discrimination, e.g. by enacting comprehensive, enforceable civil rights for the disabled.
Immigration: reform system to remove arbitrariness and unfairness of 'primary purpose rule' and streamline appeals system for those denied a visa.
Swift and fair decisions on asylum seekers, control of unscrupulous and crackdown on fraudulent use birth certificates.

Open government

Incorporate European Convention on Human Rights into British law to establish 'a floor, not a ceiling, for human rights'.
Introduce Freedom of Information Act and an independent National Statistical Service.
Reform civil justice system and Legal Aid.

Northern Ireland

Seek a new political settlement which can command the support of the Unionist and Nationalist traditions

CONSERVATIVE

General approach

Gradual improvement not radical change.

Parliament

Extend Queen's Speech to cover legislation not only for year ahead but for year after that. This will make more draft bills subject to public scrutiny before they reach the floor of the House of Commons.
Opposition proposals on the House of Lords represent 'fundamental changes which have not been thought through' and 'would be extremely damaging'.

Devolution

Against devolution to Scotland and Wales: would create strains that could pull the Union part, create a new power-hungry layer of government, risk conflict between assemblies and Westminster and raise questions about whether present Scottish and Welsh representation at Westminster
Devolution not in the interests of Scotland, Wales or the Union as a whole.
Against regional government which would be 'a dangerously centralising measure'. lnstead, want to shift power to the local neighbourhood by e.g. giving more power to parish councils.

Electoral reform

Against changes in the voting system which would break the link between an MP and his constituents
A system of proportional representation (PR) would be likely to produce unstable, coalition governments unable to provide effective leadership, with crucial decisions being dependent on compromise deals hammered out behind closed doors.
'This is not the British way.'

Individual rights

Against a Bill of Rights, which would risk transferring power away from parliament to the courts, thereby undermining the democratic supremacy of parliament. This may be necessary in other countries which depend upon more formalised written constitutions but 'we do not believe it appropriate for the UK'.

Open government

Build on steps already taken to more open government by by legislating on commitments in 1993 White Paper to create a statutory right of access by citizens to personal records held about them by the government and other public authorities.

Northern Ireland
Aim is to end direct rule and restore local accountable democracy. To this end continue to pursue policy of dialogue and negotiation with and between the democratic Northern Ireland parties.

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS

General approach

Priority to restoring trust between people and government, renewing Britain's democracy and giving government back to the people.

Parliament

Modernise House of Commons by reducing House to 200 MPs and introducing tougher rules for conduct, behaviour and outside sources of income .
Fixed parliamentary term of four years. improve drafting and consultation on legislation and strengthen MPs' ability to hold government to account.
Reform party funding and limit national spending on campaigns. Each party will publish its accounts and list all large donors.
Transform House of Lords into mainly elected second capable of representing UK nations and regions and of playing key role in scrutiny of EU legislation.

Devolution

Introduce Home Rule for Scotland and Wales with a Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd elected by proportional representation and able to raise and reduce income tax.
Scrap unnecessary quangos and hand functions to elected bodies
More poen and representative appointment process for quangos.
Elected regional assemblies in England where there is demonstrated public demand for them.
Strategic authority for London.
Strengthen local government, with councils given wider scope for action.
Will allow local authorities to raise more of their funds locally, give them greater discretion over spending, and permit them, within strict limits to raise funds for capital projects directly from the market.
Long-term aims of replacing Council Tax with a Local Income Tax and replacing the Uniform Business Rate with a fairer system.

Electoral reform

Introduce proportional representation for all elections.
Greater use of referendums for constitutional issues, e.g. changing the voting system or any further transfer of power to European institutions.
Referendums on local issues where there is public demand.

Individual rights

Incorporation of European Convention on Human Rights as 'first step' to Bill of Rights. Will establish Human Rights Commission to strengthen protection of individual rights.
Will create a Ministry of Justice for protecting human rights, overseeing the administration of the legal system, the courts and legal aid.

Open government

Introduce Freedom of Information Act establishing citizens' right to know.

Northern Ireland

Set up a power-sharing Executive elected by PR. Build on Joint Declaration and Framework Document.

4. Evaluation and interpretation

A. The Agenda

o The significance of Labour's agenda is that its reform proposals challenged many of the most fundamental aspects of the British political system, particularly:

▪ A centralised state ▪ A tendency towards elective dictatorship through the operation of a majoritarian electoral system, ▪ Weaknesses in the protection of liberties and rights and in the extent of popular participation.

o Details of most reforms have been discussed elsewhere: Devolution to Scotland and Wales and regional reform in England; the election of devolved assembly in Northern Ireland following the 'Good Friday' peace agreement in 1998; the HRA; Lords reform, the Jenkins Commission reported on electoral reform in 1998, new electoral systems introduced for European elections, assemblies etc., a Freedom of Information Act (discussed below) o The extent of reform is impressive and its scope is wide. For example, the HRA will potentially transfers power to citizens to challenge the government’s actions and laws. Devolution has taken government ‘nearer the people’. Lords reform has largely ended the archaic hereditary principle. Northern Ireland has had a greater period of uneasy peace than at any time since the troubles began. Labour's Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act put parties on a legal footing for the first time. It set limits to spending during elections - £20 Million per party is the new upper limit, with compulsory declaration of donations above £5,000. Labour had made its own funding transparent before the law passed.

b. Reservations Edited from Gillian Peele, ‘New Structures; Old Politics?’

o Do these institutional innovations taken together amount to anything approaching a new constitutional settlement? ‘Extensive though the reforms introduced by Labour have been, it is difficult to see in them a new constitutional settlement in the sense of a coherent set of measures which can be expected to take root.’ (Peele) o There are five reasons for this scepticism about the status of the current constitutional initiatives. o First, the various changes-devolution, the Human Rights Act, the limited House of Lords reform, freedom of information legislation -have not been 'joined up' in any purposeful way. The various reform measures have for the most part been approached incrementally and pragmatically. ▪ The various pieces of legislation have been separately drafted with different lead departments and they have reflected their different origins. ▪ Yet it is not at all clear how deeply-or broadly that vision is shared within the Government. ▪ It is known that there have been divisions in the Cabinet between Lord Irvine and Jack Straw over the Human Rights Act and major disagreements both about the electoral systems to be used for the Scottish and Welsh assemblies and about proportional electoral reform more generally. Robin Cook, who was the key Labour Party negotiator on the pre-election joint committee with the Liberal Democrats on constitutional reform, remains the most significant supporter of electoral reform for Westminster elections within a Cabinet dominated by opponents of change. o Second, far from being a settlement, the present arrangements have much of the character of unfinished business. ▪ House of Lords reform has been put on hold for three years ▪ The character of the United Kingdom's territorial relationships is far from fixed, for example, the possibilities for English devolution. ▪ What devolution is leading to - whether independence, federalism or a more far-reaching form of devolution - is, of course, a matter of dispute between the parties. Nationalists see the process as leading to independence; others such as the Liberal Democrats would prefer a federal solution for the United Kingdom as a whole. ▪ It may also prove difficult to build solid public support for the asymmetrical form of devolution introduced into the United Kingdom. After the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly public opinion in both Scotland and Wales expressed disappointment with the results thus far achieved. o Third, there is also uncertainty about the attitudes towards constitutional reform of the major actors in the system - the political parties. ▪ Constitutional reform is very much a programme adopted by 'New' as opposed to 'Old' Labour. ▪ It was also a key part of the broad Labour project, highlighted after coming into office, to reach beyond the Labour Party and to include Liberal Democrats in a progressive majority. It remains to be seen how far the cooperation with the Liberal Democrats can survive the retirement of Paddy Ashdown (who as leader was personally committed to much closer links with Labour) and the sidelining of the Liberal Democrats' key goal of electoral reform for Westminster. ▪ The Conservatives for their part have often toyed with constitutional reform while out of office - as in the period 1974-9 -but have lost interest in it when returned to power and concern about the perils of elective dictatorship faded. Now the Conservative Party finds itself in the awkward position of having to work out a policy on the constitutional reforms initiated by Blair. At the moment it appears at best to reluctantly accept these measures although it is unlikely that the Conservatives on return to office would repeal such measures as the Human Rights Act or devolution (especially if a second Labour term allows them to 'bed down') the Conservatives' ambiguous attitude towards them raises questions about how they would work under a different political regime. A Conservative government could alter the detail of the reforms.

