My Lords, I have no doubt that this noble House knows right from wrong, believes in decency, wisdom, truth and honesty, and values our freedoms and way of life and the vital part that parliamentary democracy and standards in public life play. Inevitably, much criticism in this debate will be levelled at the current Government, but this is about principles that are for all time and all Governments and opposition parties—all of us in politics. We all need to do better.
In recent years, there has been an erosion of many of the cornerstones of British political life. Recent Prime Ministers and Cabinets have shown a disregard towards parliamentary process; a preference for journalists and broadcasters who support the Government’s position; an apathy for the rule of law; an overwhelming transfer of law from primary to secondary legislation; a disdain for domestic and international courts; a reduction within freedom of protest; and an undue influence on the operational independence of the police services, and indeed the electoral process itself. At the same time, we have witnessed a deterioration in standards of public life, particularly highlighted in the Covid inquiry, where we are seeing how poor standards at the heart of Government led to unnecessary amounts of human suffering at a time when the public needed those standards more than ever. Instead, the Government created a shoddy PPE procurement process, which allowed profiteers to benefit at a time of crisis.
I raised the issue of political preference in media coverage in my response to the gracious Speech. The guidelines for government communication services say that dealing with journalists
“should be objective and explanatory, not biased or polemical”,
and
“should not be—and not liable to being misrepresented as—party political”.
In 2019, a Freedom House report entitled Media Freedom: A Downward Spiralstated:
“The fundamental right to seek and disseminate information through an independent press is under attack, and part of the assault has come from an unexpected source. Elected leaders in many democracies, who should be press freedom’s staunchest defenders, have made explicit attempts to silence critical media voices and strengthen outlets that serve up favorable coverage”.
This is sadly now true of us.
When the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman flew to Rwanda, the Guardian,theMirror, the i and the Independent were all excluded, and initially also the BBC. That happened less than a year after journalists from the Guardian, the Financial Times and the Mirror were blocked from joining the then Home Secretary Priti Patel’s trip to Rwanda to sign the original asylum deal. In 2020, political journalists, including the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and ITV’s Robert Peston, staged a walkout after Downing Street communication staff attempted to brief some journalists but not others. Those excluded by former Mirror and Sunjournalist Lee Cain—and that revolving door itself is incestuous—included journalists from PA, the Mirror, the i, HuffPost UK, Politicshome and the Independent.
My Lords, I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, told the Liberal Democrat conference in 2011 that men made bad decisions, but I have to say that even by that standard, that speech was a dreadful calumny of the performance of Parliament as a whole. I am sorry that she chose to make a highly tendentious and political attack in what should be a serious debate. She complains she has only 15 minutes; I have only three minutes. That says everything about the accountability which Parliament has been able to bring to the Executive. For all her talk of parliamentary sovereignty, this is the party which actually wants to set up bodies which will hold Parliament to account and create a situation where folk in public life are accountable to unelected regulators for compliance with detailed rules—which would be utterly disastrous.
We need to restore the sovereignty and reputation of Parliament, but we certainly will not do it with this kind of speech coming from the noble Baroness. I give her a piece of advice. She talks about how people ought to be able to make protests, but let us look at the conduct of her leader on the Post Office matter. He would not even see the postmasters and, when he had finished being in charge of that, went off to work at a considerable salary for the lawyers responsible for advising the Post Office. If she wants to have a debate where she throws mud, she should start with her own backyard.
The noble Baroness is of course right that Parliament’s ability to hold the Executive to account has declined, and she is right that we need to look at that. Looking at the recent dreadful news we have had on the Post Office, what lessons are to be learned? The lesson to be learned—no doubt, as I said the other day, in defence of her leader—is that we have created a whole load of quangos and agencies or nationalised organisations which are not directly accountable to Ministers and run on an arm’s-length basis. That is the point about the Post Office: it is a nationalised body. We have the situation where Ministers have to answer for bodies over which they have no executive control. That is one of the lessons that needs to come out of this.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, for prompting this debate.
