Ferdinand Mount

This Charter88 Sovereignty lecture was given at 11 May 1992

Let me start with a confession. I am not an expert on the British Constitution. I am not, for example, in the same league as John Stuart Mill who started learning Greek at the age of three and was on to proportional representation by the time he reached his teens. At a rough estimate, I should guess I started taking an interest in the British Constitution at the age of forty-two and a half.

I can only console myself with the thought that most of us are in the same boat. The general standard of Constitutional argument in this country would barely scrape a GCSE pass in a poor year. We most of us rub along on a few inherited patches of wisdom. The greater part of the estate has been set aside; the traditional machinery lies, still visible to the gaze, but neglected and rusting in a corner of the field. As Nevil Johnson put it 15 years ago, we suffer from "atrophy of any language in which we can talk of constitutional issues, of rules, or of the principles of public law". It requires only a brief acquaintance with the vigour, the ferocity, the scholarship of debate on constitutional questions in the U.S. to come to the conclusion that we, to put it kindly, are a bit out of practice. What seems to me worrying about our Constitution is not so much that it is unwritten as that it is so often inarticulate. If you think this too sweeping a judgment, I'd like to offer a couple of recent examples.

You will recall the appearance of the Maxwell brothers, Kevin and Ian before the House of Commons Select Committee on Social Security. And you will also recall the great fuss there was when they refused to answer questions. Grave constitutional principles were said to be at stake. But what principles precisely? After a good deal of head scratching and foot-shuffling, nobody seemed very sure - was it the right to silence? But then for the life of us we could find nothing about the right to silence in Erskine May. Was it something like the American Fifth Amendment, some protection against self- incrimination? Unfortunately, we don't have a single written Constitution for there to be a fifth amendment to. I read the newspapers pretty carefully, but nowhere could I find any mention of the ancient principle involved, one which would have been familiar to Montesquieu and Burke, namely that it isn't parliament's job to try cases which may conceivably be brought before the courts. A principle better known as the Separation of Powers.

Or to take another fairly recent example. You will remember the outcry after the release of the Birmingham Six last year. More than 140 MPs - over a fifth of the House of Commons - petitioned for the removal of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane. So did many great newspapers -the Independent did it twice - and many leading commentators such as Bernard Levin and Ludovic Kennedy. Even those who defended Lord Lane, such as Mr. Louis Blom- Cooper, defended him on his conduct of the case (conduct which I happen to agree was disastrous). Nobody, but nobody, defended him on the strict constitutional grounds that High Court judges enjoy security of tenure during good behaviour - and bad behaviour is not the same as a bad judgment. Yet this principle is the foundation of the independence of the judiciary, the undoubted bed-rock of our liberty. It was surely worth a mention.

As we go along, I shall refer to one or two other interpretations of our constitutional arrangements. All I wish to add at this point is that correct interpretation is not always easy; it's often more of an art than a science. Consider a problem which looked very pressing a few weeks ago. Suppose the General Election had resulted in a hung parliament, with Labour having won a handful of seats more than the Conservatives. What would Mr. Major's position have been? Well, the obvious parallel was Mr Heath's position after the results were declared in February 1974. And the Grand Soothsayers of our Constitution, Lord St. John of Fawsley and Mr. Peter Kellner, both agreed that Mr. Heath had been well "within his rights", in seeking to remain in office, and patch up some deal with the Liberals.

Well, those of us who were around at the time remember a strong feeling compounded of embarrassment and distaste. It seemed to us that, in a first- past-the-post system, Mr. Heath had finished second, a close second, but second none the less, and that he therefore ought to step down. Indeed, even the argument advanced on his behalf, that the Conservatives had totted up more of the popular vote than Labour, was more appropriate to a plebiscite than a strictly parliamentary system.