o Fourth, The series of constitutional reforms introduced by Labour will bring new institutions and procedures to the machinery of British government. Whether they will change the behaviour and values of British politicians is another matter entirely. It is difficult to change the traditional assumptions and values of politicians so deeply socialized into a political system which has emphasized adversarial politics, partisan identity and loyalty, and parliamentary sovereignty. o The difficulty of reconciling new structures with old political attitudes has already been seen in relation to Labour's efforts to control both the candidate selection processes for Scotland and for Wales and in the selection of the Welsh Labour leader. In both the process of selecting the Welsh Labour leader and in the selection of its candidate for mayo of London, New Labour appeared to be using the old time-honoured machine methods of electoral control using the unions to help influence the result. (In the London mayoral race the Prime Minister's candidate, Frank Dobson defeated Ken Livingstone only as a result of the support two unions which had not balloted their members.) The devolution of power and decentralization of decision making thus make uneasy bedfellows with the tendency within New Labour (which affects the core executive as well as the Part to centralize and control power more effectively. o For the Conservatives the problem of adapting to constitutional change reflects the varied analyses of the Party's political prospects. There is a tension in the Conservative Part between those who wish to attack the Labour reforms root and branch and those who wish to promote a process of reasoned and constructive thinking about constitutional arrangements. While the Conservatives in opposition are inevitably acutely and painfully aware of the advantages which the executive has in the British system, the memory of being in government is perhaps still too strong to prompt a radical rethinking of how best to check the executive through parliamentary or other means.

c. Unfinished Business, Gaps and Failulures (a critical assessment by Simon Hughes and Duncan Black)

o Public confidence: a prime duty of any Prime Minister in a democracy is to use the office to buttress public respect for government itself. In this Tony Blair has failed. The people - ill-informed and apathetic as many were - had started with hopes of some newer, cleaner, brighter politics but Labour, 'new' as it called itself, all too soon looked like business as usual. Bernie Ecclestone's cash, Peter Mandelson's high-living on secret borrowings, tight controls and warped votes in Wales and London. There had been no recovery in voter turn-out for elections, and predictions for a 2001 general election were as low as 65 per cent. Labour's offences against the public's faith in politics were far less heinous but then higher standards had been expected of them. o Labour could never quite weave a convincing tale about what it was doing or why. There was no coherent pattern to the patchwork of constitutional reforms, all of which had their own individual rationale, none of which were stitched together to make much sense, to 'tell a story'.

o Lords reform was always going to be arduous but bold strokes that might have cut a path through the jungle were not taken; little effort was made to rouse the people against the peers. Scotland's Parliament and Wales' Assembly are permanent, but not a word was heard about the equally hereditary monarchy.

o Proportional representation: In opposition, talks with the Liberal Democrats had gone far; in the event of a smallish Labour majority in 1997 - up to fifty maybe three cabinet seats would have been found for Paddy Ashdown and pals. PR was to follow. Early on, despite the scale of Labour's victory, that still seemed Blair's intention and his mentor Lord Jenkins was to be his way of realizing it. Jenkins would report and be 'free to consider and recommend any appropriate system or combination of systems in recommending an alternative'. By the time Jenkins produced his report in 1998, PR was clearly no longer a priority. A year after that, Prescott could without contradiction publicly promise to dump the Liberals and PR with them. o Blair was aware of his lack of courage - he subsequently said his failure to bring Paddy Ashdown into his cabinet in 1997 had been a great error; the price and the prize would have been PR.

o Northern Ireland: Blair's passionate determination to enter the history books as a peacemaker in the North of Ireland explains the huge investment of political time and energy he made in Ulster. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 was a personal achievement. o In principle, here was a platform for peace. But the agreement was hedged about with fatal ambiguity, especially on the core issue of the decommissioning of IRA weapons. But peace of a kind did hold - fewer soldiers but 'Real IRA' bombs (its personne1, methods and munitions known to the IRA proper), masked men firing weapons over tricolour-draped coffins and continuing local intimidation. Blair's achievement amounted to de-escalation, temporary or permanent, who knows. The larger goal he set himself - to establish a functioning devolved government for Northern Ireland embracing Irish nationalists and former terrorists - hung there unrealized.

o The Commons A modernization effort of sorts got going after Labour came to power, for example, a minor experiment in hours was launched, with the Commons sitting on a Thursday from 11.30 in the morning to 7.00 p.m. o But Blair despised the Commons and did all he could to prevent its improvement. Labour even slowed the technical re-equipment of a legislature that is still Victorian in habit and performance o Blair had promised progress towards wiring up Britain, yet only a handful of MPs, and a good few of them Tories and Liberal Democrats at that, had personal websites. The pace at which they started using e-mail was glacial. Labour showed little interest in redefining the purpose of backbench MPs or the powers of select committees. A polite request from the Liaison Committee of chairs of these select committees for staff and new powers was repulsed. Most of all they wanted recognition by ministers that making law and policy should be a more consensual business, in which MPs are partners. Strengthening their committees was a chance to reinvigorate trust in Parliament, but what government volunteers to facilitate challenges to its own absolute authority? Not Tony Blair. Again, the absence of any bigger constitutional picture.

o Freedom of information: By proposing a legal right to see information, the government broke new ground in challenging the tradition of secrecy that has characterised British government. However, much depended on how the exemptions were defined, and on the powers given to the Information Commissioner . o A Freedom of Information Bill was not included in the programme for Labour's first parliamentary session, though in the Queen's Speech the Government did commit itself to producing a White Paper o The failure to include a bill in the first session was seen by freedom of information campaigners as a setback. The official reasons given were that Labour's devolution proposals for Scotland, Wales and London left little room in the parliamentary timetable for a further, substantial constitutional bill. o The Minister, David Clark, published a White Paper, Your Right to Know, was published in December 1998. This revealed a far more radical approach than most commentators expected . A draft Freedom of Information Bill was finally published by Home Secretary Jack Straw, in May 1999. Among the many departures made from the line established by Clark's White Paper, three were particular significant. ▪ Exemptions preventing release of information in 22 areas of public life, including policy making, commercial secrecy, the economy, international relations and health and safety featured at the heart of the draft bill. ▪ The power of the Information Commissioner were effectively undermined by a clause preventing him or her from overruling a public authority and ordering disclosure of information on public information ▪ The Clark commitment to public access to information unless it caused ‘substantial harm' was watered down. o Unsurprisingly, this unimpressive set of proposals provoked a storm of political protest on the Labour backbenches, in opposition parties and among interest groups committed to freedom of information.

