David Starkey: How New Labour Trashed The British Constitution

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foreign then about what happens in Britain uh with the election of Turney Blair in 1997 is how what again you know it you you really do sound awfully uh farage East um or or whatever how these essentially foreign and um unenglish Notions about government get superimposed onto our existing structure or rather chip away you have to chip away at whole sections of the historic core to accommodate them and wherever you look you see this process at work and it's it's it's it's it's it's I mean let's just let's just pick some examples be Central to it it seems to me is the attack on the very nature of parliament itself that's to say you cut parliament's powers in a whole series of different directions um you do it first of all by an attack on I suppose really the core idea of parliamentary sovereignty I think the fundamental Enterprise of the Blair government curiously Blair represents in one sense the Triumph of the political process in an extraordinary general election Victory a unique capacity at winning elections and so on but for reasons that I've never fully understood is or maybe because he knew he shouldn't have done it he is profoundly mistrustful of the political process and seeks in every way to limit it and let's look at how it's done and again it was done in some ways I mean what's most striking about those new labor changes they're rather chaotic they're not introduced as part of a single package and yet overall they have this these remarkable consequences um I think the most interesting set of changes I mean Blair is a lawyer is in highly specific legal ways let's look at what they did one that that most people I think really didn't register what its effect was going to be was the destruction of the position of Lord Chancellor Dairy Irving had been at Blair's own mentor and he was actually compared for his his power is lavishness is refurbishment of the Lord Chancellor's lodgings in the Palace of Westminster he was compared with which were refurbished in the most lavish and ostentatious scale he was compared to previous holder of the office to Cardinal Woolsey and Blair clearly came to resent his mentoring in his heavy hand and he turned to another one of his friends to Charlie Faulkner who was a mere solicitor and they decided that the office of Lord Chancellor had to be abolished it had to be abolished well first of all because they wanted to get rid of the Lord Chancellor and his power but more importantly they decided that it would be done on reasons of principle because it offended against the separation of powers the idea was that the Lord Chancellor in those days was the head of the judicial system he was also a judge himself and he sat in the cabinet so he he even he is a living challenge to the very idea of the separation of powers he has judicial and by the way he was in charge of the process of judicial appointments he had judicial Authority he had legislative Authority and he had executive and political Authority because he sat in the cabinet so instead you the the first intention is to abolish the office completely and instead to have that faintless Sinister thing called a Minister of Justice what European governments had whose record of course in delivering Justice and on the whole been very much less distinguished than that of this allegedly perverted office in Britain so it the the original intention was to abolish it you then discover of course that you can't but the very simple and this shows the astonishing ignorance the astonishing historical ignorance of people like Faulkner and and and Blair because they mention the office of Lord Chancellor is mentioned in literally hundreds if not thousands of statutes it is in in terms of the historic parliamentary Constitution it's the point it's the point along with the monarchy in which all the different streams of the English Constitution actually met so abolishing the office well you couldn't you demoted um and what had been this this office invariably held by a great and distinguished lawyer now becomes the kind of thing which to show the measure of its fall is briefly held by Liz truss so you can tell how far the office of Lord chancellor has fallen it becomes a mere kind of honorific to be attached to the so-called Ministry of Justice now this why does this matter have you ever noticed have we all noticed the appalling mess of our judicial system it's underfunding the chaos of the courts the appalling record of of in many ways of the Judiciary and but the whole the whole complex of the judicial system their interaction between again another invention the crown prosecution service the courts the prisons the police and so on this seems to me to have been unthinkable in the days of Derry Irving uh from on the labor side or somebody like a Makai of classroom under Thatcher what we did by by deliberately destroying a post of unique Authority we diminished and I would argue undercut possibly fatally what must be one of the central functions of government which is Justice you see it seems to me once again we've lost sight of what government really is about um that if you look at the definition of a king in the Middle Ages low to fight and to judge that is the task of a king if you look at the Great Seal which is the embodiment of the monarchy on one side you have the monikers judge crowned imperially crowned enthroned robed and whatever and on the other you have the monikers and Knight an armed Knight The Defender of his or her people and those two those are the two phase those are the two fundamental faces of government the imposition of Justice internally and the defense of your people against a foreign foe we've completely lost sight of this with the welfare with with with what is essentially the welfare state uh in which you know health education uh generally being nice to people retirement pensions and whatever completely overwhelm the fundamental functions of the