In October it will be 30 years since the Committee on Standards in Public Life was established. I sat on the original committee in 1994—I think I was its youngest member—and our first report in May 1995 set out the seven Nolan principles of public life, which were enumerated by the noble Baroness. Their purpose was to ensure the highest standards of propriety in public life. As a code of conduct, they are still a lodestar for all those who serve the public in any way.
Yet, 30 years on, the need for scrutiny seems ever greater. I want to believe that having the Nolan principles has made people more aware and thus more likely to call out poor standards. I am reluctant to accept that malpractice, chancing your arm or even headline-hitting scandals, which we have unfortunately had close to home in this House, are inevitable. However, while it would be naive not to acknowledge the tensions that exist between power and doing the right thing, the last few years have exposed too many instances where those in political life have fallen short of the Nolan principles. The litany includes lying, bullying, poor leadership, the breaching of lockdown rules, dubious lobbying practices, the Owen Paterson issue, public procurement scandals and partygate. While these fall foul of just about every one of the seven principles, what links them all is a lack of integrity in recent leadership.
Frankly, I am not surprised by the current dismal standing of our parliamentary democracy. A recent World Values Survey from the Policy Institute at King’s College London shows that the percentage of the British public who had confidence in Parliament has halved since 1990, from 46% that year to 23% in 2022. Among young people—millennials and Generation X—the percentages are even lower.
My Lords, my noble friend made a superb speech, which was not partisan and covered ground that is common to all parties.
I will pick up first on her point about law-making by statutory instrument—by powers given to Ministers—with only very limited parliamentary scrutiny. On the only occasion during my time here when this House used that power effectively, the Government went ballistic and wheeled in the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, to tell us that we should all be abolished or in some way have our powers reduced. A power which is never used is not a power. In this case, whenever these powers are introduced in Bills, they come with explanations that the matter has to be considered by, and requires a resolution of, both Houses of Parliament. If we never deny that resolution, we do not exercise the power. It is a great weakness in our system, which is more important now that the Commons devotes so little time to the proper study of legislation and sits for fewer hours than we do.
My other point is the system of appointment to this House. We have had 17 new Conservative Peers—the Liz Truss list, the Boris Johnson list and then all those who were brought into this House to serve as Ministers, perhaps for less than a year, and are Peers for life as a result. It is a completely distorted system and we need to change it to an orderly one. The Burns committee produced a system which could be used, in the absence of any more fundamental reform of the House of Lords, to give some coherence and fairness to that system of appointment. It was widely accepted right across the House, but the Government have not acted on it. Theresa May did when she was in office but subsequent Prime Ministers have not done so, and they ought to. The continuing absurdity of the nomination system brings the House into disrepute.
Across the free world of parliamentary democracies there is a very real threat. We are seeing it in France, Germany and the United States, where ex-President Trump says he wants to be a dictator for one day so that he can entirely reverse US policy on climate change. This is dangerous territory. We have got to make the parliamentary democracy system deliver and get it to the point where people find that it properly deals with their concerns. We should not treat attempts to achieve that as partisan; they are very necessary to our democracy.
My Lords, the democratic system is pretty robust and parliamentary democracy has survived, albeit in a less authoritative form. Democracy, however, being a process rather than a state, is fragile and needs constant vigilance. The media is awash with reports on the demise of democracy the world over, but especially parliamentary democracy in the UK. Lord Sumption has referred to “a developing totalitarian tendency”. That there are too many unfortunate examples of these tendencies has allowed an attitude of regretful acceptance of the increasing power of the Executive.
Recent legislation has included clauses that either unduly restrict current individual freedoms, infringe obligations set under international treaties or increase the power of the Government to alter clauses at will without proper parliamentary scrutiny. These actions add up to a public perception of a lack of transparency and good faith on the part of the Government and a consequent fall in public confidence in, and respect for, the integrity and credibility of the UK’s political institutions.