o The Lords: Labour decided on its half-measures because it did not want to confront the key questions of whether the British constitution needed a second chamber and, if so, whether it had to be o The fundamental question remained unanswered - however they came to be there, should an upper chamber have the power to block and/or delay Commons legislation? If not, why bother with one at all?

o Labour and the machine of state: Labour would not or could not devote time to modernizing the government machine. Blair revelled in the exercise of 'prerogative power' - the mass of discretionary decisions open to the Prime Minister with minimal external supervision and no basis in statute law. Labour saw no reason to make the centre any more transparent. o The Blairites did little to rearrange Whitehall. They kept MAFF, despite the relative unimportance of farming. No departments for Europe, children or women were founded. They created the jumbo Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions and the Department for International Development. It was not long, however, before DETR was regretted, as transport rose to the top of the political agenda. The need to placate John Prescott prevented dividing it up again.

o Beyond Westminster and Whitehall: The Prime Minister was taken with another idea, first floated by Michael Heseltine - city states with their own directly elected executive mayors. Blair, typically, had not involved the Labour Party at large. The Greater London Act paralleled devolution to Scotland and Wales, though the powers granted to the new London Mayor and Assembly were circumscribed with a budget of only £3.25 billion a year. Only 34.6 per cent turned out to vote on whether to have a London Mayor and 72 per cent of those said yes (barely one in four adult Londoners). o Having learnt nothing from the antagonism stirred up in Wales by the machinations surrounding the selection of Alun Michael, Number 10 and HQ at Millbank cooked a dog's breakfast, humiliating the official candidate, Frank Dobson. Ken Livingstone, a sublime tactician, won the popular contest with a far from popular mandate: 32 per cent - I.7 million voters out of a possible 5 million bothered to vote in May 2000 for Mayor and Assembly, which meant Livingstone got only 15 per cent of the London electorate's first choice votes. Democracy looked far from invigorated that day - and yet power relations between urban England and Westminster may profoundly change in consequence. The Local Government Act 2000 allowed people to petition their council for referendums to create an elected Mayor. Mayors who were directly elected by more voters than mere MPs might take on an unstoppable momentum.

o The law: If the powers of the state under Labour were only 1ightly reformed, some effort - though far from radical - was made to modernize the professions which, some would say, run the country as much as the elected Government. On jobs for Judges - in 1998-9 Lord Irvine made some 634 appointments to the high court, circuit and district benches and tribunals - he repulsed the idea of a Judicial appointments commission, neutral and expert. Instead he clung to what amounted to private selection by the Lord Chancellor's Department o Enactment of human rights was a long-standing promise. Labour resisted setting up a Human Rights Commission to undertake cases even if they did establish the Disability Rights Commission precisely to fight for the 'human rights' of people with disabilities. Reorganization of the 'rights' furniture is going to be needed soon.

o Citizen, state and party: The press seized on the Ecclestone affair in the autumn of 1997 to argue that New Labour were as bad as old Tories. Taking money from Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone smelled; whatever his aim in paying, he appeared to receive a commercial benefit over tobacco advertising.

d. Conclusion

o Paradoxes: Labour’s reform programme is full of contradictions and paradoxes; ▪ Reform has been conditioned by self-interest but there is a significant element of principled commitment to democracy. ▪ In some areas – like the House of Commons – Labour actually seems hostile to genuine reform ▪ The government has shown decisiveness and radicalism – particularly in devolution – but great conservatism and timidness in other areas ▪ The extent of the reform programme is unparalleled but there is little overall pattern or sense of direction ▪ It is not at all clear how many Labour ministers and MPs are committed to a programme of reform and there are certainly significant divisions.

o Developing a codified constitution is not on Labour’s agenda and there seem to be a number of reasons why a codified constitution is not likely to be a practical possibility. ▪ Codified constitutions emerge at specific crisis points in history. The UK is not in crisis. ▪ Constitutions require agreement on the aspects of the old system which need replacing and consensus on solutions. There is no such agreement in the UK. ▪ Codified constitutions empower judges and limit politicians. This is not the culture of UK politics and certainly not of Tony Blair – this is why electoral reform has been sidetracked. Politicians want to do things, they are not concerned with setting up institutions or rules which remove their power. ▪ Self-interest usually outweighs principle. The electoral system is grossly unrepresentative but it is not in the interests of the governing party – or the Opposition – to change rules which benefit them. ▪ The Conservatives are not a party who push constitutional reform and are rather obsessed by the European issue. Only the liberal democrats have a cohesive constitutional reform programme envisaging a codified constitution. ▪ Only a third of the electorate actually cast their ballots for Blair in 1997. Constitutional reform does not motivate the voters. They will march to protest against the government’s plans to end fox hunting but not to demand fair representation. ▪ It would be difficult to be confident in the British public’s support for rights and liberties – all too easily nationalism is aroused and racism – it is admitted – is deeply embedded in many police forces. ▪ While Labour can be criticised for tackling reforms without an overall plan, the issues are impossible to bring together in a single overall settlement. For example, it has proved impossible to settle the Northern Ireland problem. How much more difficult it would be with the complications of attempting to solve the whole question of the relationship of central government with regional government. All that is feasible is to tackle the most pressing problems first and leave others – like English regional government – for the future. ▪ The general difficulties that change brings should not be under-estimated. For example, the monarchy is clearly undemocratic and outdated. No-one would invent a hereditary head of state today. Yet, there is no popular movement for abolition and establishing an effective alternative is not easy.

Question

Evaluate Labour’s record on constitutional reform

6. Critical comment on Labour’s Reform Agenda

The Guardian on UK Democracy

You can't impose democracy from above

Political reformers need to drop the idea that constitutional blueprints can transform the culture of politics

Democracy debate: Observer special

Talk: how democratic is Britain?

