Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
MR MICHAEL WILLS MP
29 APRIL 2008
Q180 Chairman: Can I move us into more general territory? As I understand it, your role is generally to go around stirring up excitement about constitutional reform matters and to stimulate interest in Britishness, British values and trying to get some statement of these and so on. This must be hard going. I say that having just looked at this Hansard report on political engagement for this year where they do this survey each year. They say how the public do not understand any of this and, since 1997, MORI has found that no more than 2% of the British public have identified constitutional reform as one of the most important issues facing the country. They go on to find that they are only interested in three issues. Two are about the voting system and the third, which they do get excited about, is the West Lothian question, although they do not call it that. This is difficult territory, is it not? That is the stuff we do not want to talk about, the stuff that the public do want to talk about, and the stuff that we want to talk about they seem not at all to be interested in.
Mr Wills: It is hard and I think we have to be realistic. These sorts of process issues, wiring issues if you like, about power in our society are often very difficult. There are moments in our national history when they become extremely important and they crystallise into very high level issues but for most of the time, quite understandably, people are concerned with the state of their mortgages, the state of the economy, whether they have jobs, the state of public services, crime and immigration. These are front line issues which all politicians have to deal with and they are inevitably going to be more salient than these sorts of issues, often because they are quite complex and technical. There are two things that I would say in relation to that. If we get this programme of reform right, we will be setting in place mechanisms and changing the way that our constitution operates in ways that we hope will engage people more over time. The effects will not be instantaneous and sometimes government has to take a step back and say, "Look, we are going to put the mechanisms in place to do the right thing, the effects of which will take place long after our political lifetimes." Constitutional change often is like that. Sometimes it is much more dramatic. The effect of the Freedom of Information Act in changing the political path has only just begun. The effects of it will only properly become evident, I think wholly beneficially in my view, perhaps 20 years from now because it takes a long time to change political cultures which is what essentially that is about.
Q181 Chairman: What progress are you making with this attempt to get an articulation of British values?
Mr Wills: We are about to launch the process for it. It is a process which we want very much to be owned by the British people themselves. We are adopting an innovative mechanism of policy formation. There will be a lot of consultation, town hall meetings, a significant online presence and so on. In the end, all that will feed into two citizens' summits, the first of which on a regional basis will decide whether there is a need for such a statement of British values. We believe that there is a very strong case for articulating what it is that brings us together as a nation, but we want to hear from the people themselves on this. The second one will deliberate on what it should be. By a citizens' summit I mean a demographically representative body of the British people that will come together and deliberate on all the arguments. They will have access to all the information from the consultation, access to witnesses who will come and give evidence, some of which will inevitably be hostile to the Government and the Government's position on this. They will then, as a body, deliberate. The outcome of those deliberations will come to Parliament in keeping with our belief in representative democracy for Parliament to take the final decision.
Q182 Mr Walker: I am just amazed. How can Parliament legislate on what British values are? It just seems absolutely amazing to me that we are going to do this sort of road show. We are all going to get together in these citizens' summits and have a think about what our values are. What on earth do you think will come out of that? What is a British value?
Mr Wills: To call it a road show rather demeans what is an innovative, new, democratic process in which the British people will come together to discuss precisely these issues. There is a lot of cynicism in London about this particular issue. What is extraordinary is that if you ask people outside the confines of Westminster, Whitehall and what used to be called Fleet Street what it means to be British they will come up with their own answers, often very thoughtful and considered answers because our national identity is something that matters to all of us. It is not that this is a myth, that somehow we are searching for something that does not exist. It does exist. It exists in all countries and most other democracies have a way of expressing themselves in certain ways. You may think that expressing it through the values that bring us together is the wrong way of doing it and other people may agree with you. I would just ask you to reflect on this, as you find this so astonishing. If you accept that there is such a thing as a national identity, which the great majority of people share—and I am sure you do believe that—where does it reside? It does not reside in 19th century articulations of blood and soil. No one believes that any more. It is pernicious nonsense. If it does not reside in those 19th century notions, where does it reside? I would absolutely welcome your contribution to this process and debate. If you can persuade everyone else that this is an astonishing waste of time which I fundamentally disagree with, that is the democratic process, but we should discuss it.