Parliament is one of the key institutions of democracy in the UK, along with regular elections, the independent law courts and a free press. The Westminster model is renowned throughout the world; it is one of our most potent symbols of fairness and a key instrument of soft power. It allows the UK to punch well above its weight. It is worth preserving. As the historian David Runciman has said, the end of democracy will not be signalled by tanks on the lawn but by the slow, almost imperceptible erosion of our democratic institutions. No matter how much these values are reiterated, recent history has shown that in each House profoundly undemocratic legislative clauses have been passed.
There may be those in this House today who disagree that there is any real threat to our ancient institutions. However, are these institutions in fact able to do the job for which they exist? They may well continue to function, but are they delivering? Are we noticing that institutional arrangements may be breaking down?
My Lords, I too think the Post Office scandal is instructive and I will use it to make my point, which is different to my noble friend’s.
The excellent ITV drama illustrates powerfully what many voters already think about those of us in positions of authority—that too often we do not listen to or take seriously what voters are telling us if what they say or want does not correspond with what we have decided is right and want to do. The travesty was sub-postmasters, the kind of people who represent the epitome of good character in communities, having their concerns dismissed time and again in favour of sophisticated arguments from Fujitsu, Post Office executives, civil servants and lawyers.
What this saga shows is how we—the powerful decision-making class—lose sight of what matters when dealing with complex challenges. While the individuals responsible for the Post Office scandal must be held to account and face the consequences of their failure, we must all understand that this event goes wider than an example of injustice—even though it is the worst of its kind. What it represents is the division between insiders and outsiders that led to Brexit and other democratic shocks that followed in 2017 and 2019.
Too often, we complain that people call for simple solutions to complex problems because “they don’t understand”. People do not expect simple solutions to complex problems, but they do expect people such as us to be motivated by the kinds of simple values that any decent, upstanding citizen instinctively shares. We evidence that by how we do our job, which must include listening and understanding their experience of the problem that only we have the power to fix.
In short, if we want to change the standing of parliamentary democracy and our politics, we must take far more seriously the views and demands of the people we rely on for support and are here to serve. They want us to uphold and share their standards in how we go about our work. If we do not learn the lessons of our collective failure, we would be unwise to believe it will be business as usual at the ballot box when the current Parliament ends.
12:20 pm
Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]
My Lords, in 2019, when Parliament was certainly not at its best, the think tank Onward found that two-thirds of younger voters were in favour of a strong man leader prepared to defy Parliament. We had a leader, Boris Johnson, who flagrantly broke the rules and lied. The Hallett inquiry has exposed habitual use of foul-mouthed language in No. 10. Civil servants in No. 10 colluded with the rule-breaking by the Prime Minister. A senior Minister unblushingly told the House of Commons that the Government intended to break international law. Two independent advisers on ministerial interests have resigned. There has been the affair of PPE procurement, the VIP channel and the bounce-back loans—an issue that the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, referred to in her admirable speech.
In 2021, a Savanta ComRes poll showed that 76% of voters were concerned about corruption in government. A series of parliamentary by-elections has been precipitated by episodes of sexual abuse and other bullying, and by improper lobbying. There are institutional reforms that a new Prime Minister intent on restoring the integrity of public life, as Keir Starmer is, could implement. The so-called Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests should be given power to initiate inquiries and his recommendations should be enforceable other than at the caprice of the Prime Minister. The admirable but airy Nolan principles should be given teeth through new powers for the Committee on Standards in Public Life to investigate and regulate; the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, ditto. The revolving door of lucrative opportunities for both Ministers and officials scandalises the public. The existing feeble legislation on lobbying should be toughened up.
