The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : Collapse of the British Constitution

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Monday, Oct 25, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Collapse of the British Constitution

By Arvind Sivaramakrishnan

The electorate, not Parliament, not the judiciary, and certainly not the Labour Party, appears to be the only institution that can stop Tony Blair doing anything he wants.

DESPITE THE apparent calm of everyday life in Britain, the British political classes are slowly and painfully realising that no institution in the United Kingdom can put the slightest restraint on the power of the Prime Minster, Tony Blair.

First, the British judiciary is constitutionally subordinate to Parliament, and in practice is completely subordinate to the executive. Ministers have a long record of overriding adverse judicial rulings by putting new statutes through Parliament, and now they are removing independent-minded judges from important cases. For example, the House of Lords judge Lord Steyn, who consistently takes a strong position against abuses of official power, has been removed from a Bench that is to rule on the indefinite detention of four foreign nationals suspected of links with terrorists.

Lord Steyn has been removed for telling an audience of judges and lawyers that the U.K.'s derogation from Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights is not justified. The ostensible reason for his removal is that he has already made his mind up on the case. But that could also be true of the other judges on this particular Bench, the only difference being that they have said nothing in public. Worse still, as a member of the House of Lords has told this writer, in this particular case the Government is appointing a Bench with a record of favouring the Government.

Secondly, the much-vaunted principle of Parliamentary supremacy is no longer even a joke. The ruling Labour Party have a majority of 155 seats in the House of Commons. Substantial numbers of Labour MPs are utterly convinced that Mr. Blair is the sole reason for the party's overwhelming victories in the last two general elections, and remain convinced that without him they risk losing their own seats in the next election. Dozens have toed the line and voted for laws they hate, even if they have been in tears at doing so. Those who have voted against the executive have barely dented the Government's majority, and the House of Lords, constitutionally powerless against the Commons, is often described as a collection of the Prime Minister's cronies.

The Parliamentary Labour Party have all but vanished; it bears no relation to the body that stopped Harold Wilson from sending British troops to Vietnam in the 1960s. (The Labour Party itself, with membership nose-diving and a reported mood of despair at grassroots level, is in no shape to make any impression on its leader.)

Other forms of Parliamentary scrutiny have also been reduced to utter uselessness. At question time, Ministers routinely brush off questions by blandly repeating the Government line, and new regulations will allow Ministers not to answer questions from MPs. If questions have not been answered by the end of a parliamentary session, the MPs concerned must resubmit them or they will be expunged; all a Minister has to do is delay answering.

As to parliamentary select committees, these have been bullied and traduced by government whips and unelected aides into revealing their questions in advance. And even if the committees have held firm in their reports, these have been treated with contempt. For example, in 1999 the Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Select Committee was highly critical of the Government's illegal sale of weapons to one of the sides in the Sierra Leonian civil war. But the committee's report was immediately rejected out of hand by Mr. Blair, who had almost certainly not even read it. A further method for the Prime Minister to control select committees is to ensure that only MPs sympathetic to the Government are appointed to the Government's quota, which is by definition a majority on the committee anyway.

Another sacred cow of the unwritten British Constitution is the theory of Cabinet Government, whereby the Prime Minister is only primus inter pares and governs with the agreement and consent of Cabinet. Even Margaret Thatcher, who knew better than most how feeble British checks and balances are, was politely and firmly told by her Cabinet that she had to go. She went instantly. Mr. Blair, on the other hand, has neutralised the Cabinet. Even the three or four heavyweights closest to him have been totally ineffective in persuading him to change his mind on anything significant — above all the invasion of Iraq.

If the Cabinet cannot stop the Prime Minister, then the other, less formal, checks on the executive have no chance whatever of doing so. The civil service, noted for their invisibility in a state which has the world's toughest official secrets regime, has quietly expressed its fears over the collapse of checks and balances in the U.K. Critics will talk of crocodile tears, and there is much evidence of systematic civil service obstruction of government programmes, as there is of support for any number of repellent policies. The current civil service disquiet may even reflect naiveté born of long acquaintance with the tradeoffs and compromises of everyday governance. But for the Sir Humphreys to go public, however discreetly, is a sign of real alarm in the state apparatus.

Of the remaining forms of scrutiny of the executive, public inquiries have their remit and their powers defined by the Government, which in practice means the Prime Minister. To date no public inquiry has attempted to exceed these, presumably on the - increasingly fantastic - grounds that that would infringe Parliamentary supremacy.

The inquiry conducted by Lord Hutton in 2003-04 into the circumstances surrounding the death of the weapons expert David Kelly was widely seen by the public as a whitewash. Further, the Butler Report on the totally fictitious claim that Saddam Hussein could attack the U.K. with weapons of mass destruction at 45 minutes' notice was written in terms which the political classes saw as severe criticism, but which made no impression whatever on the Prime Minister. Neither could the report's author, Sir Robin Butler, believe it when no journalist asked him if he thought the Prime Minister would have to resign.

As to the press, they are either wildly supportive of the invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq, or — — following the panic caused in the BBC by the Hutton Report — plainly intimidated. The executive, for its part, is publicly said by former insiders to be obsessed by tabloid headlines and little else, with the implication that every policy is no more than short-term headline-seeking, a pandering to fear in order to terrorise Parliament into passing grotesquely repressive legislation. The latter is now so extensive that even the Egg Marketing Inspectorate has the power to tap telephones.

If the systemic developments amount to nothing less than a constitutional catastrophe, even more frightening possibilities are now apparent and even imminent. To start with, the Prime Minister has openly been described as messianically convinced of his own rightness. The Conservative Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned after a backbench rebellion of 41 MPs over the disastrous invasion of Suez in 1956; Mr. Blair ignored the backbench rebellion of 139 over the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The distinguished political scientist Professor David Marquand, himself a former Labour MP, says Mr. Blair thinks that a `perversion of Islam' has devised an `evil conspiracy designed to destroy the western way of life.' This implies, Professor Marquand says, that Mr. Blair is prepared to send troops to anywhere he thinks this conspiracy is at work, be it Iran or Chechnya. We can only wonder what it will take for facts to count for anything here. And as Mr. Blair has said that he will answer only to his Maker for the tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq, the United Kingdom is in effect now led by a fantasist who has crushed every institution of state that stands between him, his raw will, and the mass of the public.

Yet all is not quite lost. Where they have shown any opinion, British voters have indicated that, particularly over the invasion of Iraq they are, increasingly, simply distrustful. The electorate, not Parliament, not the judiciary, and certainly not the Labour Party, appear to be the only institution that can stop Mr. Blair doing anything he wants. Whether the simple-majority electoral system will allow them half a chance of doing so is another matter.

(The writer is lecturer in politics and law at Taunton's College, Southampton, U.K.)

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