It seemed to me that Mr. Heath's behaviour had in fact crystallised, somewhat involuntarily, a new constitutional convention: namely, that the winner of the largest number of seats has the right to try and form a government. Now you still won't find this convention in any of the textbooks; you won't find it, for example, in the latest edition of Rodney Brazier's invaluable Constitutional Practice. But I believe it to be the case. If Mr. Major had finished a few seats behind Labour, I am convinced that he would have resigned instantly.

Stanley Baldwin put his finger on the difficulty:

"The historian can tell you probably perfectly clearly what the constitutional practice was at any given period in the past, but it would be very difficult for a living writer to tell you at any given period in his lifetime what the Constitution of the country is in all respects, and for this reason, that at almost any given moment ... there may be one practice called 'constitutional' which is falling into desuetude and there may be another practice which is creeping into use but is not yet constitutional."

Such difficulties are notoriously peculiar to the British. Until recently, there were two other civilised countries which didn't possess some kind of single special entrenched document setting out the rules of the game - Israel and New Zealand; in recent years, though, the passing of a constitutional semi- entrenched law in New Zealand has given that country something resembling a single written constitution. In Israel, similar basic laws have been passed in recent years. So we are now more or less on our own. Nothing wrong with standing alone, but it does help to know where you are standing and I'm not convinced that we do.

But our exceptionalism is odder than that. Not merely are we an exception to the rest of the world; our constitutional arrangements are also an exception to the general run of arrangements in other great British institutions: sporting clubs and federations, college bodies, learned and professional institutions, political parties, trade unions. Almost all of them have a code of rules written down in a single document and special procedures for changing those rules - procedures which tend to be elaborate, to require extra-large majorities for approval, and to require that approval to be spread over an unusually large number of meetings or conferences. So the British parliamentary system is unusual in that way too, that exactly the same procedure is gone through, regardless of whether the measure is some profound constitutional alteration or the Hairdressing (Scotland) Amendment Bill.

Defenders of the status quo will argue that this system has served us well over the centuries, that our parliamentary traditions have combined stability and flexibility and that we should not cast away in a minute what has taken generations to build.

I am not insensible to the charms of this line of argument. But it has to be said that the status quo is not what it was. Advocates of "rolling constitutional change", like the present Education Secretary, Mr. John Patten, have to reckon with the fact that this is a rolling stone which actually sheds moss. It shed, first of all, the Church and the heritage of natural law which placed the monarch firmly under the Almighty and hence prevented power from being wholly arbitrary; then it shed the power of the monarchy, although Queen Victoria was extremely reluctant to admit it; then it shed the effective power of the Second Chamber, in two steps, in 1911 and 1949. More recently, the independence of local government went for a burton.

This thinning of our constitutional texture was described by Lord Hailsham as amounting to "elective dictatorship". Forty years earlier, Harold Laski claimed that "our Government has become an executive dictatorship tempered by the fear of parliamentary revolt." In earlier years still, even those principal justifiers of our constitution, Sir Ivor Jennings, and A. V. Dicey, now and then uneasily let slip their anxieties that the party majority - what Dick Crossman called "the battering ram" - could now force through any measure which took the passing fancy of the Prime Minister of the day, without fear of modification or delay. These fears that our democracy is now too unmediated and too centralised are neither novel nor confined to one party or another. After all, we have together endured a pretty consistent stream of ill-considered, short-sighted, partisan legislation: from the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 to the Poll Tax legislation of the 1980s. The supremacy of our elected parliament is our most precious constitutional inheritance, but is that all we are to inherit?

There are certainly differences in the way political parties approach the dilemma. The Left tends to be indignant, the Right tends to be apprehensive; the Left tends to talk of incipient fascism, the Right foresees the end of civilisation as we know it; the Left worries about human rights, the Right about sound money. But there is a common ground, and it is the purpose of these Sovereignty Lectures to explore, and, if possible, enlarge this common ground. I ought to repeat, by the way, that I'm not a signatory or a paid-up supporter of Charter 88. But we do travel along the same line for quite a part of the way, even if as Iain Macleod said of Enoch Powell, I prefer to get off several stations before the terminus.