A new Prime Minister could refrain from constantly playing musical chairs with ministerial appointments. If Ministers stay in office for only five minutes, they cannot do the job properly and the public feel let down. Similarly, for confidence in the competence of government to be restored, civil servants should stay longer in the same post. There should be a new dispensation for local government, with radical decentralisation of power to revitalise democracy at the grass roots. Supercilious attitudes at the centre to the mayoralties and devolved Administrations should end.
A new Government must grasp the nettle of the funding of political parties. Consensus seems unobtainable. Such is the urgency of dispelling the public’s perception that political donations buy power, policy and honours that a new Government should legislate with no further ado for public funding of political parties.
If we want politics and government to be respected, Ministers must tell people the realities and not run scared of focus groups. Leaders should lead. Whatever institutional changes are made, there is no substitute for good government.
My Lords, like others, I contribute to this discussion with a great amount of feeling, because the debate goes right to the heart of the integrity of public institutions, including both Chambers of our Parliament. After Sue Gray’s report on parties in Downing Street during lockdown, my most reverend friend the Archbishop of Canterbury described standards in public life as
“the glue that holds us together”
and called for a “rediscovery” of these standards. That was in May 2022, but since then, it can feel like little has changed.
There are now 18 MPs sitting as independents in the other place, outnumbering the number of Liberal Democrat MPs. All 18 have been suspended from their party. Whatever the reason—lobbying, leaking, sexual misconduct or bullying—it is clear that standards are not being observed in every case. While it is impossible to create a world where no individual breaches will ever occur, we can and absolutely should create a robust system which minimises the risk of slipping standards and deals quickly and efficiently with situations where this does occur.
Standards in public life matter. This is not just a topic for the so-called Westminster bubble. When standards are not observed by those with the privilege of sitting in this House or the other place, trust in our whole democratic institution begins to crumble. Whether we like it or not, Parliament and parliamentarians act as role models, including for children and young people. People especially notice how we behave. What we say and how we say it, as well as how we behave more widely and how we ensure that standards of behaviour are maintained, have an effect far beyond the immediate and can over time erode society. Clearly, it is a small minority who do not live up to the standards that we expect of those in public life, but the effect remains. The British public’s trust in the political system has fallen significantly. A poll earlier this year for the Institute for Public Policy Research showed that only 6% of the public have full trust in the current political system. This is not just down to standards in public life, but it is certainly not unrelated.
20 of 73 shown
That got me thinking about the state of us, and not in a good way. It is clearly not just me. This debate is not the first on the subject, both here and in the other place. Many voices are now speaking out about the need for change, and many of us who went into politics are sad at what has happened to it. This is a cri de coeur from me and my colleagues, and, I would hope and expect, from many across this Chamber.
On the rule of law and independence of the judiciary, the extraordinarily wise and now sadly late Lord Judge believed that we were ceding too much power to the Executive, power that should and must be retained by Parliament. In a lecture he gave, he said that
“what Parliamentary sovereignty never has been is executive sovereignty, or ministerial or government sovereignty. Indeed Parliamentary sovereignty is the antithesis of executive sovereignty. The two concepts are mutually contradictory. The democratic process is not meant to give, and our constitutional arrangements were not intended to provide us with executive sovereignty. No Prime Minister is a monarch, or president, not even the head of state … At the heart of the development of our constitutional arrangements, Parliament is there to protect us from authoritarianism, from despotism, from an over mighty monarch, but also from an over mighty executive … in the last session of Parliament just over one hundred Henry VIII clauses had been enacted … proliferation of clauses like these will have the inevitable consequence of yet further damaging the sovereignty of Parliament, and increasing yet further the authority of the executive over the legislature … Henry VIII clauses should be confined to the dustbin of history”.
I could not agree more.
Only recently we have seen machinations to subvert the Supreme Court holding unanimously that the Government’s Rwanda scheme was unlawful, by bringing forward legislation declaring Rwanda a safe country. This move is scarily reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, when party member O’Brien tests Winston Smith’s allegiance to party truth, insisting that Winston sees five fingers when he holds up only four—that is, the truth is what I say it is. We have seen contempt for international courts, such as the ECHR, which is the embodiment of high ideals of internationalist values and constants that remain today hugely important in guaranteeing peoples’ fundamental human rights in law. It came as a surprise to some in government that it was nothing to do with the European Union.
