21 July 2016
Gone For A Constitutional
by J.R.Thomas
The Shaw Sheet would never wish to rain on Mr Cameron’s parade. On the other hand, it has been an exceptionally wet summer, so a little splashing in the direction of Witney may be excusable. But we splash Mr Cameron with restraint, as there is little doubt that Dave did a reasonable job in a time of very considerable difficulties, and did it with good humour, displaying a calmness under fire which was at times remarkable.
He will probably not be remembered as one of the UK’s great Prime Ministers, more perhaps for a Harold Macmillan-like ability to elegantly move the Conservative Party through shoals of social change to a (somewhat grudging) acceptance of a new world. It is ironic that his bravest attempt, his attempt to bridge the party’s greatest chasm, the European one, ended with him falling off the bridge into the chasm, followed down into the unknown depths by the bridge itself. The great irony is (ask again in twenty years) that he may indeed have enabled the party to solve that difficulty, and that it will finally be able to put aside a cause of internal dispute that has bedevilled it since the 1960’s.
But, here comes the rain. Mr Cameron has followed Mr Blair in playing fast and loose with the constitution, and the consequences of that may yet become a problem to those who lead our country. Mr Blair was a man with a mission; and a mission driven by that most dangerous of drivers, one with an extraordinary confidence that he was right. Most of us suffer from doubt; we ponder and consider and analyse what we believe and what we should do. Some of us do not believe anything political or social too strongly; what matters to most of us are family and friends, goodwill and happiness. Into this category we suspect Mr Cameron fits comfortably; he is basically a nice man who has no great urge to change the world, but would like to make it a nicer place. This extends even unto the European Project; indeed all the evidence is that he did not have particular affection for it and under not very different circumstances would have campaigned for Britain to leave.
What is surprising is that he fought to stay in Europe with such determination; mostly perhaps because on his side of the room he found himself among friends and in the company of those he found agreeable, whilst he had less natural sympathy with the coalition on the Leave side. But also, his position was very Cameronite; don’t make waves, not big ones anyway, and negotiate rather than fight. But alas that attitude may yet cause trouble in his attitude to matters constitutional.
His messianic predecessor-but-one had an overwhelming urge to modernise, change, bring ancient (and not so ancient) practices into the twenty first century and apply modern management to them. That included the British constitution. As every schoolchild knows, Britain does not have a constitution, at least in a written form. It has a series of conventions and practises which, in places, are cemented together by legislation – such as those related to voting practice which run from the 1932 Great Reform Act onwards. Mr Blair wanted something more formal, something which would become a written constitution and a Bill of Rights. Tony is a lawyer with strong links across the Atlantic (even before he became the standby man for a certain Texan) and would no doubt have liked a constitution that looked something like the American one. He did not get there but he got some of the way, helped by the new supremacy of the European Court which likes its law codified and not decided by ancient practice.
Mr Cameron moved things on a further step in 2010, all in the interests of making his coalition work. With hardly a thought, seemingly either by him or by the Commons, legislation was passed to remove the monarch’s prerogative to dissolve Parliament and call a new government into being. It was not put quite like that of course; what was done was to create five-year fixed-term parliaments, at least in so far as the Commons is concerned – the Lords just go on, subject to the creation of new peers and the slowly evolving make-up of the small (but surprisingly active) group of elected hereditaries.
This change to fixed length Commons sittings was passed in a great hurry to make the coalition with the Liberal Democrats work. Nick Clegg and Dave may have been best mates within days of their first discussions, but Clegg was wise enough to know that the friendship might evaporate suddenly if Dave felt he could call a snap election and win without his new partners. So the fixed term Parliament was non-negotiable, and sprang into instant being, a weight on the coat tails of the winning party whosoever they might be, for ever. On the party that is. It is of course a useful defence for Prime Ministers faced with rebellion from the backbenches, who can now say, effectively, “Do as you like, I’m carrying on”.
But consider the case of a Prime Minister in the very position that Nick Clegg feared so much. Imagine the following, however unlikely. The Lib-Dems have gone on holiday, leaving no forwarding address; the Labour Party is engaged in civil war over internal points so abstruse that nobody can understand what any of them are about. A new Conservative Prime Minister finds herself (it could be herself, just saying, bear with me) in a honeymoon of love and adoration with the British (or at least, non-Scottish) public. She wants to go to the country to improve her slender majority to a nice big cosy one. Now, in the old days she would have gone round to see Her Majesty who would, having ascertained that the PM had a theoretical majority in the Commons to support this urge, have granted a dissolution. But now HM can’t; the Fixed Parliament Act won’t permit it.
So what to do? There are only two possibilities. The first is to repeal the Act – tricky with a small majority, with a few difficult Tory backbenchers strongly conscious of the power which their position gives them. The other route permitted under the Act is for the House of Commons to pass a vote of no confidence in her Majesty’s Government. The divided minority opposition cannot achieve this, but our hypothetical Tory Prime Minister can. So she calls for a vote of confidence in her own government, instructing her parliamentary party to vote against themselves. At that point the Tory backbench awkward brigade joins forces with the Lib-Dems (passing swiftly through the House on their way somewhere or other), and finally the Labour Party can unite on something. Together, they oppose the Conservative government proposing a motion of no-confidence in itself – which it loses. But that leaves things just as they were before, other than gales of laughter from across the world. Then what?
Lots of democracies have fixed terms for their legislatures and ministers; the Presidents of France, Russia, and the USA do, and the whole governmental system of the United States is run on fixed terms for everything. And you might argue that it works, though the French and Russian oppositions might have interesting contributions to make to such a debate. But, of course, their systems were designed that way, and have checks and balances to ensure that they serve the democratic interest. Lucky Mr Cameron; he can watch sit in the dry and watch his successors grapple with the little-considered consequences of uninformed tinkering with complex machinery.
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