state but you cannot get away without them if you have if you have uncontrolled immigration in other words undefended Frontiers on one hand and on the other hand an out of control criminal population you are lost the the fundamental principles of government are no longer being followed so I mean it's going too far to say that is all the responsibility of the abolition or the demotion of the office of Lord Chancellor but I do not think things could have declined so far and so fast if that had not happened and then of course there was also the the other um deadly shift which was the again on grounds that it offended the separation of powers the Supreme team Appellate Court had actually been a committee of the House of Lords the the the the judicial Committee of the House of Lords because Parliament itself was the Supreme Court you say no we can't have that so you invent a supreme court um as as the final appellate body but that again um destroys the notion of parliament itself being only one body in the country should be Supreme and that is Parliament which incorporates the crown and the position has always been in English law that the judges were under the throne you know the the famous remark of James the first that they were the Lions under the throne what you do now is you separate you you you you you you put alongside the powers of the state you put the powers of of the Judiciary and you actually give them the power to strike down ministerial action and even to challenge legislative action now and it's gone much beyond the sphere of the Supreme Court and that once again there's been this month there's been this notion that in a sense things are too important to be left to politics this again you know it it goes back to these doctrines of natural rights and so on this idea that some things are so important that they cannot just be left of the natural processes of politics they must somehow be entrenched they must be embedded they must be made that parliaments have to do it um and it's it's it seems to me again to be profoundly dangerous um it was only it was only just beginning to be sketched and under under new labor and the origins of it interestingly enough do actually uh go back to Margaret Thatcher and Thatcher of course mistrusted the agencies of the state correctly she looked at how badly nationalized Industries have been done and instead you set up these things called quasi-administrative non-governmental organizations and the the idea is that they would somehow do it better but of course they have to be given terms of reference which are very often embedded in statute and the problem is that if you as it will give them the the duty of enforcing what are as it were super political rights or suprapolitical values or suprapolitical goals you extraordinarily limit the activities of the state itself and of Parliament and therefore of democracy again um just jumping around rather the decision which was widely praised at the time of Gordon Brown to take interest rates out of the hands of the chancellor actually it had been for for most of the 1990s it was set extremely happily in a public dialogue between the governor of the bank of England and the uh and and the uh and the chance of the ex-tracker and and remarkably effectively it has to be said but you create instead a monetary policy committee which is given the absolute right to control um to control fiscal policy sorry not to control to control monetary policy this seems to me to be quite extraordinarily dangerous because of course it embodies a set of alleged independent experts and you then create now a structure in which entrenched in Supra law is an idea of supra experts or above anything as vulgar as having to get either consent or Democratic agreement or ordinary political process an area after area has been treated like this the climate change committee um again created by Ed miliband Under new labor now effectively controls the most important series of decisions on Broad economic social whatever whatever else you like the extraordinary process by which we're supposed to get to Net Zero and even worse is when what you start to do as part of this process of effectively saying some things are too what it would terrifies me is the whole of what we're looking at now says some things are too important for politics now think about what that means it means that something in other words it's what is it is it's more like Divine Right monarchy or or um or or a church that that claims some form of Supernatural endorsement and the political process is the one by which we are supposed to weigh first of all we contribute to but the fundamental thing about the political process is it's one in which conflicting goals have to be held against each other what we are doing is to create a series of single issue committees so you create the single issue committee that looks after monetary policy you create another single issue committee that looks after climate change you create another single issue committee English nature which governs land use which is why you can't build anywhere but of course a proper job of government would be to weigh climate change against monetary policy against land use but you can't do that because you separated the thing out and you've given each one of these things absolute privileged rights which Parliament cannot break and who stops Parliament doing it judges and the Supreme Court and we've again we've complete again new labor completely confused the rule of law with the rule of lawyers and once again and I'm I'm leaping around now more than I should be doing but it seems to me that so much of what's gone wrong with our politics we are now beginning to hone in on we thought or many of us thought that it was brexit we thought or rather we thought that it was the European Union which of course represents Enix Chelsea's this particular view of politics it has to because it's it's a highly uncomfortable Confederation of rival States and what you've tried to do was to create a