Tom Bentley
Sunday November 3, 2002

This weekend Charter 88 held a big conference in London on the future of democracy. Its starting point was the 'widely recognised' fact that, despite devolution and other constitutional reforms in the last five years, democracy in Britain is in crisis.
More and more people are now getting in on this act. But most are still looking in the wrong place for solutions. There is a common, deeply held assumption that somehow abstract institutional redesign - constitutions, rules, charters - will solve the problem of democratic renewal. The issues are real, but we have to understand democracy differently if we are going to discover any lasting solutions.
The crisis claim might seem paradoxical to some who know Charter 88's history. It is seen by many as one of the most successful pressure groups of the last twenty years. Its high profile campaigning for constitutional modernisation helped to make it unthinkable for New Labour to back away from its commitment to devolution as it approached power.
Constitutional reform was one of the most time-consuming, energy-sapping activities that New Labour undertook in its first term. Yet five years in, a democratic health check appears to reveal an even sicker beast than at the exhausted end of the Conservative years. The sparkling new institutions in Edinburgh, Cardiff and London had already lost their sheen.
In Scotland, which had for decades managed to organise virtually all political discussion around the question of independence and devolution, most people seem even more put off by the new political culture than by the old, Westminster one. In London, Labour mayoral hustings in the last month have had almost no attendance, and the contest for selection has collapsed into infighting over who gets the bloc vote from which union.
The real wakeup call came with the low turnout in the 2001 general election. Others, including the BBC, which has reviewed its political programming, and a growing number of front bench politicians, are increasingly concerned at people's apparent disengagement from politics. The perception of decline is so strong that it even helped push the House of Commons into reforming its own working practices this week, in an effort to make it more engaging, relevant, and family-friendly. This week a report by Ian Hargreaves for the Independent Television Commission found that the average time spent each month watching TV news has fallen from 9 to 8 hours, and that news has real problems reaching young people and some ethnic minority communities.
This problem is not just British. At European level, it is now received wisdom that citizens feel a damaging sense of 'disconnection' from European institutions. The re-run of the Irish referendum ratifying the Treaty of Nice has been interpreted as a warning to European reformers; a reminder that people are no longer prepared to be led by a political elite insisting that further integration is necessary and inevitable. Europe's constitutional convention, headed by former French president Valerie Giscard D'Estaing, is a partial response; an attempt to find a workable set of rules for political decision-making in an enlarged EU, and a constitutional settlement for the next stage of political history. In the US, the farce of the 2000 presidential election convinced many that the democratic system is in trouble there too. In France and Holland, dissatisfaction with traditional politics has produced ugly upheaval and unstable governments.
Some people, such as David Goodhart, editor of Prospect magazine, make a powerful case that this is not a major problem. Goodhart thinks that people are less likely to vote because voting matters less. In a post-cold war world, where the great majority are well off, politics has become more managerial and less important. The modern media, among other things, will hold politicians to account in a way that makes strong partisan identities and personal engagement unnecessary for all but the elites who make it their business to pay attention.
But this is wrong. Yes, people may have more choices about how to spend their time. Yes, the basic twentieth century opposition between capital and labour that structured western political identities has partially dissolved. But no, consumerism and a more intrusive media are not capable of taking up the strain created by the decline of political engagement. If people want basic public goods like hospitable streets, more learning and better health, the institutions delivering them need active support, and not just through taxes. If government - at whatever level - is going to improve security from violence and war over the next generation, it must be capable of taking decisions which are technically sound, but also clearly understood and legitimated by citizens. This cannot be done without finding new ways to connect the way people express their own concerns and allegiances with the distribution and use of political power.
So where are the solutions? First, we need to understand that the idea that genuine democracy can be advanced simply by creating more formal rights, more freedoms, more procedural rules, is fundamentally misguided. Formal governance does matter, but it is too easy to get obsessed with it. Running permanent committees debating the minutiae of different restructuring proposals, which is essentially what the Giscard Commission is, does little to reawaken wider interest in politics, or to explain what effective, transparent institutions actually look like when they operate well.
And the problem with this focus is that it produces the wrong kind of imitation. For example, I've just received an email from 'Youth 2002', including a draft European constitution produced by 1000 teenagers during a 2 week congress in Denmark over the summer. Getting young people together to debate politics and society is fantastic. But if the output is a draft constitution that declares 'The European Union shall preserve equality and the separation of powers', its value is pretty limited. So many youth parliaments and mock elections that have sprung up, especially since David Blunkett added citizenship to the school curriculum. Quite naturally, many people think that the way to empower and engage young people is to imitate the adult processes which currently constitute politics, as a form of preparation for the real thing.
But compare this to Lewisham Listens, an internet based consultation programme for young people run by a London borough. Rather than trying to replicate existing institutions online, it initiates and connects together somewhat more mundane conversations about which things affect young people's quality of life - transport, leisure, street safety and so on - and what the council could do to improve them.
We should be looking, not at the formal institutional structure but more at the informal spread of relationships, conversations and ideas. The technology and the organisational structure make it possible, but they are not the democracy. On a grander scale, Opendemocracy.net is attempting to create global community of participants. Again the focus is not on inventing procedures for democracy, but providing stimulation through content and the means to debate and add to it. The emphasis on the site is the issues - urban and rural, media power, life after 9/11 - the rules of engagement underpin a process of interaction that is pretty unique, but the rules are the supporting infrastructure, not the ultimate goal.
These new processes of interaction do not achieve change unless they are connected to the use of power; that is why formal politics continues to matter. But it is the connections between institutional function and everyday behaviour that generate the potential for change, not the properties of the institutions themselves.
The democratic process itself is also the product - it is true that the ways in which people interact to make collective decisions and determine priorities influences the quality of the outcome. But this process of democracy is itself much more widely distributed than the workings of the formal institutions at the core of our political systems. Political scientists Almond and Verba recognised this 50 years ago when they wrote Civic Culture. A century before that Alexis de Tocqueville - a Frenchman - wrote a study called Democracy in America that helped start the worldwide admiration of US democracy.
Tocqueville did it, not by doing an academic study of the concept of federalism, but by travelling across a young country, holding conversations with Americans and observing the ways in which they came together around common interests and aspirations. Perhaps it is time for somebody to do the same for democracy in 21st century Europe.
Tom Bentley is Director of Demos, the independent think tank.

Whose democracy is it anyway?

Karen Bartlett of Charter 88, setting out the themes of Charter 88 and Observer Future of Democracy conference, asks if it is any surprise that our politics turns so many people off.