I'll start the exploring by stating what I take to be the principal shared belief about the present state of things, the single piece of common ground which we all have at least one foot planted on.

I mean the belief that two World Wars and the various ideological shocks of the past century have left our system too centralised; and that accordingly we need to disperse, devolve and pluralise power and responsibility. Power in the U.K. has been clenched too tightly; sensitivity to the interests and aspirations of individuals and localities - what might be called fingertip feeling - is possible only if we unclench the fist. That broad general assumption would, I imagine, unite most people in this Hall. The belief, I'm sure, is common to the four people delivering these Sovereignty Lectures. Certainly Mr. Gordon Brown's absorbing address in this Hall a couple of months ago repays re-reading, because it embodies an approach very different from the battering-ram Labour Party of my youth, which not only believed, in Douglas Jay's immortal words, that "the man in Whitehall knows best" - about nutrition, about education, about how to run a steel mill, but also that socialism could be effectively delivered only by the concentrated clout of central government. Not only was the man in the Whitehall omniscient, but he was omnicompetent too.

That kind of self-confidence has pretty well disappeared from British politics, and we, most of us, kiss it goodbye without regret. We have, over the past decade-and-a-bit, witnessed quite a dispersal of the Whitehall estate. One elegant bystander saw it as selling off the family silver, but a large quantity of the goods on offer on closer inspection turned out to be car boot sale stuff. The really valuable lots were those sold off to existing tenants - the council houses, above all. Despite the widespread grumbles at the time, the logic of such privatisation has now become generally accepted.

But I regard that dispersal of property rights as only the first of three stages in the process of unclenching the fist. The second stage is what I would call the dispersal of institutional responsibility; I mean here such things as the local management of schools, better still in my view, grant-maintained schools or self-governing hospitals. To those who are still unreconciled to the latter and regard them as some kind of below-the-belt blow to the National Health Service, I would only say that even within the 1945 Labour government there was a strong body of opinion, led by Herbert Morrison, which opposed the nationalisation of those hospitals which were owned by local authorities and charitable bodies, believing that Nye Bevan's total takeover would injure local pride and enthusiasm and was anyway unnecessary to the central purpose - the provision of first-class free treatment.

But I don't want to become embroiled in an argument about the specifics of these reforms. My purpose is simply to mention the first two stages in the dispersal campaign - property rights and institutional responsibility - only to set them alongside the third stage, the one we have scarcely started on, constitutional reform. From my own perspective, I regard this third stage as unfinished business in the process of reinvigorating self-government in this country.

I do not expect everyone here tonight to agree, but far from this quest for decentralisation representing a retreat from Thatcherism, I regard it as the completing and securing of the two projects of individual responsibility and limited government which modern conservatism has adopted as its mission. And I think complacency about the present state of our constitutional arrangements is just as much of an abdication from true Conservatism as complacency about the State education system or nationalised industries was in 1979.

And that, I promise you, is the last whiff of party politics for this evening.

Now if you see our essential purpose as a decentralising one, if you keep your eye on that goal, then I believe honesty compels us to be a little sceptical about some reforms.

For example, some eminently respectable bodies have put forward the suggestions that the remaining constitutional prerogatives of the Crown - the right to dissolve Parliament and so on - should be removed and granted to some other public official, the Speaker of the House of Commons, for example. Now this sounds an impeccably democratic and modern-minded suggestion; there is no need to accuse all those who make it of the peevish republicanism which does lurk in the breasts of some would-be reformers.

Yet I cannot see that the proposal would do much to assist the dispersal of power or even the cause of making its exercise more transparent. The Speaker is, for all his or her inestimable virtues, only a nicely laundered politician; he or she lives like other politicians in a web of gratitudes and resentments; if his or her arm is in fact untwistable, there is no way of preventing an old comrade from trying to twist it, or of stopping old opponents from accusing him or her of having had it twisted. Which sounds to you better evidence of an effective separation of powers: the relationship between President Hillery and Mr. Charles Haughey, or the relationship between the Queen and Mrs. Thatcher?

