Tinkering with the constitution

When I was a law student it was emphasised how important the Rule of Law was and we were referred to the works of Dicey. Separation of the powers - the executive, the legislature and the judiciary was (is) a vital element of our unwritten constitution. We take judicial independence for granted. In those far off days it was taken for granted that whilst the executive sat and voted in the legislature, backbench MPs were sufficiently independently minded to act as a check on the executive. We were told also that it was a flight of fantasy to imagine an elected second chamber would ever exist.

Fast forward forty years. Now it is expected there will be a fully elected second chamber within a few years. Will an elected second chamber be a threat to the primacy of the House of Commons? No doubt it will as the current primacy rests on the fact that the Commons is elected and the Lords is appointed.

The most significant problem has been and continues to be the power of the executive to dominate proceedings in the House of Commons through the whips and party discipline. The threat of deselection can have a sobering effect on a potentially independently minded MP!

The proposal for primaries would go some way to overcoming the power of the whips and I welcome it for that reason alone. However the problem of the 'payroll vote' remains. MPs of the party forming the government should not be regarded as lobby fodder whose existence is simply to do the government's bidding. It is for this reason that I deplore the strategy of David Cameron to neuter the backbench 1922 Committee by pushing through a proposal that all Conservative MPs, payroll and backbench, be members of the committee.

The concept: let's be united as one party just doesn't wash. Government has to earn the respect and votes of backbenchers.

Lord Tebbit has suggested that backbenchers on the Tory side might like to form a 2010 Committee. An excellent proposal and one I hope the Liberal Democrat backbenchers take up as well. It is important to remember the constitutional position: it is the Queen in Parliament which legislates, not the executive through putting the frighteners on the legislators.