CONSTITUTIONAL RETREAT
The Government’s flight from reform

Senior parliamentarians from both Houses and all three main parties have highlighted the Gordon Brown’s retreat from his constitutional reform agenda in a major new publication, Beating the Retreat. 

Liberal Democrat Peer, Lord Tyler convened Conservative MPs, Andrew Tyrie and Sir George Young, and Labour Peer, Lord Morgan to make contributions to the booklet, published by the University of Essex’s Democratic Audit. 

In an overall commentary on the reform agenda, Lord Tyler concludes the document by criticising both the Government and the ‘cautious’ parliamentarians who scrutinised the draft Constitutional Renewal Bill, published earlier this year. 

He says, “At times exchanges between Committee members and witnesses seemed so incestuous as to be constitutionally unhealthy – a dialogue between colleagues in the same Establishment.  The mechanism by which participants are chosen for such committees – and evidence is invited – seems to give disproportionate emphasis to the status quo, and those who have a vested interest in it.” 

“It is essential to re-emphasise that the government owes its legitimacy to the support of a majority in the House of Commons.  It is surely time, too, that the machinery of government itself ceased to be a press officers’ plaything.  Ever since Tony Blair’s now infamous attempt to abolish the role of Lord Chancellor by telling the wires it had been consigned to the dustbin of history, we know the folly of an approach that says new departments can be created, and old ones abolished, all at the personal whim of an individual Prime Minister.

“If this Draft Bill was meant to drag the Royal Prerogative into the 21st century, by making it subject to proper democratic accountability, it has certainly failed to do so.”

The full report is available from Democratic Audit – www.democraticaudit.eu