LORD NORTON OF LOUTH “I spend half of each week in Hull teaching about the British constitution and the other half in Westminster trying to save it.”
The Conservative Party, despite myths to the contrary, has always been a driver of constitutional reform. In 1979, the departmental select committee system was one of the measures that we introduced to hold our ministers to their decisions. An executive with uncurbed power makes people feel powerless, and this Labour government has always attempted to centralise even further, and if re-elected will drive it into the ground. Labour has been crushed by the overwhelming dominance of political authoritarians – the state is the answer to all our society’s woes, and nothing will stand in their way. Labour’s constitutional vandalism has crippled parliament, and now it’s up to us to save it.
A Conservative government constantly asks two essential questions: Does this action enhance personal freedom? And does it advance political accountability? Alienation from our political institutions has led to the rise of the fringe extreme which have infiltrated our communities, and spread false ideas, despite evidence proving the opposite. So this is hopefully (if I can find the time between my upcoming exams!) the first in the series of articles examining how our radical reform agenda can save our political institutions.
Firstly : A British Bill of Rights.
The Joint Committee on Human Rights has strongly recommended the adoption of a British Bill of Rights. Gordon Brown said he supported one in the past, but has now fallen back onto spinning a line that the Conservatives want to take away the rights of our citizens which is nonsense. That he can backtrack on such serious reform in order to play party politics shows how shallow his commitment is.
The main Conservative suggestions for additional rights in a BBOR are the right to trial by jury, and the placing of strict limits on administrative penalties without due process of law. Other possibilities are rights for victims, habeas corpus, equality before the law, and good administration, all of which have been eroded.
The HRA is not entrenched, save for the obligation to interpret all legislation, including future legislation, compatibly with Convention rights. It thus entrenches the ECHR rights against implied repeal, but leaves Parliament free to pass incompatible legislation if it makes clear that is its intention – all of which Labour have done mercilessly.
Dominic Grieve has stressed the importance of creating a document with greater public resonance than the Human Rights Act one which can be owned by the British people. We must seize that chance.
Related posts:
The title of this essay contains an interesting assertion, which I don’t necessarily discount out of hand, but nor do I fully share the author’s faith across the board. While the anxious traditionalist may need to ‘vote Conservative to save our constitution’, how much of said constitution is he in fact securing for the future?
Lord Norton, for instance, is one of the principal forces behind the Parliamentary Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber, an advocacy group that emphasises the strengths of the appointed House of Lords and the weaknesses and implied contradictions involved in an elected model (including suggestions for a hybrid body of the two forms).
Yet it is the Conservative Manifesto which states that ‘We will work to build a consensus for a mainly-elected second chamber to replace the current House of Lords’.
And so, while I agree with Disraeli’s dicta that ‘the programme of the Conservative party is to maintain the Constitution of the country‘ and that ‘a real Constitution is the creation of ages, not of a day, and that when we destroy such a Constitution we in fact destroy a nation‘–and also fear that the programmes of the alternative parties may be far worse–I only wish his party eschewed ephemeral constitutional populism for the proven worth of conservative parliamentary principles.