Q183 Mr Walker: I can assure you I am not going to take part in this. I will tell you what a British value is. It is one man, one woman, one vote. That is a pretty good value in a democracy. Unfortunately, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has reported that in many parts of this country it is one man, one woman, three or four hundred votes, so why do we not start there and restore confidence in our electoral system that has been so thoroughly debauched over the last decade?
Mr Wills: I do not agree with that interpretation of The Rowntree Report but can I thank you for your contribution to the debate on the British statement of values? You have just made a contribution. I am very grateful for it. We will register it and pass it on.
Q184 Mr Walker: Please do not pass it on.
Mr Wills: It will be recorded.
Q185 Mr Prentice: The Joseph Rowntree Foundation that reported yesterday said our elections were wide open to fraud. We have had judges over recent months and years saying that the UK is like a banana republic when it comes to our elections. The Electoral Commission has for three years now been insisting that the Government bring in individual voter registration. Why is the Government resisting this if it is still resisting it?
Mr Wills: We are not resisting it. It is a big change. We have to make sure that it takes place in a way that does not decrease participation in elections. That is the issue.
Q186 Mr Prentice: Does not the integrity of our elections trump that?
Mr Wills: The integrity of our elections is paramount. I do not recognise the descriptions that you have just given. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation report is more balanced in all the detail than the representations we have just heard. Of course there are issues. Of course there have been instances of fraud and they have to be tackled and they will be tackled. We face as a democracy certain challenges and we have to find our way through them. Participation is declining. I think it is right that the Department should look for ways of increasing participation in our elections. Postal votes is one of them. If the system is opening itself up to fraud—and there have been cases of it—we have to close those processes which do render it open to fraud. We are looking at the question of individual voter registration. We are not resisting it, but we have to be sure that any changes we make do not worsen the problem in another area.
Q187 Mr Prentice: I have an instance in my constituency at the moment where there are 27 voters registered at a certain address which begs the question who the head of household is who signed the form certifying that the other 26 are legally entitled to vote. The only way you are going to get round that is to go for individual voter registration with identifiers, whether it is national insurance numbers, photo ID or whatever it is. It has to happen quickly, I put it to you.
Mr Wills: As the Secretary of State said in the House of Commons this afternoon, the processes that would be needed to put it in place would not be in place before the next general election, but it is something that we are looking at.
Q188 Chairman: Is it not even more difficult because I think I am right in saying that almost all the abuse cases that we have had have involved minority communities?
Mr Wills: I cannot answer for the statistical analysis.
Q189 Chairman: We should not be mealy mouthed about it. It is importing cultural practices from one place to another. If we are serious about Britishness, surely one of the things we have to be serious about is telling everybody who lives here about the integrity of democratic politics.
Mr Wills: Of course. This is fraud. This is a crime. People go to jail for this sort of thing. There is no question about conniving at it in any way whatsoever. Of course it is wrong. It is a crime.
Q190 Chairman: If we are honest, we have been so anxious to get turn out up that we have been rather casual, have we not, about some of the implications of it?
Mr Wills: No. I do not think we have.
Q191 Chairman: We have, because we have resisted individual registration.
Mr Wills: From memory, I cannot recall many people in this House resisting the idea of doing what we can to encourage postal voting to increase participation. This has undoubtedly opened up problems and we have to deal with them. We are dealing with them. No one is complacent about this issue. I agree with everything you have said about the integrity of the electoral system. Somehow the idea that we are just shrugging our shoulders at it, saying that it does not matter and belongs to that community or this community is simply not true.