Or let us take a more central preoccupation of constitutional reformers, Proportional Representation. Now it is said on behalf of Proportional Representation that it produces fairer, more representative, more balanced parliament and hence more stable, consistent governments. And it is said against PR that it gives an easy leg-up into Parliament to demagogic racists who might otherwise fade away, that it gives unrepresentative minorities - the Free Democrats in Germany, for example - undue influence over the policy of governments in which they are coalition partners, and that it makes stable, consistent government less rather than more likely. I happily concede that for a chamber which does not have to sustain a government, a Senate or the House of Lords, PR seems to me ideal; and in any case, in the right political circumstances, PR, like the first-past-the-post or election by drawing lots, for that matter, can produce perfectly decent government for longish stretches of time.

But what I don't think anyone can deny is that PR does have an inherent centralising tendency. It centralises political power at party headquarters. In any seriously proportional system, that is, a party-list or multimember system, the party label is essentially the currency in which the votes are counted and the seats allocated. I would like to refer here again to Mr. Nevil Johnson of Nuffield College, a former believer in PR, who in his recent recantation was much impressed by the overweening power - and consequent tendency to corruption - within the major parties in West Germany. There is, I believe, genuine virtue in the relative poverty of our political parties and the relative independence of their constituency associations. I cannot help believing that both the poverty and the independence would wither under most systems of PR.

At the same time, the management of government under a PR system also has an introverted quality, which amounts to a further kind of centralisation. It is not simply that the electors cannot foresee and have no control over the policy trading between the parties which negotiate the virtually inevitable coalition after the election. If the coalition is to prosper, the eyes of its leaders must be constantly on the mood of their junior coalition partners, rather than on the mood of the nation; by contrast, a British Prime Minister or an American President in their simpler systems will be paying close attention to what the voters as a whole are saying. The conversation between governors and governed is more straightforward, more transparent.

Many of you may wish to dispute this argument, and in a way I am sorry to have spent this much time on it. But I do so, not so much to bury PR, as to try to clear it out of the way in order to concentrate on what seem to me the real architectural questions about our constitutional arrangements.

I think it's a pity that in many people's minds constitutional reform and PR have come to mean much the same thing. To me, PR looks like an ingenious and expensive scheme of interior decoration which we might get fed up with all too quickly; I don't see it as a load-bearing part of the structure.

Well, what should that architecture look like? I'll jot down five general principles which I think ought to guide us, and then like a good jobbing architect I'll give you a prompt and, I hope, alluring blueprint.

I make no apology for pausing to consider the qualities we are aiming for. It has always seemed to me rather odd that constitutional reformers should take less trouble to consider the aesthetic and functional qualities of their proposals than a team designing a new can-opener or garden spray.

First of all we want simplicity. We don't wish to add to the burden of government on the citizens, either through extra taxes or extra administrative complications. Every additional tier of government must increase the possibilities of further public expense and more maladministration. So, for example, if we want to set up some sort of representative body for Scotland, then the Scots, whether pro- or anti-devolution, would be glad to see a layer of Scottish local government removed in compensation. Conversely, since the demand for a corresponding network of English regional assemblies is faint if not invisible, then we should feel no compulsion to invent one.

Second, stability. We want a system that will improve consistency and steadiness in the quality of government. Voters will not thank us if, in our quest for mathematical fairness, we end up with a set of arrangements which produces more see-sawing of the type which has been so justly complained of over the post-war era in British politics.

Then it follows from what we have already said about unclenching the governmental fist, that separation is a highly desirable quality. Any reforms which help to entrench, clarify or widen the present separations between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary should be favourably considered, in the interests of improving both the protection of liberty and the transparency of government. Conversely, any proposal which would tend further to glue together our already over-fused branches of government should be looked at with a sceptical eye.

