BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
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involved in setting up the new bodies sat or had sat in Westminster.17
Some further powers were transferred to the National Assembly for
Wales – and the National Assembly separated from the executive (having
previously been united as a body corporate) – under the Government of
Wales Act 2006.
Human rights
The government published a White Paper, Rights Brought Home, and
then followed it with the introduction of the Human Rights Bill,
embodying the ECHR in UK law. The measure was passed in 1998, with
its principal provisions taking effect in 2000. The Act made it unlawful
for any public authority to act in a way that was incompatible with
Convention rights. Higher courts were empowered to issue declarations
of incompatibility where there was deemed to be a breach. By the end of
2003, the courts had issued declarations of incompatibility in fifteen
cases, though five of these were overturned on appeal. Parliament
enacted various changes to bring the law into line with the declarations of
the courts. These included the Gender Recognition Act 2004, conferring
rights on those who changed gender, and – as we shall see – various antiterrorist provisions.
House of Lords reform
The 1997 manifesto committed the party to an ‘initial, self-contained
reform’ to remove the hereditary peers from membership of the House.
17 See Constitution Committee, House of Lords, Devolution: Inter-Institutional Relations in
the United Kingdom, Second Report, 2002–03, HL Paper 28.
This was to constitute the ‘first stage in a process of reform to make the
House of Lords more democratic and representative’. The House of
Lords Act 1999 removed all bar ninety-two of the hereditary peers from
membership of the House. (The ninety-two were retained as the result of
a deal between the Tory leader in the Lords, Viscount Cranborne, and the
Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, designed to smooth the passage of
the Bill through the Lords and act as a spur to later reform.) Under
goading from Cranborne, the government also moved to consider what
should comprise stage 2. It appointed a Royal Commission under a
Conservative former cabinet minister, Lord Wakeham. The Commission
recommended three options for a partially elected chamber.18 Though
the government in its 2001 manifesto said it would seek to implement the
recommendations of the Wakeham report ‘in the most effective way possible’, it failed to gain much support for its proposal, published in a
November 2001 White Paper,19 for a House with 20% of its members
elected. It then handed over responsibility to a joint committee of both
Houses, which identified seven options for reform of composition. Both
Houses voted on the options in February 2003. The Lords voted for an
all-appointed House and against all the other options. The Commons
was unable to muster a majority for any of them. The issue returned to
the agenda in 2006, and in 2007 the government published a White Paper
advocating a House with half of its membership elected and half
appointed.20 In March 2007, both Houses again voted on reform options.
The Lords voted again (but by a bigger margin) for only the all-appointed
option, while in the Commons there were majorities for an 80% elected
and a wholly elected House.
Elected mayors for London and other cities
The government achieved passage of a Bill authorising a referendum in
London on whether Greater London should have an elected mayor and
authority. In the referendum, a large majority (72%) voted ‘Yes’, albeit on
a small turnout (34%). The Greater London Authority Act 1999 established an elected mayor and a twenty-five-member Assembly. The two
were elected separately under an unusual hybrid system of government.
The mayor enjoys some executive powers, subject to scrutiny by the
18 Royal Commission on Reform of the House of Lords, A House for the Future, Cm. 4534
(London: TSO, 2000).
19 HM Government, Completing the Reform, Cm. 5291 (London: TSO, 2001).
20 HM Government, The House of Lords: Reform, Cm. 7027 (London: TSO, 2007).
Assembly. The successful candidate for mayor, Ken Livingstone, was
elected as an independent in 2000, having been suspended from the
Labour Party, but was later admitted to membership and re-elected in
2004 under the party label. The policy of rolling out elected mayors to
other cities proved less successful. The Local Government Act 2000
required councils covering populations of 85,000 people or more to
create a new structure, selecting one out of three options. These included
a directly elected mayor. In practice, the overwhelming majority opted
for an indirectly elected leader and cabinet, the closest option to the
status quo. Fewer than twenty opted for an elected mayor. Where elected
mayors do exist, they have broadly similar powers to those of indirectly
elected council leaders.21
Reform of party funding
The government commissioned a report on the funding of political
parties from the Committee on Standards in Public Life. The
Committee reported in 1998 and, following a White Paper in 1999, the
government achieved enactment of the Political Parties, Elections and
Referendums Act 2000. The Act inter alia established an Electoral
Commission, provided for the registration of political parties, and
imposed restrictions on the sources of donations: money could not be
received from non-EU and anonymous donors and parties had to
report donations to the Electoral Commission. A limit was also placed
on parties’ expenditure in election campaigns. The measure, however,
failed to still controversy over party funding. The blocking by the House
of Lords Appointments Commission of certain nominations for peerages in 2006 led to allegations of honours being awarded in return for
donations, resulting in a police investigation. The Prime Minister was
one of those interviewed. Some of the donors were investigated for
making loans to the Labour Party at less than commercial rates (not
permitted under the Act). As a result, provisions were included in the
Electoral Administration Act 2006 to regulate loans to political parties,
including a reporting regime, and an inquiry into party funding established under Sir Hayden Phillips, a former permanent secretary in the
Lord Chancellor’s Department.