Sunday October 27, 2002

Political dry rot has firmly taken hold in the foundations of British democracy. The Houses of Parliament once inspired a democratic principle to be exported around the world. To most British people today, they have become a symbol of alienation where a small elite rule without accountability.
How healthy is our democracy in Britain in 2002? Hundreds of thousands protest on the streets while politicians and media worry about apathy and the lowest election turnout since 1918. We teeter on the brink of war without any effective public forum providing a voice for those many people who have profound misgivings about an invasion of Iraq. We live in a curious world where the civil liberties agenda has been successfully hijacked by a cadre of the old establishment primarily concerned with their ability to carry on fox hunting. A political era in which the worst excesses of the "sleaze" era have not been repeated has done nothing to restore trust in our elected politicians.
Yet this New Labour government can claim to have delivered more on constitutional reform than practically all of its post-war predecessors put together. But where the government has failed not so much on the ingredients of constitutional reform, but in failing to make any sense of them.
Having committed themselves to a large programme of constitutional reform under the late John Smith, they have wearily carried out these reforms in the spirit of ticking off a list of tiresome commitments. They have singularly failed to create any strong democratic narrative. Because the Government's heart is not in it, their reforms often disappoint in the detail. Devolution for Scotland, less for Wales, even less for the English regions. A House of Lords to be partially elected. Not so much as a whiff of proportional representation for Westminster. Little discussion of the lack of democracy or accountability in any of the international institutions - the European Union, the WTO and the World Bank.
Where the reforms have been impressive they have gone largely undefended. Instead of heralding a new era in which rights are taken seriously, the Human Rights Act has languished as the kicking boy of everybody from the Daily Mail to Prince Charles in his letters to Ministers. The lamentable failure of most on the left to speak up on its behalf leaves the Act fated to be both toothless and vulnerable to demolition by a future government, even less likely to support it than the current one. Creating a separate Human Rights Commission would, it seems, simply cause Ministers too much inconvenience in the courts. It is essential, therefore, that human rights should now have a major function at the heart of a new single equalities body, and are not merely tacked on the end.
Politicians worry about apathy but refuse to recognise the many ways in which our current political system increases apathy. When the political parties only care about scrambling for a select few swing voters in the marginal key seats, most voters know that their votes don't really count or matter under our current electoral system.
On public services, the debate over public or private funding continues to be hotly contested. But only organisations like the World Development Movement have drawn attention to the fact that real future of public services lies not in Westminster or in the regions, but in the GATS agreements Britain has signed up to at the WTO. These agreements open our public services to investment and influence from private companies, British and foreign, in the name of free trade. While we argue about public 'ownership' of hospitals and schools, we may be fighting the battle without being told that the war has already been lost.
But more important than the detail of arguments about GATS or electoral reform, the democracy is in the debate. But the government is simply too complacent about democracy and not open to debate about the future of our politics. Ironically, they now favour the introduction of a democratic constitutional framework for Europe while still resisting the debate at home. Surely our government should be equally interested in transparency and legitimacy here in the UK too. Jack Straw announced that a common statement of values for the EU was necessary as no one understood how Europe worked, but that most people did understand British democracy as embodied by familiar images of the Houses of Parliament.
Really? It would be difficult to find a member of the public who could explain many of the mixed and confused principles of British democracy - the royal prerogative, the function of the second chamber, the proposals for devolved assemblies in some parts of the England but not others, the role played by the Lord Chancellor, or their own rights as subjects. People may have a weak grasp on the technicalities of power, but they do understand that it is held by a very few, in Westminster and further afield. People understand that these decisions are not influenced in any way by them, or even by the majority of their elected representatives, treated by the government as mere "lobby fodder".
Our unwritten constitution and system of government has managed very well up to this point to exclude the majority of people from the small political elite which understands how decisions are made. Strong governments can, and do override at whim the unwritten conventions that determine how our country is shaped. A written constitution is not merely a 'statement of values', created to paper over enormous areas of democratic deficit in institutions like the EU. Nor is it a piece of paper in a museum. A written constitution is a clear contract with every citizen, which is never subject to unquestioned renegotiations by any government.
This current government may be well intentioned, but it is overwhelming in its strength and its ability to ride roughshod over our democratic traditions while the opposition is pitifully weak. The current issues we face are critical in determining our global and local future. Progressives need to realise that the arguments for democracy are now more important than ever. By campaigning separately we have made it far too easy for the government to ignore us. For too long we have campaigned alone on issues which share an underlining concern; the lack of democracy, transparency and accountability in the decisions which affect our lives.
We must create a coherent democratic framework that links the concerns people feel over war, Europe, sleaze, the media, local government, and the power of multi-national companies. These links have not yet been made. It is up to reforming groups and individuals to create this agenda, and act together to serve notice on the political establishment that people throughout the country demand to be listened to.
Karen Bartlett is Director of Charter 88.

Is the UK OK?

In 1977, the country was in severe post-industrial decline. Now, a quarter of a century on, much of Britain is enjoying unprecedented prosperity. So why do we still seem to be gripped by anxiety? Neal Ascherson finds a nation ill at ease with itself

