Constitution: Gracious Speech — House of Lords, 2015-06-25
Topic: Civil Rights
Frank Ashcroft Judd (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I very much thank my noble friend Lord Wills for having introduced such an important debate and for having done it so well It is clear from what he said—and this was very much reinforced by my noble friend Lord Lipsey—that the present arrangements are just not adequate. In fact, they are fundamentally flawed and lack credibility. Piecemeal reform is not the way to proceed; we need a road map and a destination which the road map will assist us in reaching. I am inclined to believe that we will have to go down the road of federalism and regionalism, even if we have several attempts, and whatever happens in Scotland. I also believe that it will also be necessary to introduce a new approach to voting that enables a far wider cross-section of the population to identify with those who claim to be representing them In recent times there has been a lot of talk about Magna Carta. I am as excited about Magna Carta as anybody—it has tremendous significance in our history. But we are trustees of a great deal more than just Magna Carta. It opened a door by taking on the exclusive power of the king and demonstrating that this could no longer prevail, but it also opened a door to a process of evolution to which the role of the people was absolutely essential Let us cast our minds back over our history just for a moment to William III, the Bill of Rights, the Levellers, Peterloo and the Tolpuddle martyrs. My wife, who is a historian, said to me this morning, "Aren’t you talking about social issues here rather than constitutional issues?", but of course my point is that social and constitutional issues are essentially linked because the constitution has to reflect the social realities of the time in which one is living. There is a post-First World War endorsement of the essential role of women. We in this House should never forget the incredible courage of the Suffragettes, but of course they were preceded in the previous century by the Tolpuddle martyrs, and before that, more generally in politics, by the Great Reform Act 1832 After the Second World War we saw very significant developments. There was the drive for the UN declaration on human rights, in which great people such as Eleanor Roosevelt played such a key part, as did leading statesmen in our own country from both left and right. They were central to the creation of that declaration. That then moved on to the European convention. Of course these had implications for our constitution—it was part of the process of evolution Another thing happened after 1945. We began to see in a highly interdependent world the indispensability of international institutions. Some people would ask whether this raised issues of sovereignty. Of course it did, but we were recognising that the interests of the people who happened to live in the British Isles could best be served by contributing—let us not talk about sacrificing—some of that sovereignty to the wider international community, because that was indispensably in our interests. More recently—and it will be with us for a long time—we have had the struggle for identity in Ireland and Scotland. In Scotland—I am a half-Scot—let us never forget that very much lingering at the back of a lot of people’s minds has been a feeling that the Act of Union was not something that they brought about but was very much a stitch-up between the Scottish establishment and the English, and that the day of reckoning will come I am trying to describe the fact that it has been evolution and struggle that has brought us to where we are, and we still have a very enviable society in many ways. Now, we are trying to engage in top-down management. We are saying, "We’re the people who manage things at the moment. How are we going to get it right for the future?". I believe that that is destined to fail unless we re-engage the people in the process. We are practitioners within the existing constitution. We do not own it; the constitution belongs to the people. Therefore, if we are to have a lasting and sustainable way forward, it has to re-engage the people. It seems to me from that standpoint that a national convention on the constitution, with wider representative participation in society as a whole, is critical. I sometimes fear that we are determined in all we are doing to retain the power of the Executive. The time has come when we have to re-examine the role of the Executive, which is to reflect the will of the people. It is their servant, not their master.