By this evening, it is possible we'll be in a full-scale constitutional crisis. The Leader of the Commons, Peter Hain, has threatened that if the Lords refer the constitution bill to a select committee, the government will remove the bill in a huff to the Commons from where it can be forced through the Lords by using the Parliament Act. This follows the other threat to use the Parliament Act to force through the abolition of the 92 remaining hereditary peers, a move that tears up the previous promise to leave them alone for the time being.

The government argues that the Lords' blocking tactics are undemocratic because they are thwarting the will of the elected Commons. The response to that is that the government is being undemocratic by destroying the constitutional conventions that guarantee our liberties, in particular by abolishing the Lord Chancellor, bringing the judiciary and the courts under political control, packing the Lords with toadies and attacking the rule of law itself by excluding the courts from the immigration appeals process. In response to that, the Home Secretary David Blunkett has attacked the senior judiciary for suggesting that they should have primacy over Parliament:

'"The question is do we have a democracy where parliament actually makes the decisions and if it gets them wrong overturns them? Or do we have a democracy where we say, 'you can go so far but actually the real democracy is the judiciary' and they should not only want to sit in parliament, which is what they want ... they should also be able to override Parliament.'

Blunkett certainly has a point about judicial supremacism, encapsulated most starkly in the recent comments by Lord Steyn (Lord Woolf came close, but wasn't so explicit) that the judiciary might have to overrule Parliament. Such judges should certainly be put back in their box. But the fact remains that it is this government that, through the Human Rights Act, gave these judges a stick with which to beat up parliamentary democracy. And Steyn and Woolf also have a point when they claim the government is threatening the rule of law and the whole basis of the constitution.

In other words, what we have here is a breakdown of the conventions that have governed us. Both judiciary and government are at fault; but ultimately it is the government which, through its autocratic, legally illiterate, mob-rule, Jacobin-lite approach has provoked this crisis.

Posted by melanie at March 8, 2004