Power To The People - Brief Article

IF MPS DON'T HOLD AN INCREASINGLY PRESIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT TO ACCOUNT, WARNS TONY BENN MP, DEMOCRACY COULD SUFFER

I WAS ELECTED 50 years ago and have fought 17, and won 16 contested elections, a record equalled, I am told, only by two former prime ministers, Gladstone and Churchill. I have sat in 14 parliaments under 11 prime ministers, with eight speakers. For these reasons, I feel qualified to comment upon the work of the House of Commons today. And one comment I feel should be made, because it seems to be seldom commented upon, is this: governments do not make laws.

Standing alone, this may seem a strange statement, but I will explain my point. It is common to hear people say that the Government has decided to do this or that, for example, 'the Government is introducing means tests for disability benefits'. Yet it is not government that does these things; it is ourselves, as MPs, who do. We are the legislators. We pass the laws.

Yet, worryingly, during the time I have been an MP, great changes have occurred - at an accelerating rate over recent years -- that have altered the focus of power in this country. There is a growing centralisation of power in all parties, and I believe that, without any announcement of any change being made, Britain is steadily moving from a parliamentary to a presidential system of government.

It appears to me as an observer that, increasingly, all effective power comes from the prime minister. I understand that the current prime minister has twice as many advisers as his predecessor. That is not a new development, but it is new in the sense that it is now becoming apparent to many people, certainly to me, that the real Cabinet is now 10 Downing Street and that policy announcements made have often been discussed within that Cabinet alone.

My diary from January 1968 tells me that I had eight Cabinet meetings in a month, most or many of which lasted all morning and afternoon. I understand that the Cabinet now meets for between 20 and 40 minutes. I can only conclude that the Cabinet is no longer the centre of real decision-making. I also understand that no cabinet papers have been presented by individual cabinet ministers since the election. When I was a minister, I presented many, as did other ministers, but that process has passed away without comment.

The problem with the development of this new 'presidential' system is that there are no effective checks and balances comparable to those, for example, in the United States. As we know from recent history, an American president has to think about the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Supreme Court in making his decisions, but the 'president' of the UK does not have to think about any of those things.

So how should the House of Commons respond to this situation?

As MPs, we are carried into the House by a party at an election. We are all committed to the manifesto that brought us here. Yet we backbenchers are not required to take orders from the government when a policy has not been in the manifesto, has not been put before us, and has not been the subject of consultation.

This is extremely important, because we are also committed to the electors that we represent, the people who choose us. They employ us, they can dismiss us and we must speak for them. I have learned far more from letters from constituents, and from my surgeries -- 500 or more people come to them every year -- than from listening to debates in the House. They bring the real experiences of life to me.

Our duty is to speak and vote as we believe to be right, within the framework of loyalty that I have described to our party, to our constituents and to our conscience.

With the help of MPs from various parties, I recently tabled an Early Day Motion in parliament, attempting to address this issue. The preamble rehearses much of what I have said, but I would like to lay out the operative passage here:

"That this House[ldots] therefore invites all[dots] Members, while honouring their personal and political obligations and loyalty to their own party and the manifesto on which they were elected, to speak and vote more freely in the House on the proposals put before them, and by doing so to reassert their historic role as elected representatives, their right and duty to express their own deeply held convictions and their responsibility for maintaining the role of this House as a democratic legislature holding all government to account, having been elected by the people for that purpose.'

I believe that that is the responsibility of all MPs, whichever party we belong to, to hold governments to account, on behalf of the people. I also believe passionately that the new tendency towards centralisation should not obliterate the very thing of which we boast most proudly: our democracy.

Tony Benn is the Labour MP for Chesterfield.

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