Prime Minister (Office, Role and Functions) (Hansard, 28 November 2001)

§ Mr. Graham Allen (Nottingham, North)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to define the office, role and functions of the Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury; to make arrangements for his appointment; and for connected purposes. Thomas Paine argued in "The Rights of Man" that a government without a constitution is a power without a right. Power unacknowledged is power unaccountable. Power unbounded is power uncontrolled. The time has come for this Parliament to acknowledge and define the true extent of the power of the United Kingdom prime ministership.

We will all be stronger for recognising the central truth of British politics: the office of Prime Minister towers over our democracy. This mighty oak casts a long and chilling shadow over all of us who are drawn close to it—[HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."]—regardless of which party is in office. We all know that there is no political office like it in the democratic world—the concentration of power, the scope of decision making, the span of patronage, the control of both Executive and legislature, plus the informal abilities to set the agenda and dominate access to the media.

I and my sponsors—all departmental Select Committee Chairs and of all parties—make no partisan or personal points. The development of the office under all incumbents over the past century has made a myth of the notion of parliamentary sovereignty, a lie of collective Cabinet government and a near terminal hollowing-out of our political parties. Our politics, once a rich and varied diet of interaction and competition, has given way to McPolitics—a dumbed-down, one-dimensional relationship between a prime ministership and an insatiable media, with the rest of us reduced to spectators, bit players and cheer-leaders.

All of us in this House should be anxious that at some point in future—in different hands; in less wholesome hands—such awesome prime ministerial power could overwhelm and threaten our democratic culture. We cannot rely for ever on prime ministerial benevolence and self-discipline. Stronger institutional bulwarks are needed to keep vigil over our democracy. It is our duty in this House, and one that Downing street can no longer neglect, to think on those issues and propose some practical answers. Before then, a more routine and obvious obligation falls on us as parliamentarians: to define the office that is so central to our politics to give it statutory life and legalise the existing institution of the prime ministership. That is the intent of the Bill.

So much of the office still lies in a shadow, a mystery, much of it veiled in the royal prerogative, the Crown at No. 10 Downing street—all of it outwith parliamentary consent. A handful of our statutes make passing reference to the office, all on minor matters such as the appointment of bishops and so on. None define it. None consolidate it in one place so that all can see the magnificent spread, the frightening reach, of prime ministerial supremacy. After almost 300 years that oversight should be put right, for without definition there can be no limits, and without limits the office itself will become a threat to representative democracy.

1009 I recently asked the current Prime Minister to define the prime ministership. He replied: The Prime Minister's roles as head of Her Majesty's Government, Her principal adviser and as Chairman of the Cabinet are not … defined in legislation. These roles, including the exercise of powers under the royal prerogative, have evolved over many years, drawing on convention and usage, and it is not possible precisely to define them."—[Official Report, 15 October 2001; Vol. 372, c. 819W.] Parliament can and should help the Prime Minister. If it walks like a prime ministership and if it talks like a prime ministership, let us ensure, on the hard countenance of a parliamentary Bill, that it is a prime ministership. The House has many precedents on which to draw: every other liberal democracy is meticulous in describing its key political office; in addition, the House itself has recently delineated the role of the First Ministers in Scotland and in Wales. Our will may be suspect, but our competence is not.

Of course, the office has changed since the time of Walpole, who became the first Prime Minister in 1721 and who spent his day eating Norfolk apples on the Treasury Bench. Each incumbent has added something and the office inexorably continues the trend of accumulating power—but that is no force of nature; it is not beyond our control. I propose that we in Parliament stop spectating and make a conscious decision that the evolution has gone far enough—that we define the prime ministership as it is now in law, and that the Executive power should not grow further without the clear consent of this Parliament or a future Parliament. If Parliament does not have the responsibility to draw that line in the sand, it has no real purpose at all and our transition to the dignified part of the constitution is complete.

Defining the prime ministership does not weaken it and it is not my intention to do that, but neither does my acceptance of a strong Executive imply acceptance of a feeble Parliament. We do not have to choose between the lyrics and the music of our democracy. Indeed, being clear about what the prime ministership can do will only help Parliament to rediscover and redefine its own destiny as we are squeezed between devolution, Europe and globalism. It will give us a sustainable role for the future.

A healthier Parliament will be a help to the prime ministership. We in this place can add value through accountability, scrutiny, value for money and even delivery of policies. All those are reasons why the current Prime Minister and those to come should welcome—indeed, initiate—a new relationship with Parliament, rather than stand in its way.

My unambitious Bill is designed merely to consolidate in one statute all the prime ministerial powers that already exist. The one modest innovation is to suggest that Parliament takes its part in the process of choosing our Prime Minister. Parliament has become the electoral college that briefly flickers into life on general election night, with the media left to acclaim the prime ministerial winner.

The Bill proposes that the day after the election the House meets, just as the Bundestag in Germany meets, and elects the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister would then go to the palace in the normal way. Symbolically at least, that would acknowledge the House as the ultimate 1010 source of Executive power. It would be some riposte to those who say that Parliament is just bypassed and is a rubber stamp, or that the elective dictatorship is not even elective.

As the new century begins, knee deep in political cynicism and failing participation, we have a clear and present duty to prepare ourselves for the future and to examine our institutions without exception, however exalted, to ascertain whether they and we measure up. We cannot examine a shadow behind a veil, a Prime Minister with unacknowledged powers who is shrouded in the mysteries of an unwritten constitution. Let us now bring our mightiest office out of the darkness into the dawn of democracy, and into the light of the law.

