Queen’s Speech

Lord Beith Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

Powerful words, my Lords. I shall return to a subject much discussed already. Let us imagine that at the end of this Government’s term of office, we are reviewing their record and whether they have in fact defended the constitution. On the union, the mishandling of the Northern Ireland protocol and the refusal to understand opinion in Scotland on many issues will tell against them.

I shall give just a few examples that will tell equally strongly against them. The first is the deliberate weakening of the Electoral Commission’s authority and independence through one of the last Acts in the previous Session of Parliament; the second is the so-called Bill of Rights Act, which is intended to prevent the convention rights to which we are signatories being enforced effectively in UK courts. The Government claim that by this legislation they are restoring the balance of power between the legislature and the courts but, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, so wittily pointed out, it is the Executive who are seeking to gain from any rebalancing that takes place.

A third example is the Brexit freedoms Bill which, as the Government admit, is designed to enable secondary legislation to be used instead of primary legislation to change retained EU law in order to create or vary criminal offences, or to create new public bodies or new licensing regimes, for example. The Government claim that they are doing this in order to prevent these important measures

“taking decades of parliamentary time to achieve”.

Decades? If statutory instruments are debated at all in the Commons, they usually get one and a half hours. In this House, the presumption, challenged by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, has been that fatal Motions are not appropriate and that we should not decline to accept wholly or seriously defective legislation which would normally be enacted through primary legislation, or use our limited powers in order to do so. We should bear in mind that these are unamendable Motions—we cannot improve them, tidy them up or sort them out—on matters that are normally reserved for primary legislation. This is a profound and retrograde constitutional change so far as it affects retained EU law.

Fourthly, I must mention the planned reintroduction of severe restrictions on public protest which this House threw out in the last Session. Our streets will not be made safer by a new offence of locking on, that is, gluing yourself to public buildings. So far as I know, the only case of locking on going on at the moment involves the Prime Minister, who has glued himself to No. 10 Downing Street—and it would take more than glue solvent to extract him from there.

Powerful in their impact on the constitution as legislative changes are, just as great will be the impact of practices which have gone on under Boris Johnson’s leadership. They set dangerous precedents for the tolerance of unacceptable conduct in public office, such as trying to change the rules governing MPs’ conduct so that a close colleague would have escaped punishment; using the power to appoint to the House of Lords fundamentally to change its composition and to reward donors of millions of pounds to the governing party, without regard to any concept of fairness in appointments or to the House’s declared wish to reduce its size and to follow a procedure for doing so, which the present Prime Minister, unlike his predecessor, is not prepared to do; and, finally, appearing to rule out entirely the resignation which used to be the constitutional consequence of criminal offences or of misleading Parliament.

It used to be assumed by many that our constitution derives strength from not being written or codified in a single document because it is built firmly on a foundation of a shared understanding of what constitutes sound and honourable government. I fear that we cannot say that any more.