That is linked to my next desirable quality for which I will meekly use that unlovely term, subsidiarity (devolution is not much better). Functions should be exercised at the lowest practicable level of government and, wherever possible, not by government at all but by private individuals and independent institutions. This rule applies pre-eminently to our dealings within the European Community, but not to them alone.

And mention of the European Community brings me to my final desirable quality, what I call patriation. While subsidiarity is a constitutional expression of democracy - people-power - patriation gives constitutional expression to national pride and independence -nation-power, if you like. It is English and Scottish judges who ought to be the prime protectors of our legal rights and liberties; it is British MPs who ought to remain the prime exponents of our anxieties and grievances. It is the best defence against the outbreak of neo- fascism which Euro-sceptics like Mr. Norman Tebbit fear, and not without reason. I say 'prime'; I do not say 'sole'. I do believe that the European Parliament and the European Courts do have a considerable role to play in the resolution of disputes and grievances. But we need to think much more carefully than we have so far about their relationship with national courts and parliaments.

Well now, let us get down to specifics. What kind of reforms fit the bill we have drawn up?

I want to start, briskly and symbolically, at the bottom, with local government at its most local. One of the unsung disasters of the Heath-Walker reforms was their lack of interest in the lowest tier of government - the parish. I suppose that is not so surprising when you consider that some of the historic counties - older than the Westminster Parliament - were being shovelled into the dustbin of history - or so they thought at the time.

I remember, as a rather timid leader-writer, going to see Mr. Peter Walker in his cubbyhole in the House of Commons, and summoning up the courage to ask him if he didn't think these new super-counties were a bit large and remote and if there wasn't something to be said for keeping the intimate historic scale (although I don't think I put it so coherently). He looked at me, not unkindly, for he is an amiable man, but with amazement. The doctrine that bigger was better was such an indelible part of the conventional wisdom of government that anyone who couldn't see it must himself be an antique survival like a beadle or a remembrancer.

I want to revive the bottom-most tier - well, tier is too grand a term, ledge would be nearer the mark - as an earnest of our basic intention, which is to revive self-government. At present, village or ward governance is mostly agitation and supplication; there is very little decision-making power. Entitle every parish council to 5% of the proceeds of the council tax to spend as they thought fit - rather on the lines of the old penny - now two-penny rate - and then you might see things begin to hum; environmental self-improvement on a modest scale might replace futile lamentation.

Moving from the little platoon to the battalion level, we have a double purpose: to restore the historic counties and boroughs, in the interests of civic pride and to simplify the over-elaboration of tiers and functions. It is nice to hear from Mr. Michael Howard that there is no money to spare for a grand reform; we don't want a grand reform; we want a careful county-by-county and borough-by-borough reconsideration, of the sort that seems to have met with general approval in Wales. I don't mind if Sir John Banham's rural rides take years rather than months. It was hurry that undid us last time.

A simplification of local government then leaves room for representative bodies in the non-English bits of the United Kingdom. As their names suggest - the principality, the province and the kingdom - the three regions are different in themselves and different in their historic relationship to the British Crown Parliament. It would accordingly be wrong to aim for a tidy-minded symmetry in devising representative bodies. No constitution is or can be perfectly symmetrical, what it can and must be is generally accepted as both fair and usable.

As in Gladstone's day, opponents of anything which looks faintly like Home Rule like to ask what is now known as the West Lothian question: how can Scottish MPs at Westminster continue to vote on English domestic affairs when, if we had a Scottish Assembly, English MPs would no longer be allowed to vote on Scottish domestic affairs? This is the sort of question which is asked by people who don't want an answer. After all, for half a century, nobody minded Northern Irish MPs voting at Westminster on mainland business, while mainland MPs took no part in the increasing activities of the Stormont Parliament.