quasi-non-political body um that's to say the uh the the the European commission with another quasi Court uh uh to to enforce its Authority but it's quite clear that the reason that we seem not to be able to govern ourselves wasn't outside it wasn't coming from Continental Europe it's internal it is the final working through of the changes of the new labor years which which above all set up above the sovereignty of parliament set up the sovereignty of abstract doctrine of one sort or another and this seems to me to be where we have gone so hideously wrong we've also of course attacked the sovereignty of parliament in other even more radically different ways by reversing the processes of the act of Union the devolutionary structures that we have created have disintegrated uh that that nation that was unified through its Parliament so we've attacked parliament in the sense we've reduced the competence of Parliament and parliamentaries and therefore of us in terms of the issues of government but we've also altered literally its geographical scope all of which by the way we saw exactly all of these points were exemplified in the appalling mismanagement that was covered where you got the Rival jurisdictions outbidding England in increasingly insanely restrictive politics and the nature of those increase of those insanely restrictive policies was because they were the result of another single issue expert committee sage in which I mean there was a rather magnificent description of it what was it mad virologists and out of control statisticians or whatever a whole series of professional groups that got above themselves and it contained not a single person who understood Finance not a single person who cared about education not interestingly enough a single person who cared about cancer or heart disease because of course it was a single issue committee um and that single issue committee also showed something else the extent to which the theoretical checks on politics have ceased to work completely because the entire media the entire mainstream media was com not only complicit in this process but actually clamored for more and more it also showed a whole breakdown of the relationship between government and opposition because the opposition is clamored for more and more and more in other words to summarize quickly what has turned into a rather Meandering discourse I think we are faced with a choice we need to recognize that we have just more than half destroyed what had been the world's most effective system of government we therefore have a choice do we go back and try to restore it or do we have to admit that we actually need revolutionary change my view is that revolutionary change is and there is very good historical evidence for this invariably catastrophic in other words what we need to do I rest my case the French Revolution the Russian Revolution the Chinese Revolution all they do is they reinforce the worst aspects of the answer of the asean regime what I think we need to do is as I've been trying to do but want to do it much more systematically is to analyze how the old system of English government worked and to try to revivify it and try to do exactly what was done in the 19th century what Disraeli said is the proper function of a conservative it is really recognizes that a conservative in a progressive country you invariably change you have to change you should change but what you should do is change in accordance with what is there already exactly has happened in the 19th century when you broaden the franchise within the existing structure of parliament what we need to do I think and now they would actually go back and I would reverse the abolition of the counties um the as genuine focuses of government you don't want regions in England we had historically and they're still in people's minds Lancashire Yorkshire whatever the the great the the the great cities that were carved out of them in in in the in the 19th century the old County boroughs all of these things was genuine self-governing entities but they weren't as it were in opposition to the state they were themselves of course um intimately involved with it and their representatives invariably formed part of the Parliamentary process itself has it interestingly enough is the good side of American government where the American Constitution and the constitution of the various American states embodied legally very much the old pattern of English government which is why I mean I remember vividly for many years I had a house uh in America in a tiny little town called Chester Town inhabitants what three thousand they were a reasonably large liberal arts college that place had its own police force it had its own fire service admittedly um uh a volunteer one it had its own um uh um it it it it it it it it it it had its own pretty minimal public sector housing it ran its own sewage it ran its own electricity supply all of that and do you know what by a town meeting of all the citizens and repeatedly in the American pattern you see that which is why generally speaking small town government and much state government in Merrick is admirable in very often large city government isn't again modeled on that old pattern of English government which I know I sound like the most empty headed um sort of stuff shirt whatever I'm not but it did work it worked well it needs that kind of careful Revival and rethinking which we were able to do with our institutions of government in an extraordinary fraught period of the 17th century if they could do it at the restoration and the Glorious Revolution well perhaps who knows we might even be able to do it now [Music]
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Channel: David Starkey Talks
Views: 73,491
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Keywords: David Starkey, History
Id: lu22nG7CN8Q
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Length: 22min 5sec (1325 seconds)
Published: Sun Sep 17 2023
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