21 Colin Copus, ‘Local Government’, in Bill Jones et al., Politics UK, 6th edn (Harlow:
Pearson Education, 2007), p. 577.
Electoral reform
An independent commission on the electoral system was appointed
under Liberal Democrat peer Lord Jenkins of Hillhead. It reported in
October 1998, recommending a system known as AVϩ.22 The Alternative
Vote was to be employed in single-member constituencies, accounting
for 80–85% of the membership, but with a number of top-up members to
ensure some element of proportionality. The report attracted oppo
sition
from the Conservative Party and from Labour MPs committed to the
existing first-past-the-post system. Tony Blair adopted a fairly neutral
stance on the recommendations, much to the dismay of the Liberal
Democrats, and no measure was brought forward to provide for a referendum. The Labour manifesto in 2001 noted that new electoral systems
had been introduced for the devolved assemblies, the Greater London
Assembly, and the European Parliament elections. ‘We will review the
experience of the new systems and the Jenkins report to assess whether
changes might be made to the electoral system for the House of
Commons. A referendum remains the right way to agree any change for
Westminster.’ These words were basically repeated in the 2005 manifesto.
By May 2007, a desk study of the consequences of the new electoral
systems had not been completed, although an independent commission
had published such a review in 2004.23
Local and regional government
The government created regional development agencies (RDAs) to
encourage economic regeneration in the regions. The move to establish
elected assemblies came in 2002, when the Deputy Prime Minister, John
Prescott, published a White Paper, proposing referendums on a regional
basis, beginning in those regions where the demand appeared to be greatest. Initially, referendums in three regions were planned, but this was then
reduced to one. It was held in the North-East in 2004 and resulted in a
78% ‘No’ vote. On local government, the government published three
White Papers and enacted, as we have seen, the Greater London Authority
Act 1999 and the Local Government Act 2000. The latter required
all councils with populations of 85,000 or more to move from the old
22 Independent Commission on the Voting System, The Report of the Independent
Commission on the Voting System, Cm. 4090-I (London: TSO, 1998).
23 Independent Commission on PR, Changed Voting Changed Politics: Lessons of Britain’s
Experience of PR since 1997 (London: Constitution Unit, 2004).
committee-based system of decision-making to one in which there was
a clear division of executive and scrutiny functions, more resembling
national government in which a cabinet is scrutinised by parliamentary
committees.
Freedom of information
The government published a White Paper, Your Right to Know, in
December 1997 and invited comments. A draft Freedom of Information
Bill was published in 1999 and subjected to pre-legislative scrutiny. The
Bill was then introduced and enacted as the Freedom of Information Act
2000. The Act created a statutory right of access to information held by
public authorities, though with certain exemptions, including particular
classes of information; some other information could be exempted as a
result of a prejudice test. An applicant not satisfied with a response to a
request under the Act could apply to the Commissioner for Information
to determine whether the authority in question had acted in accordance
with the provisions of the Act.
In order to give departments and other public bodies time to prepare
for its implementation, the Act did not come into force until 1 January
2005. In the first quarter of the year, departments of state received a total
of 7,733 information requests. (The figures cover ‘non-routine’ requests,
excluding information given out in the course of routine business.) The
Ministry of Defence received the largest number (1,843). Of a total of
13,427 requests made to all monitored bodies, 2,413 were deemed to fall
within exempted categories. The most commonly applied exemption was
that relating to the formulation of government policy.24
Northern Ireland
The government maintained a bipartisan approach to resolving the
problems of Northern Ireland. Tony Blair witnessed two major outcomes
during his premiership. The first was the Good Friday Agreement.
