We are all reformers now

We are all reformers now. This will be the refrain of all the candidates for the Speakership. It is a phrase that hints at the opportunity, but also the danger. Will the election open the way to the most powerful Speaker in our history?

Both candidate and programme are of equal importance. The next Speaker has to be strong enough to get the reforms through.

Speaker Martin has done the Commons a great favour in setting out a leisurely election process. It will be the first campaign ever in which candidates will be required to publish manifestos and possibly to participate in hustings.

But the election will go further than that. The public will want their say in who they see as their Speaker. Local newspapers are likely to run their own polls on who constituents would most favour. And this is likely to be the first election in Britain where the internet plays a key role.

The next Speaker will only be the most powerful in history if he or she is elected on a programme that points to the next phase in our Parliamentary development. I have been asked whether I will throw my hat into the ring. I am thinking about that as I accept that there maybe too many colleagues on my own side who would block any such possibility.

I will therefore spend the next ten days or so developing the details of a programme, and I shall be happy to support anybody who is more likely than I to drive through the programme of reform. I will make an announcement on whether I am a candidate after we return from the Parliamentary recess.

I have already given the headings of what I believe that manifesto should cover in my previous blog, I intend to develop over the next ten days or so each of its ideas in more detail.

Any great reforming programme has to take the two central ideas that underlie our democracy – representative and responsible government – and reinterpret them for a Parliament in a deep crisis that goes, way, way beyond expenses. The Commons is failing to fulfil its historic role.

We MPs only get responsible government because parties are elected on a programme and are then held accountable for this programme by voters at the following election.

Crucial to the delivery of that responsibility is the political party.

Without political parties we would be in a worse state than the fifth French Republic. But voters increasingly loathe how parties operate.

No new contract is going to be successful unless a new balance is found on the need for the government to gain its programme through the House and a revitalised House of Commons being as a representative assembly. We will never get that revitalization until the Commons itself controls its own programme by its own business committee.

But that business committee has to go beyond simply “receiving” government Bills.

How can the representative arm of our constitution be strengthened in totally new ways so that Parliament’s consideration of government Bills allows the representative arm of our constitution new powers. But, likewise, how can these powers be exercised in a way that is effective but does not threaten either the Government’s existence or it being held accountable at the end of the day by voters for the totality of its programme.

I will pick this point up in my next blog.

Date added: Wednesday 20th May 2009