Q192 Kelvin Hopkins: A simple solution would be to adopt what they do in Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland, we used to have regular abusers registered. Now they have rigorous controls of postal voting so that you have to show a passport to get a postal vote and individual registration. Do that here and solve the problem. I hesitate to say this in public but one of the reasons why our party is reluctant to do this is that it might dent our support in certain areas. That is a political consideration which I say in front of a Conservative colleague. I think that is something we ought to address.
Mr Wills: If I can just reassure you, the Northern Ireland example in our view as well is enormously important. It is being studied with great care at this moment.
Q193 Kelvin Hopkins: I had a discussion with you shortly after the new Prime Minister took over about the prospects for constitutional change. You were very enthusiastic and so was I. Is this not an opportunity to clear the decks and clear out the stables of what went on with the previous regime, to have a new constitutional settlement in a sense which opens up democracy and diffuses power away from the centre?
Mr Wills: I agree. I would argue that what we are doing is just that. If we try and define in a sentence what this is about, it is about diffusing power. It is about the redistribution of power in our society. It is an argument, a discussion about where power is located and where it should be located properly. I agree with you. Healthy democracies have power diffused widely. That is a constant challenge. This is not a one off solution. What we know is that power clusters chemically around power and therefore it is a constant exercise to keep breaking it up. It is why I personally believe that Freedom of Information is so important, because that is one of the greatest dissolvers of accumulated power potentially in a democracy, but it is by no means the only thing. What we have to do is to recognise that the character of our democracy has changed. We have to be very careful about measures of direct democracy which sometimes seem a very attractive panacea. We are bringing forward measures of direct democracy. We are not against it. But sometimes people talk as if direct democracy is a panacea for all the accumulated problems in representative democracy with which we are all familiar, but actually there is also a great risk of direct democracy. It can place power disproportionately in the hands of the wealthy and the powerful. That is something that we always have to be on guard against. That is what we are trying to do. This Bill is part of that process but it is by no means all of it. We are shortly going to be announcing the consultation on the Bill of Rights and Responsibilities which will be an important part of this process as well, into which incidentally, just to return to the vexed topic of the British statement of value, we see the British statement of values forming potentially an important part. Any rights and responsibilities in the end, any Bill of Rights anywhere in the world—and it is in our own history—have been rooted in the values of the society for which it provides part of the governance. Somehow or other, if we are to proceed with a Bill of Rights, there will have to be some statement of the values of the society which give those rights force and validates them.
Q194 Kelvin Hopkins: Going back to the point that Tony made about only 2% of the population being interested in constitutional reform, is that perhaps because they do not appreciate the significance of constitutional procedures or constitutional power; that we do not have enough of it in Britain constraining the Prime Minister and that our system permits a wilful Prime Minister to do things which in no other policy would he be permitted to do? The last Prime Minister, if he did one good thing, made us more aware of the problems of having a wilful, powerful Prime Minister who aggrandises power and drives us for example into illegal wars.
Mr Wills: If it was as simple as that, we would have half solved the problem already. I think it is much more complicated than that. The problem is that the importance of these issues is always just one removed. If people are worried about schools, education, crime or immigration, what they actually need to know is that they have the hands on the levers of power to effect change and that their voices can be heard. Historically, they have been able to do that at elections. If they do not like what they are getting, they are able to say what they think through their vote. For many that increasingly is not satisfactory. So we have to provide ways for people to have an influence on policy making between elections, systematic processes by which their voices can be heard consistent with a system of representative democracy. That is what we are trying to develop and that is what we will be publishing documents on in the next month or two.
Q195 Mr Prentice: You talk about real power. A lot of people out there think it is just pretend power. You just told us that we are going to have a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. Is this going to be a kind of mission statement or will it give people rights that they do not have at the moment? Will it be justiciable? Will people be able to go to the courts and force the Government to act because their rights are being infringed? How different is it from the Human Rights Act that is already on the statute book? What do you mean by a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities?