Following substantive negotiations between the different parties, agreement was reached and embodied three strands: a Northern Ireland
Assembly with devolved executive and legislative powers, with all sections of the community able to participate; a North–South ministerial
24 Freedom of Information Act 2000: Statistics on Implementation in Central Government, Q1:
January – March 2005 (London: Department for Constitutional Affairs, 2005).
council; and a British–Irish Council. It also included sections on rights
and equality of opportunity, and envisaged paramilitary decommissioning of arms within two years. The agreement was then endorsed, by large
majorities, in referendums on both sides of the border on 22 May 1998.
An assembly was elected and, following some tensions within the
province, a power-sharing Executive was appointed in 1999. However,
there were clashes over the pace of decommissioning by the IRA
and splits within the ranks of the Unionist parties. The Assembly was
twice suspended. After a re-convened Assembly in 2006 failed to make
progress, the British and Irish premiers set a deadline of 24 November
2006 for agreement to be reached. In October, the government brought
together the various parties from the province at St Andrews in Scotland
and produced proposals for power-sharing and a deadline for the
restoration of devolved government. Parliament gave legislative effect to
the agreement. A referendum was held to endorse the agreement in
March 2007 and, after a six-week extension of the deadline, agreement
was reached on 26 March between the Democratic Unionist Party, now
the dominant Unionist party in the province, and Sinn Fein, with DUP
leader Ian Paisley being nominated as First Minister and Martin
McGuinness of Sinn Fein as Deputy First Minister. After thirty years of
violence in the province, the agreement was hailed as historic, arguably
the most important constitutional achievement of the Blair premiership.
A supreme court
In June 2003, Downing Street announced that the position of Lord
Chancellor was to be abolished and a new supreme court to be created.
Advice revealed that such changes could not be achieved immediately –
the Lord Chancellor was mentioned in a large number of statutes and
other documents – and a Constitutional Reform Bill was introduced. The
House of Lords referred it for scrutiny by a select committee. It was eventually enacted as the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. It created a Judicial
Appointments Commission, ensuring greater transparency in judicial
appointments. Its other provisions were more controversial. Despite
some opposition from the House of Lords, the Lord Chancellor was no
longer required to be a senior lawyer and peer, and was no longer to be the
presiding officer of the House of Lords. (In 2006, the Lords elected a Lord
Speaker, Baroness Hayman.) It also established a supreme court, thus
detaching the existing highest court of appeal from the House of Lords.
The Act stipulated that the court would come into being once the Lord
Chancellor had confirmed that the new court building was ready. This
was expected to be in October 2009.
Referendums
The holding of referendums, actual or promised, became a significant
feature of the constitutional landscape. As we have seen, referendums
were held in Scotland, Wales, Greater London and Northern Ireland. UKwide referendums were promised on a new electoral system and in the
event of the government recommending that the UK join the single
currency. The Local Government Act 2000 also provided that the introduction of an elected mayor was dependent on a local referendum, triggered either by the council or by a petition of 5% (10% in Wales) of the
electors. An attempt to amend the Political Parties, Elections and
Referendums Bill in 2000 to provide for a referendum on any proposed
legislation ‘of first-class constitutional significance’ failed. Nonetheless, it
was apparent that future proposals for major constitutional change were
likely to face demands to be subject to a referendum. As Derek Scott, a
former Downing Street adviser, recorded: ‘Towards the end of the
Convention on the Future of Europe, several key advisors told Tony Blair
that it would not be possible to hold the line against a referendum on the
EU constitution.’25
The Blair premiership thus saw an array of significant changes to the
Constitution. The list is not exhaustive. There were a range of other
changes. The Electoral Administration Act, for example, lowered the
age at which one could stand for election to public office. (The first
eighteen-year-old candidate stood in the May 2007 local elections.) A
Commissioner for Judicial Appointments was appointed in 2001. Legal
aid was reformed. There were various changes to the structures and procedures of the House of Commons as well as the House of Lords. There
were various attempts by the government, thwarted in the House of
Lords, to reduce the number of jury trials. As we shall see, there were also
attempts to change some of the measures enacted. The foregoing adumbration, though, comprises the most significant changes enacted during
the Blair premiership and all, bar the provisions of the Constitutional
Reform Act, relating to the promises made when Tony Blair entered
office.
25 Derek Scott, Off Whitehall (London: I. B. Taurus, 2004), p. 246.