Sunday June 2, 2002
The Observer

King Arthur's Round Table still hangs on the wall. But what has happened to his kingdom and his subjects? The huge disc of painted oak in the hall of Winchester Castle is medieval, not Arthurian; an invention to suggest that the kingdom has been solid and unchanged since the Romans left. But it does change, even in 25 years of one queen's reign. And people invent patterns to make sense of those changes.
In the Great Hall at Winchester, I found two women looking at the magnificent pair of wrought-steel gates forged in honour of a royal pair, for the wedding of Charles and Diana in 1982. The women smiled faintly, but refrained from crass comment. We went outside and sat in Queen Eleanor's Garden, a tiny plot of grass and flowers created only a few years ago and opened by the Queen Mother.
The two had served together in the Navy, the Wrens, and had been friends for a long time. 'We'll stick with her,' one said calmly, as if she had decided not to change dentists. She was talking about the Queen. 'And she should go on - not retire or anything. As for Charles, I don't mind if he marries Camilla, just as long as she's not made queen.' She laughed suddenly: 'The papers all said nobody would care about the Queen Mum when she died, but they did. I just love it when the journalists get it so wrong!'
Twenty-five years ago, the renowned foreign correspondent James Cameron wrote: '7,829 shopping days till next jubilee, the golden one; can you bear to wait? I can. I shall celebrate it on my 91st birthday, if and when, and by that time I shall be wise enough or dottled enough not to care.'
Cameron's 'if and when' let him down. He died in 1985. But if he had reached that birthday party, he would have been astonished by the placidity of the golden jubilee. No orgy of Queen-worship, but a temperate holiday picnic with flags. Almost no fierce and principled challenges to the monarchy; only a few intellectual warnings that the Queen's reign has amounted to 50 wasted years of democratic stagnation.
As Cameron was writing his complaint, the Sun was proclaiming: 'Out of the woodwork they crawl, the termites of the Left. The knockers, moaners and miseries who just can't bear the thought that this jubilee weekend the Queen is the most popular lady in the land.' But where are the termites in 2002?
Back in 1977, more than 6,000 people came to a Communist Party 'People's Jubilee' party at Alexandra Palace in London. At that time, the party still claimed to have 28,000 members, all presumably committed to do away with the monarchy when the correct historical moment arrived. The Socialist Workers' Party found it hard to meet the demand for their 'Stuff the Jubilee!' buttons. Above all, and to the ecstasy of the media, the Sex Pistols hit the top of the NME chart with their jubilee anthem ('God Save the Queen/ the fascist regime ...'), which was instantly banned by Boots, Woolworths and WH Smith.
And the termites had plenty to chew on. The Archbishop of York told the nation that civilisation was impossible without the authority of a leader. A letter-writer to the Guardian thanked providence for 'the blessing of an intelligent royal family'.
Driving south from Edinburgh, as the jubilee neared its climax, I was impressed by the bunting in the Scottish Border burghs, but realised I had seen nothing as soon as I reached the first English streets at Longtown. The place had vanished under red-white-and-blue billows of flag and ribbon, and every small town southwards was the same. At Ellesmere, in Cheshire, a gigantic crown was floating on the lake (as if a 40ft queen was about to rise dripping from the water) and the little girls wore Union Jack knickers.
Hilltop beacons were lit from one end of the kingdom to the other, in spite of the downpours ('Singing in the Reign' went the headlines). A Welsh butcher set out for London to sell his own jubilee contribution: red-white-and-blue sausages. The Government even claimed that sales of jubilee medals and crown-coins would cover central expenditure on the celebrations.
Travelling around Britain in 2002, it's a very different tale. The national contrasts remain: Winchester had received about 25 applications for street parties by the beginning of last week, while in Glasgow I could hear of only about eight - and most were from Orange lodges, which have their own agenda. In 1977, huge Glasgow crowds had turned out to greet the Queen, with some estimates - certainly exaggerated - putting the numbers at more than 200,000. When the Queen came to Glasgow nine days ago, she had a friendly welcome from a few thousand people in George Square.
But England is quieter, too. As an old Pakistani shopkeeper said to me in Blackburn: 'It's natural enough, mister. She's not as glamorous as she was in 1977, and she's not as old as her mother was when she died. It's like an in-between jubilee. Anyway, everyone has many other things to worry about now'.
And yet the English, unlike the Scots, can still measure history by jubilees. When I asked people in England, north or south, how their nation had changed in the past quarter-century, they seemed to glance up at an invisible icon on the wall. When she was young, we were young. When her children began to grow up and experiment with life, we were worrying about the decay of old rules and values. When her family gave her an 'annus horribilis' and her castle went on fire, we were learning what it meant not to have secure jobs and to live dangerously. When the royals went through that 'bad patch' of unpopularity, especially after Diana died, we were wondering if we liked what we had become, and what it meant to be English. A jubilee can be a measurement of time, and of change.
At the silver jubilee, Britain was felt to be in a rotten way. There was gross decline, relative and absolute; everything seemed dirty and worn out. Inflation had reached more than 30 per cent only two years before; the pound had given way, and the Government was borrowing billions from the International Monetary Fund. Only the new discovery of oil in the North Sea promised relief: somehow, some time.
The golden jubilee feeling is wary but far less fatalistic. In 1977, it was 'change and decay in all around I see'. Today, people perceive change, a lot of it for the worse, but not decay. I went to Southampton, where the spectacular, derelict Art Deco towers of the Cunard era along the waterfront might prompt hopeless nostalgia. But a middle-aged receptionist in a new office block said: 'No, it looks bad, but life is stirring. God knows what will happen to this town, but something will. The big cruise ships call in again now.' She remembered well the despair of the Seventies. 'Back then, it was like being on the Titanic and sinking. Now it's like being on the Titanic zipping along dead blind in the pitch dark. And maybe we hit the iceberg, but then maybe we miss it and have interesting lives.'
Three questions recur when it's a matter of sizing up a quarter-century. They are: what have we lost, what have we gained, and what has stayed much the same? The third is the hardest to weigh up. Habits or institutions that fail to change when everything else has may, of course, be healthily durable. But they may be fossilising. Or they may turn out to be dead behind their painted skin.
'What's got better?' (True to the English distaste for good news, this is always the last question to find an answer). 'Well, we can certainly afford things and go to places now,' said one of the retired Wrens. 'Unemployment has gone, in most places anyway. That Gordon Brown is off-putting, but he does handle the economy well.'
A man who used to work for British Steel in Sheffield said: 'Homes are warmer, there's much more variety in food, and the world is accessible to everyone.' He added: 'If you're 23, and in work, it seems you can afford three holidays a year. Twenty-five years back, I used to see the big charter-flight queues at Manchester Airport in summer, but now it's all year round.'
A retired lawyer in Winchester contradicted the general view that 'nobody joins anything any more'. Busily involved in voluntary work, he had noticed a big change in recent years. 'This has become a commuter town now, with people travelling to London to work. But the new commuter generation wants to get involved locally; they talk about "putting something back into the community". I see it at my church, and in the theatre here. The young are especially keen, but now you also get the retired lot who all want to do Meals on Wheels or drive for the hospitals.'
Why was this?
He thought it was because 'people want to re-find their way back to each other'. And local business and industry were into sponsorship in a big way now - something that scarcely existed in 1977. 'The cathedral, the Winchester Festival, the Theatre Royal, the Children's Hospice: they compete to sponsor these projects now'.
This was a shrewd view, based on experience. But few others seemed to share it. They looked back and felt that Britain had become a much more harried, disintegrated society over the quarter-century. A young woman lawyer in Leeds said: 'People just don't have time - not for each other, and not even for themselves. Everything has to be done now, this minute.'
All their worries seemed to converge on the family. A Somerset woman, travelling towards London, thought that it all started with housing. 'The expense of mortgages now and the lack of council houses: that means it's so difficult to marry and have children. And when they do, they both have to work to pay the mortgage, and then they can't look after the kids properly. So truancy, so crime. Mark my words, we'll see grown-up young people going back to living with their parents again, like in the old days.'
A white obelisk seems to frighten many of those I talked to. It is the kitchen fridge, once a harmless convenience but now becoming a threatening monster which freezes the very warmth of families. A half-French woman with a married daughter explained: 'I sent her on an exchange to Germany back in the Seventies, and she told me about this frightful family where there were no meals, nobody spoke to each other, and they all grabbed stuff from the fridge to eat in their own rooms in front of their own tellies. And now I see this all around me in England.'
Again, almost everyone blamed this failure of family on the new work environment. A teacher near Halifax had watched it infect her own girls' school. 'Pressures from outside, new demands, new jargon and targets, and the result is demoralised staff. Children are over-tested now, and yet they learn and understand less. It's a hyperwork culture. The health of the people I worked with deteriorated. Everyone is chasing their own tail. Women naturally feel they have to use their education, and yet that means they are working longer and longer hours.'
Her husband put in: 'This is supposed to be the American work ethic. But when you actually see the Americans, they work nothing like as hard as we do now. What are we meant to be imitating?'
Somewhere along the line between the jubilees, Britain's institutions lost spontaneity and self-confidence. Was that the result of the breakneck changes of the Eighties, and the sudden destruction of so much traditional industry - of coal, steel, heavy engineering and textiles? Was it a consequence of the surge of working-class unemployment in those years, or of the massacre of middle-class professional jobs and careers ('downsizing', 'de-layering') that soon followed? Nobody had a clear answer. And yet, everywhere I went, people complained of the new nervous rigidity, the terror of responsibility, which they felt was paralysing public life. Some thought it was to do with political correctness. 'You can't say nitty-gritty now, because it's got something to do with slavery, and you can't say Pakistanis are 10-a-penny, and Warwick University won't even fly the English flag in case it upsets somebody,' groused one of the retired Wrens in Queen Eleanor's Garden.
Others saw deeper. 'Look at the consultancy phenomenon,' said the man who used to work in steel. 'Once a firm or a school would deal with a problem internally, with a few guys round a table or a group of teachers, and do it cheaply and fast. Now the same problem has to be put out to a consultancy, wasting tens of thousands of pounds and months of time. Managers are convinced that anything which comes from outside must be correct. Big companies used to have their own lawyers and investigators in-house, but they were all made redundant years ago. Everything gets contracted out, for fear of making a mistake. It's a failure of self-confidence.'
Three generations of a family were sitting in the sun outside the museum at Carlisle, eating salads and ice cream. What had changed for the worse, since the last jubilee? A few years ago, they might have shaken their heads over the future of the monarchy. Now it was the style of government that troubled them, the stiffness and remoteness of authority, the hypocritical language of twenty-first-century power.
'They don't trust us, never mind us not trusting them,' said the grandfather. 'When my daughter here was little, politicians said their stuff and we said our stuff, and they bloody knew we didn't think a lot of them. But now they are really out to con us, day and night. And we aren't allowed to say what we really think back. All spin and correctness. People I know aren't racist, like, but it makes them mad they can't say enough is enough about asylum-seekers and all that. I'd say something, and my grandson might repeat it in school, and they'd send for the social worker and get him suspended. And you can't answer back. You just get "bear with me" and music and "press two if you're a dissatisfied customer".'
His son-in-law looked embarrassed at this. But then, after some throat-clearing, he said: 'I'll tell you what I see has changed. This country is a lot less deferential than it used to be. But it's less free as well. Work that out!'
At Jubilee times, it is people's image of the past that matters, rather than the 'true history'. The social-moral changes of the past 25 years can plausibly be told as the life, works and legacy of Margaret Thatcher. But, to my surprise, nobody I met in England wanted to lay blame on past leaders. They preferred to say: 'We have become ...' and 'We used to be ...' as if Britain were just a difficult family growing up.
None the less, they were resentful. They felt, for instance, that social mobility had slowed or stopped. The social revolution that began in the Sixties, as children from working-class homes surged up through the new universities to become a new technocracy, was history now. Instead, a hopeless 'underclass' (an ugly Americanism which I heard much more often than 'the excluded') was accumulating dangerously.
Everywhere there was a sense that officialdom - government or the private sector - was ossifying, losing nerve and contact, failing to respect the intelligence of a population which claims to feel mature and privately empowered as never before. Everywhere, too, there was sourness and anxiety about immigrants, directed more at government policy ('they lie to us; they won't listen to us') rather than at the incomers themselves.
But nobody moaned about 'national decline'. The euro seemed heartily disliked, but often perceived as a fate no longer avoidable. Under the grumpy surface, this society is confident about itself. 'This awful lack of time for anything', the Halifax teacher said, 'prevents people being as kind as they would like to be.'
And the monarchy, on its golden day? The Scots seem genuinely detached: often affectionate about a Queen, but increasingly sceptical about a Crown. The English are different. 'We'll stick with her' is very English. But it conceals how intimately the monarchy is still part of English self-understanding: the 'enchanted glass' in which a nation sees its reflection.
The glass is fragile now; more shocks could shatter it for ever. But for the moment, the magic holds. I am neither English nor a monarchist. But the night I began this journey, I had a dream. I was escorting the Queen to a tiny, ill-lit old cinema. 'Mind that broken stair, Ma'am,' I said, taking her hand ...
Millions of her subjects, royalists or republicans, have dreams like that. It is no good being ashamed in the morning. In the quiet, darkened bedrooms of the island kingdom, there is a jubilee every night.