The Government have acted to strengthen their power over the judiciary in the Judicial Review and Courts Act by reducing the scope of judicial review. The Government have severely restricted legal aid, making access to justice uneven and unfair. Members of the legal profession are exhausted and court backlogs deny justice. The breaking of treaties such as the Northern Ireland protocol was once unthinkable. Mrs May spoke for many when she asked
“how can the Government reassure future international partners that the UK can be trusted to abide by the legal obligations in the agreements it signs?”—[Official Report, Commons, 8/9/20; col. 499.]
This is not to mention the illegal proroguing of Parliament.
The phrase “free and fair election” is dashed off so easily, but it is the heart and soul of our democracy. The Government compromised that in the Elections Act 2022, by giving themselves the right to intervene and to direct or guide the Electoral Commission’s strategy and priorities. Those changes went through—of course—via a statutory instrument, the excess use of which is the preferred tool of a Government who will not be thwarted. The ability to thwart a Government acting in an overweening and injudicial way is the absolute strength of our democracy.
As to the operational independence of the police, it is a fundamental principle of British policing that sits alongside the important principle of policing by consent. The ex-Home Secretary did not approve of the Metropolitan Police’s handling of pro-Palestinian protests and went into print to criticise the police force for applying “double standards” and being “more sympathetic to the left”. To attack the police publicly is just not acceptable, let alone to accuse them of political bias. She is entitled to that view but, regardless of whether she was right or wrong, she was not entitled to say so publicly.
On the public right to protest, it has always been recognised that the right of people to criticise Governments, laws and social conditions is fundamental to democracy. Via regulation yet again we have a new definition of what “serious disruption” means: a new and astonishing threshold at which police can restrict protest for any obstruction which causes more than minor hindrance to day-to-day activities, meaning that police restrictions can effectively ban a protest. If those restrictions are breached, we are now in criminal offence territory. Exactly what does the right to protest mean when the enactment of that right is criminalised?
Britain is now a country where only 9% of people say they generally trust political leaders—that is the lowest since records began. How we do our politics really matters, both inside Parliament and in the country. Standards in public life, the Nolan principles, are not going well. Selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership are a crucial part of our responsibility and are literally the antithesis of Boris Johnson, our former Prime Minister. Before I get to the deleterious effect of his behaviour, I point out that the Financial Times published an article on 16 December about the loss of trust in Parliament. More than one in 20 MPs has been suspended from the House of Commons, left Parliament altogether or been stripped of their party whip in the wake of misconduct allegations—just since the last general election. I am sure your Lordships remember the expenses scandal. We have still not recovered from that low base. That rocked public faith in all of us. Whether innocent or guilty, we were all guilty. On the doorstep, we were all scum.
Our constitutional protections have been put under huge strain because of major breaches of the standards in public office, with concerns about corruption and conflict of interest at the most senior levels. Boris Johnson’s changes to the Ministerial Code were detrimental to standards in public life. His lying, obfuscation and belief that the rules did not apply to him were shameful. He blocked his independent ethics adviser from being able to initiate his own investigations, and he rewrote the foreword to the Ministerial Code, removing all references to honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability.
In recent days, thanks to the Covid inquiry, we have seen the scale of the PPE scandal. Yes, it was an emergency, and yes, abnormal procedures were needed to facilitate that urgency, but what is a VIP lane? I would have hoped that a VIP lane was a lane that gave priority to those who came forward to help because they had the know-how, not the know-who.