Mr Wills: Just to be clear, I said that we would start a consultation on a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. However, that is not to say all the questions you ask are not extremely pertinent. I am afraid they slightly pre-empt my brief today. We have not published the document. When we publish the document, I would be very happy to come back to the Committee and answer all these questions, but it is just a little bit premature and you will forgive me.
Q196 Mr Prentice: I understand that. I am not going to press you on it. I only say that because in the next month or so we are going to get an NHS Constitution. I am left wondering whether this NHS Constitution is going to give people rights that they do not have at the moment. I think this is a problem for the Government because if you have an agenda to give people real power then you have to be serious about it. Otherwise people will just laugh in a mocking way.
Mr Wills: They tend to do that anyway, I am afraid, whatever the subject. All I would say to you is that your points are very well made. I agree with you. We will not be bringing forward anything which does not in our view make a real difference.
Q197 Kelvin Hopkins: Is it not the case that the real reason why people are not interested in voting any more is that they do not think the politicians make any difference because they do not really think they have any choice any more? The centre is now controlling the whole range of policies, a very narrow range of view, even to the extent of controlling who gets elected in safe seats to make sure they are in line with the regime, that kind of thing. They have given up because they do not think there is real choice. When they see New Labour versus New Conservative, they think: what is the difference?
Mr Wills: I think there are many reasons for the issues around participation. One of the big questions that we will all have to answer is whether the decline in participation has stabilised, whether if we had more contentious politics, where politics were genuinely more between polar extremes rather than clustering around the centre at the moment, you would see increases in participation. In France where there appeared to be a real choice at the last presidential elections we saw an extraordinarily high turn out. These are unknowables and we will all have to make our own judgments on those. On those judgments will depend quite a lot of our continuing reform programme.
Q198 Mr Walker: As you rightly said, we have a general election. We elect the government of our choice and after four or five years or whenever we get the chance to move those people on or keep them in place. How is it in between those periods that you would allow people to exercise power and influence the democratic decision making process?
Mr Wills: We are going to be publishing a document shortly which sets out some of the mechanisms. It is a green edged document because I think governments have to be extremely careful about being too prescriptive in these areas, but essentially there are already some mechanisms in place—referendums for example—and it is important that we have a growing understanding of when it is appropriate constitutionally to have a referendum. We are trying to make more systematic the various engagement processes that have grown up piecemeal over the last few years. I am talking about things like citizens' juries and, as I have described, citizens' summits. These are often rather glibly derided as focus groups. Focus groups have their place but what we are looking at much more seriously are deliberative mechanisms which other countries—Canada and Australia—have tried, where citizens come together to inform the policy making process. We have to understand that as politicians and civil servants we do not have a monopoly of wisdom. It is often the people who are closest to the problems that are trying to be solved that have the best solutions. We need better mechanisms to hear from them.
Q199 Mr Walker: This is where I get slightly concerned. If we were to be doing these in the sixties, we would still be locking up homosexuals and hanging people. If we had had citizens' juries in the sixties, the majority of people would say, "Homosexuality? That is not nice. We do not like that. Hang `em all high." We are elected to lead this country. That is what we are sent to Parliament to do. In a sense we are professionals for four or five years.
Mr Wills: I agree. We are still governed by Burke's dictum about owing our voters our judgment as well as our industry. That is absolutely fundamental. At the start of this document we have what I hope you will agree when you see it is a robust defence of representative democracy precisely on the grounds you mention. That is why these are mechanisms to inform policy making, not to dictate it. Parliament in the end will have the final say and that is crucial for exactly the reasons that you mention. It is because Parliament and our system of representative democracy allow much greater space for deliberation. It is much more effectively scrutinised by the media and within Parliament. For all that people say about Parliament, it is becoming in my view a much more effective scrutiniser of government. These two processes of accumulation of executive power and more effective scrutiny have been going on side by side. It is crucial that we not only keep that but build on it. This is the fulcrum of our democracy and nothing we are doing will challenge that.
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