Give us a new deal on democracy

Too presidential, too remote. If re-elected, Tony Blair must refute these charges and listen more keenly to the people who put him in power

Observer Election Special

Guardian Unlimited Politics

Will Hutton
Sunday June 3, 2001
The Observer

What is democracy? Lady Thatcher's and William Hague's warnings about the danger of another Labour landslide threatening an elective dictatorship are palpably self-serving, but the charge of a democratic deficit still resonates. And those Tories accomplices, the petrol blockaders, are back, justifying another round of protest because the 'politicians' are not 'listening' to their complaints.
It's a nasty last throw by a desperate Conservative establishment facing its own immolation, but it is not the only complainant. Charter 88 has been mounting meetings all over the country, putting candidates on the spot over how they would improve Britain's democratic workings. Judging by the Charter 88 meeting I chaired in my constituency, the issues cross the party divide.
More than 300 people crowded into our local Baptist church to vent their spleen about Britain's democratic defects. It might be the honours system or the lack of an elected second chamber - the passion of the arguments made it the nearest to an old fashioned political hustings I have attended for years. The issues were disparate, but the same thread connected them. Anything that smacks of top-down, unresponsive government is on the rack.
In a sense, the complaints are unfair. New Labour has launched the biggest set of constitutional reforms since the nineteenth century. The reason why it enjoys the opinion poll lead it does is because it has judged the country's preoccupations better than the Tories. It is hardly dictatorship to do what the people want - and sometimes what the people want, notably over asylum, is not very edifying. Labour is playing the democratic game by British rules, and part of the Right's reaction is that it does not accept the legitimacy of the game now that Labour is winning.
But something more is afoot, and not just in Britain. In France, there is growing concern that direct action is becoming contagious and that fundamental French liberties, notably freedom of movement, are under assault from unions and direct-action groups all too ready to blockade ports, stations and motorways to achieve their ends. The mood is spreading to Britain. Thus the Countryside Alliance and the petrol protesters. Thus the public-sector workers who have drawn a lesson from the effectiveness of direct action; it is no accident that the RMT won its guarantees over pay and job security by threatening a Tube strike in the week of an election.
But what makes governmental response difficult is that the public broadly sympathises with street protest, direct action and blockades. An intriguing poll in the State of the Nation series supported by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust reports that 81 per cent of British people agree that 'if governments don't listen', peaceful protests and blockades are legitimate ways of expressing concerns. Only just over half - some 53 per cent - think that governments should stand by the policies that won them general elections. A growing proportion of Britons think government should be permanently responsive to changing events and opinions.
And that is the way it is developing. The dictatorship charge levelled against a party with a parliamentary majority of more than 150 made more sense 30 years ago than now. It is true that the scope of British executive power remains unequalled by international standards, but that authority confronts a greatly empowered civil society in alliance with greatly strengthened media, not to overlook the influences of international treaties and the EU. The Government may control the House of Commons and the institutions of the state, but that only gets it to first base.
One of the constant criticisms levelled at New Labour in the last parliament was that it was too timid. It has been careful not to oppose a well-organised lobby or interest group; so, for example, because the NFU opposed vaccination rather than culling to create protective 'firewalls' during the foot-and-mouth epidemic, there was no vaccination. The climbdown after pensioners protested over the infamous 75 pence increase in the state pension was also spectacular. New roads and airport extensions are delayed or cancelled for fear of the public reaction. More worryingly, powerful private monopolies and insiders play the same game. It is a matter of indifference to Murdoch, Ecclestone, the CBI or a multinational whether the Government's majority is 20 or 200 - they want concessions and they get them.
This is altogether too tumultuous a process of governing to conform to any idea of an ' elective dictatorship', but it hardly corresponds to a conception of democracy. Those who shout loudest or have more brute economic power win the arguments. The Blairite constitutional reforms were designed to open up British government, but not fundamentally to challenge the core; executive power remains awesome.
The paradox is that this disables more than it helps good government. It certainly allows the Government, say, to appoint its election dissolution peers as it did on Friday as if nothing had happened, or to run Britain through myriad PPPs and quangos. But it doesn't solve the larger problem of how to govern legitimately and with the consent of those who are governed
The Government needs to be more sensitive more quickly to genuine and well-argued grievances. And it needs to be seen to be legitimate in the way it governs, makes choices and wins arguments. Here Mr Blair needs the courage of his earlier convictions about the case for constitutional reform, and which the current Labour manifesto still reflects.
New Labour will launch English regional assemblies and it could still go for a House of Lords with more elected 'lords'. Most important of all, if Mr Blair wills it, there could be a referendum on proportional representation. In 1997, our electoral system produced the least fair distribution of seats in relation to votes of any leading democracy; it will do worse on Thursday.
More proportionality won't alone solve our democratic defects, but it will ensure that national opinion is more fairly reflected in Parliament. It will also legitimise the actions of government. These are great prizes and, as it starts a second term determined to deliver, New Labour will want them more than ever. Need and conviction may yet per suade it to finish the reforms it started

