Congratulations to John Bercow on his election as Speaker. It is a great office to hold at any time. It is now a crucial one in helping to salvage the good name that should be associated with politics.

Two things trouble me, however. The new Speaker made much about how honourable the vast majority of Members of Parliament are. That is not how the public sees us, I’m afraid.

In one sense that doesn’t matter too much. The allowance system is to be reformed by the Kelly Commission. Our past expenses are also to be subjected to an audit by a new independent body which will cost the taxpayer another £600,000 each year. They will presumably treat the Speaker equally with the rest of us. What will they make of flipping a main home? And where does it leave the standing of those Members who have already repaid money back to the Fees Office.

More troubling was the Speaker’s acceptance speech. Prime Ministers and Speakers are never more powerful than at the point of election. Any reforming Speaker is going to face huge resistance here in the Commons.

That is why I was disappointed that the acceptance speech was not mainly devoted to outlining the changes the Speaker intended to bring in immediately.

Shouldn’t notice have been given that his Speakership depended on establishing a Business Committee of the House which had total control over how it spends its time? No other reforms come near to touching this one for importance.

Shouldn’t the Speaker have let it be known, even in the gentlest tones, that he had nailed his Speakership to this reform? Likewise wasn’t this an opportunity to say that the appointment of the Grand Committee’s Chair on Thursday ought be selected by secret ballot, and that he would receive nominations on the Committee’s membership directly from Members. He could then pass on his recommendation on the Committee’s membership to the Committee of Selection.

What was wonderful about yesterday’s proceedings was that the Speaker will thoroughly enjoy his role, this is an attribute not to be under valued. We need somebody who combines the serious intent of a reformer with a character that believes no matter how difficult the decisions that now face us, we should make them with good humour and believing the best in our opponents’ motives.

The Labour leadership question is at the moment settled. The Labour side is beginning to recharge its political batteries. One would expect by this weekend for the focus to return to the Speakership race.

This Speakership will differ from others in that the holder of this office will need to help rebuild trust amongst voters in the parliamentary system. The Speaker therefore needs to have a reach into the world outside parliament. But a Speaker must also, at the same time, command support amongst all the parties here at Westminster, including their own.

While I have received a large amount of support from the public, the lack of support from colleagues in my own party is at the moment a significant weakness. Unless that support is forthcoming I will not be a candidate in the election, though it may be that the Labour block may begin to break up over the next week.

It is important that our election of Speaker is seen to be one that is not driven by party advantage. If that is how the public perceives it to be then the next Speaker will be broken-backed when it comes to helping rebuild the trust in our Parliamentary system.

Because I believe the next Speaker has to be different from other recent Speakers, and that the Speakership could play a pivotal role in negotiating a new contract between the House and the government, and the House and the electorate, I will continue to put up material on my website on how I would like the new Speakership to take shape.

Productivity in the public sector fell by well over three percentage points between 1997 and 2007. This finding, published by the Office of National Statistics is the starting point of the new politics that will dominate the next ten to fifteen years.

Most politicians are still singing from the same old hymn sheet which is now irrelevant. The theme music has been an ever expanding public budget.

It was obvious this time last year that Britain faced a major budgetary crisis. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research estimate that by 2012 public expenditure even after taking into account the changes the Government have announced for after the election will come in at 48% of GDP. By then the Government estimates the economy will be again booming, but the tax revenue from this booming economy will come in at ‘only’ 38% of GDP.

How are the public accounts to be balanced? That is the big central question which needs to come centre stage if the debt market is to be convinced that Britain is worth lending to.

The ONS report is the most useful of pointers to the politics of the new era. Not only has the central assumption of social democracy – that increasing gains can come from increasing public expenditure – been tested to the point of destruction, but the new politics needs to pick up the debate from this very point.

Each of the major public budgets must be set the task of winning those non-existent productivity gains that should have been forthcoming as undreamt of sums money were allowed to slosh around the public sector. New skills will be required for the new politics.

The key people that have to be promoted in the public sector are those whose eyes are firmly on the new agenda of delivering more for less. Job security can only come if public sector workers embrace change to deliver those productivity gains which have failed to materialise since 1997.

Politicians too will need new skills. Move one is to tear up the old hymn sheets. Move two is to write the new music. The idea that one is a good Minister because one successfully defends ones budget against attack has to become old hat.

Ministers should only be promoted because they start delivering more services with a smaller budget.

Labour supporters claiming that the European results were not a catastrophe for the party can only do so by inventing a new meaning for the word catastrophe. Whether one looks at them on a national, regional or local level the picture is pitiful.

The results reflect the collapse of support for the Government in the country. They also ring a clear verdict on the EU.

Take the Wirral results, which cover four Labour Westminster constituencies. The Tories romped home with almost 21,000 votes. Labour was in a poor second place with 16,000.