As for the charade in the No. 10 garden, and the absurdity of the Barnard Castle fairy tale, what contempt for the truth and the people of this country. We all saw Allegra Stratton, then the Prime Minister’s press secretary, laughing and joking during a mock televised press briefing about a Downing Street Christmas party. Anyone who saw that clip knew in an instant what was really going on in No. 10.
This is decline and fall. We have not even recovered as a country from the way Brexit was conducted. It harmed us as a nation. Truth was a victim, and people felt empowered not only to lie but to hate the other side. Political protagonists peddled dislike, disdain, denigration of other, and fear. We created an unhappy and angry nation. We are bombarded with hate. Hate sells; hate works; hate garners votes; hate strikes emotion in us. There is hatred of other—foreigners, immigrants, scroungers, Muslims, Jews, the rich, the lazy, the lucky: we hate them all. Years of the drip-drip poison of “enemies of the people” and negative political campaigning has taken its toll on all of us.
Politicians have become reductionist in order to find simplistic messages that focus groups tell us will win votes. To win, lies do not matter any more. Truth is fake news. Facts—who cares? Experts with real knowledge are disparaged. To win, the common good comes way down the list, after party good, and public discourse is driven now by heat, not light, with the media feeding a frenzy of the negative and the nasty, amplified by the Twittersphere but led by us politicians.
Fifteen minutes was inadequate—although I understand I am running ahead of my schedule—because I have not even touched on reform of our own House, the use of hate speech by politicians in the media, nor the part that the “winner takes all” nature of our Commons elections plays in our behaviour. Yet I am absolutely sure that noble Lords across this House will fill in any gaps I may have left.
There has not even been time to lay out a prospectus for us moving to happier territory, but we have an opportunity—with an election year ahead—to demonstrate change for the better. I beg to move.
The noble Baroness is right about Henry VIII clauses, and she is right about accountability. There is still the scandal in this House of a third of our Ministers being unpaid, because so many Ministers have been appointed in the other place. That is to do not just with pay in this House but pay in the other place. If we are to address these problems, we need to do so in a non-partisan matter.
I have only three minutes, so I am over my time, but there is a very splendid pamphlet produced by Policy Exchange called Upholding Standards;Unsettling Conventions which sets out a coherent and sensible approach to this issue, not making party-political points for election purposes and then complaining about it. If the noble Baroness is worried about democratic accountability, why on earth have we got so many Liberal Democrats on these Benches when their representation in the House of Commons is derisory?
In 2021, the CSPL reported on
“the importance of high ethical standards, the continuing relevance of the”
Nolan principles,
“and the effectiveness of the rules, regulators, policies and processes related to upholding standards”.
It made 34 recommendations for reform, including a call for more power to be given to the independent adviser on ministerial standards. This recommendation was rejected. Can the Minister give us any assurance that the Government will keep the CSPL’s remaining recommendations under review, particularly that the independent adviser should have the authority to determine breaches of the Ministerial Code?
In July last year, the Opposition in the other place outlined their plans for a new independent ethics and integrity commission. I hope that this remains a high priority for any future change in government. Integrity is the overriding principle without which none of the others can be sustained. Redressing the lack of integrity in recent leadership is vital, not just for our parliamentary democracy but for our international reputation. We must not allow the damage done in the last few years to lead to any further weakening of trust in public institutions and those who work in them.
The role of Parliament has come under almost unprecedented scrutiny and criticism in recent months, and the calls for a rebalancing of power between the legislature and the Executive are loud. Perhaps we should resist pressures to be reticent as non-elected parliamentarians and insist on curbing executive power and the return of our parliamentary institutions to full democratic strength. That seems to be the fundamental task of both Houses of Parliament.
I cannot exempt the Church of England from this discussion either, given that when More in Common recently polled relative trust in British institutions, the Church came easily in the bottom half. Governance should be for the public good, to enable the flourishing of all life. We needed, in the words of my most reverend friend the Archbishop, a rediscovery of public standards back in 2022. Eighteen months on, we still need it, so today I reiterate this call for personal and institutional integrity.