An Upper House of Place-persons will be the ultimate betrayal of the hopes invested in this Government by reformers

Andrew Rawnsley
Sunday February 2, 2003
The Observer

Robin Cook may have an uncertain future, but the man sure does know his history. 'The saga of Lords Reform has been with us for a century,' Mr Cook told a Fabian Society conference yesterday. Only a century? I suppose it just feels a lot longer. He reminded his audience that Asquith's Parliament Act promised that the House of Lords would be replaced shortly by a second Chamber Can MPs save democracy from Blair? founded on a 'popular basis'. That was in 1911. Nearly 100 years later, one half of our parliament is still undemocratic. And if Tony Blair prevails, we will carry on waiting for a popular legislature.
Those who want to unpickle Britain's antiquated version of democracy have become accustomed to being disappointed by Mr Blair. When he declared himself for an all-appointed House of Lords last week, the trajectory from democratic reformer to reactionary became complete. Yes, his Government has established a Scottish Parliament and a feebler Assembly of Wales, but it took a long while for the Prime Minister to get his head around the concept that this meant trusting the people to choose their local leaders. When the people proved themselves so unreliable that they gave the Mayoralty of London to Ken Livingstone, his bête rouge, the Prime Minister's appetite for any further meaningful constitutional change evaporated.
He will not hear of any suggestion, however modest, which might impinge upon the absurdities of a hereditary monarchy. His republican wife's knees lock when she is invited to curtsey to the Queen, but Mr Blair instinctively genuflects before the throne. He does not trust the people to choose their head of state. He legislated for freedom of information in the most eviscerated fashion he could get away with. He does not trust the people to know and understand how they are governed. He broke and then ditched the promise to hold a referendum on electoral reform for Westminster. He does not trust the people to cope with any voting system which is more sophisticated than first-past-the-post.
Now beckons the ultimate betrayal of the great hopes which constitutional reformers once invested in this government. It is a dismal story, summed up by the very fact that one half of the legislature is still even called the House of Lords after more than half a decade of Labour Government. After months - no, years - in which commission and committee have wrangled about what proportion of the Upper House the people might be allowed to elect, Mr Blair has plumped for the least progressive option of all. He does not trust the people to elect a single one of them. In advance of this week's parliamentary votes on the future of the Upper House, the Prime Minister has finally come out of the anti-democratic closet by revealing himself to be opposed to granting the people any say in the composition of one half of the parliament which makes law in their name.
He is for a second chamber by appointment, a House of the Hand-picked, a Palace of Placepersons, the quangissimo of quangos. The Prime Minister must feel very strongly about this to have nailed his trousers to such an unpopular position. This is - to coin a vogue phrase - a material breach of his manifesto promise to make the Upper House 'more representative and democratic'. He has allowed the Conservatives to advertise themselves as better friends of democracy than his Government. His position is not popular with the voters. Poll after poll suggests that an overwhelming majority of people want the right to elect all of their parliament. The Prime Minister has dismayed many Labour MPs who can normally be counted as broadly Blairite. There is a very high prospect that, when MPs vote this week, they will defeat the Prime Minister, the first time that he will have been opposed by a majority in the Commons since 1997. Mr Blair has angered a large swath of his parliamentary party whose support he will need to lean on in the difficult weeks that lie ahead of him. In politics, everything tends to connect. The Prime Minister has alienated MPs whose succour he will want to see him through other turbulent waters, not least Iraq.
Has Mr Blair discovered some compelling new argument against democracy? No, his case is the familiar, tired, old one. An elected Upper House would become a 'rival' to the Commons with the result of legislative 'gridlock'. This is an argument designed to seduce those MPs who cannot believe, whatever the accumulation of evidence to the contrary, that anyone could possibly be more accomplished at law-making than themselves. There is actually no good reason to suppose that an elected second chamber would threaten the supremacy of MPs. The Commons would still provide and sustain the Government as it would remain the main initiator of legislation. An Upper House with similar powers as today to delay, but not indefinitely block, legislation leaves the Commons dominant.
There is not much purpose to a second parliamentary house which does not occasionally oblige the executive to think again. A properly reformed Upper House might one day save this Government from itself by preventing it from doing something utterly mad or bad. The trouble with Mr Blair is that he cannot, of course, conceive that he might ever need saving from himself, just as Margaret Thatcher could not perceive that the poll tax was a catastrophe until it undid her.
When Ministers shudder about 'gridlock' what they mean is that they are scared stiff that they will not always find it easy to have their own untrammelled way. In opposing an elected Upper House, Mr Blair may not speak for the majority, but he probably does reflect the reflexes of most of his Cabinet. A democratic spirit still flickers among some, flaming most brightly in Mr Cook and Gareth Williams, the Labour leader in the Upper House. The latter has enjoyed - or should I say endured? - prolonged and intimate exposure to the eccentricities of an appointed chamber. It has not convinced him that selection is superior to election.
The two of them have fought a lonely battle within Cabinet. Progressives always identify the villain of the piece as Derry Irvine. The unelected Lord Chancellor has been a loud voice for an unelected Upper House, but far from the only one. He has found strong allies among the likes of Jack Straw and David Blunkett. It is no coincidence that Mr Blunkett is the Home Secretary and Mr Straw used to be. The Home Office has been regularly constrained by the Upper House. You or I might say that was the second chamber doing its job of forcing reflection upon over-hasty Ministers. So might Messrs Blunkett and Straw, intelligent men both, in their more considered moments. But what goes deepest with them is something more emotional than it is rational. They just can't stand being thwarted. And they fear that an Upper House legitimised by the ballot box would do it to them more often.
I might regale you with the many creative and logical reforms which would establish a democratic Upper House which does not replicate or rival the Commons, but does scrutinise the executive and act as a check on its excesses. But however persuasive those arguments for reform, they would be wasted on Mr Blair. Being the man of power that he is, he chooses to interpret democracy in the most narrow way. The role of the people is to place him in office once every four years and leave him to govern as he will in between times.
This week, Labour MPs have the opportunity to take a broader, deeper and richer view of what democracy is about than the Prime Minister. They can vote to keep his promises to Britain. They can vote to trust the people to elect their law-makers. For if they don't, why should the people trust them?
Question
What are the major points commentators make in criticism of Labour’s record on reform?