We can perfectly well devise a system like the one suggested by Sir Alec Douglas-Home's committee back in the 1970s: that a directly elected Scottish Assembly would form a third chamber of the Westminster Parliament to take the Second Reading and Committee stages of Scottish Bills. Should it have revenue-raising powers? Why not? After all, until recently local authorities in this country had unlimited revenue-raising powers. But suppose a Labour dominated Scottish Assembly wanted to raise more revenue than the UK Treasury approved of? My answer is simply: let them. If the Scots wished to be more heavily taxed than the English, that would be up to them; and if they didn't, the Assembly wouldn't be dominated by Labour for very much longer.

I must, in fact, confess to a more general insouciance: I really don't mind very much if there is an occasional dust-up between one part of the political system and another. I think we have too often sacrificed clear and honest argument in the interests of smoothness of administration. I believe - and I think anyone who believes in the revival of the Second Chamber, let alone the creation of a Third Chamber, must also believe - that public, intra-governmental conflict is not necessarily an unhealthy symptom. That is why I want to strengthen the constitutional authority of the House of Lords, so that it can disagree uninhibitedly with the Commons and the Commons will have to take its disagreement seriously. That is why some element of election - by PR, if you fancy - is an essential ingredient in a reformed Upper House. Once again, I refer you to a report of a committee chaired by that indefatigable radical, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, back in the 1970s. His recipe was a mixed House, part- elected, part-nominated from among existing life and hereditary peers.

But any reform of the Second Chamber must lead us one stage further back: to a reinvigoration of the Lower House and a determination to make its scrutiny of legislation a reality rather than a wearisome formality.

It is here in the House of Commons that one experiences the rustiness of our system at its most painful and embarrassing. It is not simply the habitual emptiness of the Chamber, now crowded only for the hollow mummery of Prime Minister's question time, it is the emptiness of the speeches; the listless drone of the Minister reading out his brief, the unconvincing chuckles of the doughnut ring around him, the unconvincing jeers of the Opposition, the members who have been persuaded to stay on for the debate on the promise of unspecified favours from the Whips. True, much of all this would be familiar to observers of the House of Commons in its supposed heyday; in fact, I have often thought that the most shocking sight to the novice - the backbenchers who have been pressed to serve on committees, and who appear to spend most of their time on answering their letters - needs only a few stove-pipe hats and brocade waistcoats to recall the Parliaments of the Regency.

More serious, I think, is the way in which attention and influence has imperceptibly drained away from the House. This may come as news to some of those innocent entrepreneurs who still pay handsome consultancy fees to backbenchers, but they would be better occupied in wooing the much derided members of the European Parliament who actually have some prospect of securing the passage of a useful amendment. It is from the Upper House that the more memorable and damaging criticisms of government policy seem to come these days. While if we turn to the other branches of government, we find that the views of even minor members of the Royal family are listened to with the closest attention and often acted on quite assiduously by Ministers. Far from the Royal family receding in importance, it seems more plausible that we are coming to the end of an era of silent monarchy and returning to the less fettered behaviour of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The informality of modern monarchs may, indeed, be accompanied by a willingness to speak one's mind € la Juan Carlos.

But more dramatic even than the end to the silence of the monarchy is the revival of the judiciary as a constitutional actor. For the first half of this century, High Court judges have been cautious to the point of timidity in expressing any criticism of governmental action; the independence of the judiciary has been of a decidedly subordinate character. But over recent decades, a greater willingness not only to criticise Ministers but to grant relief against them has become visible. Not merely have many of the remaining immunities of the Crown been stripped away by statute and case law, but an increasing number of High Court judges have followed Lord Denning's lead in taking a decidedly broad view of their powers. Accordingly, aggrieved parties have piled into the courts. Lord Chief Justice Lane reported last year that applications for judicial review had risen from 491 in 1980 to over 2,000 in 1990 - with the same percentage rise of applications granted. This extraordinary upsurge in judicial boldness came upon us without much forethought or warning, and I can assure you that it has left government departments in a state of shocked apprehension. Even ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable for the Court of Appeal to find the Home Secretary guilty of contempt, as Mr. Kenneth Baker was last year in a deportation case (although the judgement was later overruled).

