Our unwritten constitution leaves us vulnerable to a future authoritarian government
5 min read
The greatest chronicler of the British state, Lord Hennessy, warns of the need to bolster constitutional defences against a future authoritarian government
It is early 2011, a few months after I had joined the crossbenches in the House of Lords. The place? The grand staircase linking the cloakroom with the Principal Floor. The company? A pair of young naval officers who had come in for a cup of coffee and a chat.
The conversation ran like this.
Naval officer: “What makes the House of Lords run?”
PH: “I’m too new to answer that?”
At that moment Maurice Peston (old friend, Labour peer, distinguished economist, Robert’s dad) passes us in the opposite direction.
PH: “Ask Maurice. He’s been here for years.”
Maurice obliges without hesitation.
MP: “The House of Lords runs on gossip and the exchange of symptoms.”
Perfect. To the point, accurate, very Maurice.
I shall miss all that this autumn. I retired at the end of June. The Parkinson’s sapping and mining the old cognitive powers means I can no longer manage the reading and thinking required to do the job properly. The ‘symptoms’ have put paid to the ‘gossip’ – though I live in hope of the occasional weapons-grade morsel coming over the phone.
The job? Lawmaking plus scrutiny, plus running commentary on the government of the day.
Room for improvement? Certainly – one activity in particular. The Lords’ use of their select committees. The red benches are brimming with men and women who have been around the block a bit. It is vital for the country – never more so than in these anxious times – that the accumulated wisdom of the past is applied to the needs of the present and placed at the disposal of the future.
There are at least five previous political generations stockpiled in the Lords. That is a great deal of experience on which to draw. For a political historian of modern Britain, it was pretty close to heaven. You could even have lunch with your exhibits. On these fronts, not least as a provider of continuity and context, the Lords provides in some abundance, but rarely is there a flicker of it reflected in the media coverage of Westminster. The output brims with insight and utility, but what use is that if it is also shrouded in invisibility?
An institution that could be a very fine rolling think-tank for the nation, especially on the many knotty intractable problems and on scientific and technological matters in particular (we have many more experts here than in the House of Commons), the output is not, I fear, reaching those parts of policy, analysis and remedy that it could do. It’s as if the institution has become a slightly embarrassing relic of a past age. Alf Dubs warned me about this in, I think, my first week as a crossbencher. “Remember,” he said, “we’re all on a farewell tour in here.”
We have lived all our lives so far inside a comforting cocoon
There is nothing more irritating than hearing a retiree preaching to those he has just left behind. But I went one step further in my valedictory speech when I asked the members of the Constitution Committee on which I once sat to undertake a special inquiry into the vulnerable points of our unwritten constitution to a future authoritarian government uncaring of – or hostile to – the conventions that enable our constitution to work, day in day out.
Especially pertinent are those human ones that are not written down but together comprise a ‘good chaps theory of government’ (to quote the phrase minted by an old Cabinet Office friend, the late Clive Priestley). To my great relief and intense appreciation, the Constitution Committee is already at work on this under the leadership of Lord Strathclyde.
In my farewell speech, and in a BBC Radio 4 programme I subsequently made with Giles Edwards, I linked the work of the Constitution Committee with a ‘politics of decency’ which we need to succour as our great protection against any future creeping authoritarianism in our politics should, heaven forbid, a politics of pessimism deteriorate still further into a politics of despair.
I think such a descent into darkness is highly unlikely as the future course of our politics and our conduct of public life. But it could happen here. We have lived all our lives so far inside a comforting cocoon – a conviction that our host of often informal, usually unwritten conventions, took care of all this as it if were a state of nature that would see off any such threats that, for the first time in my life, I am not so sure.
We owe it to our children – and to that now gone early postwar British generation that gave my age group (born in 1947) such a splendid start in life – not to let it happen here through insouciance or indifference.
And that is why, in the end, I am optimistic. Most of the time, constitutional questions languish in a deep torpor in terms of public attention. Now is the moment for them to move into the front line of our concerns with the House of Lords and its Constitution Committee in the vanguard.
Lord Hennessy is a former Crossbench peer
Peter Hennessy, with Giles Edwards and Andrew Blick, The Politics Of Decency, Haus publishing (forthcoming)
