“Many of us are sitting next to people that we have never sat next to before.” With these words, intended partly as a gentle joke, David Cameron, in his first speech to the House of Commons as Prime Minister, encapsulated the sheer strangeness of the new political landscape. No one is quite where anyone expected them to be.
The strangeness is perhaps felt most strongly on the benches of the Liberal Democrats. It is the first time that anyone from the party or, to be more accurate, from its predecessor, the old Liberal Party, has sat on the government side of the House of Commons for sixty five years. And for many of them it is still not a comfortable experience.
Most LibDems have seen themselves on the left of centre of British politics. Their dream of breaking out of the status of also-rans has lain for years in an imagined coalition with the Labour Party. It was Labour, they thought, who would most likely agree with them on the need for political reform, the reform which, among other things, would secure their party’s place as a real and enduring contender in the political fight.
But it is with the Conservative Party that they find themselves in coalition government. And, to the astonishment of many of them, it is the Tories who are accommodating their demands for political reform.
So when their leader, Nick Clegg, became deputy prime minister in the new government it was no surprise that he took responsibility within the government for its programme of political reform. And on Wednesday, barely a week after taking up his new position, he made a major speech outlining what the government proposes to do.
He said the government was not going to tinker with bits and pieces of legislation but that it was going to adopt a “big bang approach to political reform”. He went on: “This government is going to transform our politics so the state has far less control over you and you have far more control over the state.”
The identity card scheme and the national identity register are to be scrapped. The next generation of biometric passports won’t go ahead. The children’s Contact Point database will be abandoned. Greater restrictions will be introduced on the retention of DNA evidence. There will tighter regulation of CCTV cameras.
Mr Clegg said: “Britain was once the cradle of modern democracy. We are now, on some measures, the most centralised country in Europe, bar Malta.” He accused the outgoing Labour government of “obsessive law-making”. By contrast the new government would introduce “the most significant programme of empowerment by a British government since the great enfranchisement of the nineteenth century”.
The public would be invited to nominate laws that they thought ought to be repealed and the limitations on peaceful protest would be reduced.
But it is in how parliament itself works (and how it is elected) that perhaps the most radical plans lie. And for that very reason they are likely to be the most controversial.
After more than a century of argument it’s being proposed that the House of Lords should be elected and on a system of proportional representation. What’s not yet clear, however, is whether the whole house is to be elected or only a part of it. Nor is it clear when the change will happen. Meanwhile, there are rumours that the new government intends to appoint scores of new Conservative and LibDem peers in order to bolster its majority in the upper house. Some cynics will say that this is the much more likely part of the plan ever to see the light of day and that, following Tony Blair’s creation of a record number of Labour peers, this will be no more than business as usual.
There is to be a referendum on the voting system for electing MPs too. Indeed the offer of such a referendum by David Cameron was what finally clinched the deal between the two parties. But what is proposed seems likely to satisfy few activists in either party. The referendum is going to be about whether we should keep the existing first-past-the-post system, or adopt the so-called alternative vote (AV) system, in which voters select candidates in order of preference and no candidate is elected without attracting 50% +1 of the votes cast.
To LibDems this system is not at all the one they want. Their goal is a system of proportional representation and, if anything, AV is even less proportional than the current system. Meanwhile, to many Tories AV is anathema and the Tory leadership is committed to voting against the change in the referendum.
The government has committed itself too to fixed-term parliaments of five years. David Cameron said that this unilateral decision to give away a prime minister’s power to choose the date of a general election was evidence of the government’s seriousness about political reform. But the proposal has itself created a row.
Messrs Cameron and Clegg are proposing that while a government could still be defeated by a single vote on a confidence motion and would have to resign, that would not, as now, cause an immediate general election. Instead, an election could be called before the five year term had expired only if 55% of MPs voted for parliament to be dissolved.
Supporters of this plan argue that a fixed term parliament is good in itself because it creates more stability and is fairer in depriving a prime minister of the ability to go to the country when it suits his party. But, they add, fixed-term parliaments are meaningless if elections have to be called whenever a government is defeated by a simple majority on a vote of confidence – if that were the case, things would be just as they are now. Hence the need for the 55% rule. Opponents, however, argue that it’s possible to imagine a situation in which a government is defeated in a confidence vote but a new election would not be possible because the 55% of MPs needed to trigger one could not be summoned. In those circumstances, they argue, we would have a period of feeble minority government which no one could get rid of until the five years of the fixed-term parliament were up.
Few people doubt the seriousness of the new government’s commitment to political reform. What remains to be seen is exactly how the proposed reforms come out in the wash.
What’s your view? Do you think Britain needs a “big bang” of political reform or not? Do you think the government is genuine or not in wanting the state to have less power over us and for us to have more power over the state? What do you think of the specific proposals, such as abandoning ID cards, limiting the retention of DNA records, regulating CCTV and so on? Which laws would you like to see repealed? On how parliament and government themselves work, what do you think of the government’s ideas? Is an elected House of Lords a good idea or not? Should the government appoint a lot of new Conservative and LibDem peers or not? Is the proposal for a referendum on the voting system for MPs adequate or not? Are you in favour of fixed-term parliaments and the 55% rule or not? And what political reforms that have not been suggested would you like to see?