The contract that our society has with government must be written down. I ask, therefore, that the House consents to allow my Bill to be printed, and that an open, non-partisan debate can begin on the future of the Executive and the legislature.

As the prime ministership approaches its 300th birthday, we might dare to assume that Walpole's experiment is here to stay. Now, our mature democracy deserves to see the office revealed honestly for what it truly is. If it chooses, this Parliament can start to bring the prime ministership, and with it itself, into the new millennium.

§ Tony Wright (Cannock Chase)

I shall be brief, but perhaps not as brief as one former Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, of whom it was once said that he would never use one word when none would do. Mr. Attlee would not survive for five minutes in today's world of soundbite and spin, but that is our loss and not his. He would disapprove strongly of the Bill. He was the quintessential Cabinet chairman, who said and believed that a Prime Minister must remember that he is only the first among equals. However, with people like Ernie Bevin, Herbert Morrison and Nye Bevan at the Cabinet table, that was a reminder that was unlikely to be necessary.

I turn to the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) is a dangerous man. He has written a seditious tract, which he has been disseminating among a gullible public, and now he introduces a subversive Bill. It may seem innocuous enough. It claims only to constitutionalise the position and powers of the Prime Minister, now to preside over his own Department. The fact that it blows a hole through Cabinet government is the least alarming aspect of what is being proposed. My hon. Friend's real intention is to engineer nothing less than a constitutional revolution, though he is not honest enough to say so.

The House will begin to understand why I describe my hon. Friend as a dangerous man and why this is a subversive Bill. He believes that the power of the personal executive has increased, is increasing and should not be diminished but recognised. That is what the Bill would do. That is surely outrageous enough. It makes a mockery of all our preoccupations about whether there are too many special advisers in No. 10, whether the Cabinet Office has been annexed to a Prime Minister's Department and whether Cabinet government is now dead. How dare he mock our concerns in this way. How can we go on warning of the dangers of a Prime Minister 1011 becoming a President when my hon. Friend has the nerve to suggest that a British Prime Minister with a secure majority and a unified party already has far more unchecked power than an American President could ever dream of?

But it gets much worse. My hon. Friend seems to believe that a system of strong government needs a system of strong accountability. Again, that may sound reasonable, but does the House understand that it means an end to Parliament as we know and love it? We would have to stop being happy hamsters on a wheel and become eager beavers, required to think for ourselves in holding the Executive to account and debating the great issues of the day; nobody would write our press releases for us and there would be no collective line to save us the effort of thinking. Instead of representing Parliament to the people, we would have to start representing the people to Parliament.

The parliamentary pantomime would have to close down and parliamentary sketch writers who lampoon us would be out of a job. Lazy journalists who are interested in us only if we depart from the script would have to start taking us seriously. Do we really want to go down that road? That only begins to touch on the enormity of my hon. Friend's proposals. We depend on the Executive. We may call ourselves a legislature, but we know that our secret dream is to join the Executive; that is what having a job in this place means. We sit by the Executive's table, hoping to touch the cloth and ready to catch any crumbs that fall. We may only become the Parliamentary Private Secretary to a Parliamentary Private Secretary, but that gives purpose to our lives.

My hon. Friend wants to deprive us of our dreams; he wants to take nanny away from us and turn us into grown-ups. The House will understand why he has to be stopped. What is all that nonsense about the separation of powers? In the 18th century, we may have told ourselves that that was how our Government worked, but it was the secret of good government. The Americans and others may even have believed it and acted upon it, but we soon took the precaution of abolishing it. The ultimate wisdom of that course of action stands revealed today in the multi-faceted personage of our illustrious Lord Chancellor, but it also stands revealed in the glories of a supine Parliament and a passive people. We believe in strong, unchecked and unencumbered government, which has taken all the old prerogative powers of the Crown and kept them for itself. That has given us the most concentrated system of unchecked power of any democracy in the world, and we love it.

1012 We pride ourselves on our strong Government; we believe in the idea of winner takes all as long as we are the winner. We do not intend to share power with anybody, certainly not a second Chamber. We like things the way they are; we like to be able to talk about the glory of parliamentary sovereignty while having the convenience of the Executive exercising it for us. If the Executive invite us to abolish habeas corpus in, say, an hour or an afternoon, we are happy to oblige. If they are kind enough to fix the membership of our Select Committees for us, it would be churlish to want to do that for ourselves. We may sometimes say that we would like things to be different, but the truth is that we need our comfort blanket and do not intend to give it up lightly.

We do not want the Executive to be taken away from us, as my hon. Friend proposes in his Bill. Of course, it almost was taken away. In 1701, exactly 300 years ago, the Act of Settlement decreed that henceforth no placeman of the Monarch—a Minister to us—could be a Member of Parliament and all advice given to the Monarch by the Privy Council should be seen by Parliament. The Whigs rightly had nothing to do with that kind of restriction on prerogative power, and the provision was repealed before it could be implemented. So we never had a separation of powers, and the legislature and the Executive became one.

Now the Bill wants to take us back 300 years and sever Parliament's dependency on the Executive. It does not have the courage to propose a written constitution, which is the inevitable end of the process. Fortunately, knowing the House of Commons as I do, I am confident that it will prefer to cling to the apron strings of Executive power and have nothing to do with my hon. Friend's dangerous and subversive Bill.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Graham Allen, Mr. Nicholas Winterton, Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody, Mr. Archy Kirkwood, Mr. David Curry, Donald Anderson, Mr. Michael Mates, Jean Corston, Mr. John Horarn, Mr. Chris Mullin, Dr. Ian Gibson and Mr. Edward Leigh.