I have called this talk the Recovery of the Constitution. I intended a hint of double-entendre. On the one hand, I wanted to urge us to think about the sort of actions we might need to consider in order to "get our Constitution back"; but I also wanted to invoke the other sense of recovery - the sense of a patient recovering from an illness. And I do believe that in several respects we are recovering our constitutional spirits.

A majority in all parties do, I think, want to see local government recover its old vigour and independence. Equally, I think a majority in all parties are happy to see judges recover their voices and muster some of the stentorian criticism of the executive that we associate with Coke and Holt and more recently with Salmon and Radcliffe, and Denning and Scarman.

And in this renewed ability to challenge the executive, we should not undervalue the contribution made by the European connection. I do not speak merely of the pressure applied in the Community to clean up our rivers and our beaches, but of the reinforcement offered by the European Convention on Human Rights. As you know, we are signatories to that Convention, but it is not part of English or Scottish law. Yet even in this undignified position, half in, half out, it provides valuable ammunition for judges who wish to press home a point which is not sufficiently supported by English common statute law. There was a beautiful example recently in the High Court's use of Article Ten of the Convention to defend the principle of freedom of expression in the case of Derbyshire County Council versus Times Newspapers. I believe that, sooner or later, we might as well formally incorporate the European Convention in our law; but even if we don't bestir ourselves to take that step, it is in practice already a part of our legal inheritance and will come to seem as immovable as the Act of Settlement or the Bill of Rights.

It is not surprising perhaps that the House of Commons, jealous of its ancient pre-eminence, should seem on occasion the stiffest limb of government and the slowest to wake up, as though determined to reverse Bagehot's distinction and show itself the dignified rather than the efficient branch of government. Yet here too the pressure of European institutions is making itself inexorably felt. The timetable of the Community is slowly but surely affecting the timetable of the House; that old prickliness which refused to recognise the existence of MEPs is beginning to yield - they are already allowed in the canteen, soon no doubt they will be using the lavatories.

But there is a long way to go before the House of Commons has learnt the art of shaping British policy in Europe rather than reacting in peevish and baffled fashion to unwelcome faits accompli. But then we are still a long way from reconciling the government's need to get its business through with the careful and informed scrutiny of legislation. The use of the guillotine continues to increase rather than diminish, reaching an acme of absurdity as recently as June 10th last year, when it was applied to the Dangerous Dogs Bill.

I have further gleams in my eye: I'd like to reinforce the independence of standing committees by appointing them for the duration of a parliament and on a free vote; I'd like to minimise the debilitating pre-election manoeuvrering by instituting four-year fixed parliaments - with provision for early dissolution in cases where a government has genuinely lost its majority, and ultimately I'd like to entrench certain constitutional fundamentals by having a special procedure for altering them: two-thirds majorities in both Houses of Parliament or a majority in a referendum. Call that a written constitution if you like, I call it a collected and protected constitution.

But these are distant gleams. Unlike many of you here tonight, I do not believe that an effective campaign demands a once-and-for-all New Constitutional Settlement. I fancy that if we attempted such a thing, we would be unlikely to achieve it; and if we did get it, I suspect we should find that we were unhappy with a good deal of what we landed up with.

What I think we need is a sustained dedication to the subject: a dedication assisted perhaps by a standing Constitutional Commission as they have in Australia - or on the lines of our own Law Commission. That, I think, would induce all political parties to keep their own eyes focussed more steadily on the subject, instead of those jerky and intermittent glances which betray allegiance to the main chance; I want British politicians to look at constitutional matters more like enquiriers after truth and less like cocktail-partygoers gazing over one another's shoulders. In other words, I say to politicians: ask not what your Constitution can do for you, but what you can do for your Constitution.

You may think that is a lot to ask, but I can only say that if we don't knock and knock hard, the door will not be opened.