In Wirral there is considerable resentment against the current EU. It may be that all of these natural voters deserted their natural party to support one of the clearer anti-European tickets, but I doubt it.

Even so the two parties standing in the election who hold the strongest views against our present relationship with Europe far out stretched the Labour vote, and almost toppled the Tory vote.

The BNP came in with 4,666 votes and UKIP’s vote totalled more than 13,000.

Don’t let anyone kid themselves that this was an unimportant election where voters felt they could make a clear protest vote. Unless something changes significantly on a national level these results would be reproduced at a general election.

Labour cannot win with the present Prime Minister. I was one of the seven who would not support his coronation after Tony Blair was shoehorned out of Number 10. But even I didn’t think a Brown administration would be as inept as this one.

The Brownites are attempting to terrorise Labour MPs into inaction. If they succeed then we deserve our fate.

It is simply absurd to argue, as does No. 10, that the next leader must call an immediate general election. A new leader, when being invited by the Queen to form a government, should inform the Monarch that he or she intends to return in April of next year to call for a General Election on May 6.

The new Prime Minister would make that a part of a message brought back from the Palace.

Similarly, the failure to deal with immigration and Europe is poisoning our political system. I have set out in the Balanced Migration campaign how we should counter positively the BNP. Similarly, we need to cut loose European politics from our domestic politics. Voters have no party to represent their worries on this score, only the BNP with their evil interests.

Part of the great political reform programme to be generated from the Commons will entail a head-to-head with Government. The aim, as I have said before, is not the Romantic one of trying to move back to the 1860s when MPs made and unmade Governments and were seen as great initiators of legislation. That was the age when only 3% of males had the vote.

Responsible government – in the sense of governments being held to account by voters – necessarily entails party Government. Trying to go back to a pre-party age will drive the reform programme into a cul-de-sac.

The aim of the Commons must be to ensure that the Government’s programme is better prepared and, to use that horrible phrase, “fit for purpose”. There will always be emergencies to which a Government must react. But outside this narrow area all legislative proposals should start with the publication of a green paper which:

• Explains why the measure is necessary.
• Justifies why the new measures cannot be achieved under existing legislation.
• Sets out the reasons why Ministers believe the option they are proposing is the right one.
• Analyses the costs, benefits and risks of the different options that have been considered.
• Lists the discussions that have already taken place and the timetable for further discussion.
• Invites the relevant select committee to help shape the main parts of the Bill.
• Gives a timetable when the Commons might expect a Bill.

There is nothing revolutionary here. Much of this was agreed by the House in 1997 following the Scott report, but never implemented.

The House also needs to establish a Committee of equal weight to the Public Accounts Committee which would be concerned exclusively with the Government budget, its size and the main headings of expenditure. This new Committee is urgently needed for reasons I have explained elsewhere. This reform is urgent if the Commons is to play its role in helping the Government shift, over the short to medium term, the record levels of debt it needs to market.

One of the other necessary reforms I have already mentioned in the establishment of a Business Committee which sanctions the Commons’ timetable. This Committee would be responsible for ensuring that all Government measures are properly debated and amended by the weight of argument. But it would also be responsible for delivering back to Government its Bills on an agreed timetable.

The Business Committee would also be responsible for ensuring that Select Committee reports are properly debated soon after publication. It would also timetable space for Select Committees to introduce legislation resulting from their reports.

But the overall aim of the Committee should not be more, but less legislation, and of course better legislation.

We are only 8 days into a 34-day contest for the Speakership. Already two characteristics stand out.

The first is the lack of declared candidates. Sensibly the potential aspirants to the Speaker’s chair are seeing what support they have. The successful candidate needs to have good support across all three main parties.

A second characteristic is how the reform agenda is developing or, rather, how the party leaderships are responding to rapidly changing events.

There appears to be a growing agreement that the Commons needs more control over its own timetable. The leaderships are offering more time for backbencher measures and, perhaps, a secret ballot for select committee membership and chairmanships. Nick Clegg is proving to be the most radical on this issue.

What is not being conceded yet is for all Commons’ activities to be controlled by the Commons itself.

This is crucial for a healthy realignment of power between Commons and Government. Governments have a right to get their mandated election programmes through. How else can they be held accountable by voters at an election? No, or less whipping, as the Commons considers the details of a Bill, would be a good move.

But what of measures that have never been presented to the electorate? Given the volume and importance of the swathes of European legislation, how can the Commons get real and devote what perhaps might be one or two days a week, to debating, deliberating, changing, and if need be, rejecting European legislation?

Reforms on this front are all issues that, in normal times, could be considered by a Speaker’s Conference. But, given the mire we are in, the next Speaker needs to develop his or her role in becoming the voice of the House, not only in the media, but in extending the reform agenda and enabling MPs fully to make such a programme their own.

In the past Speaker’s Conferences have considered a single aspect of reform and have had small membership. A 21st Century Speaker’s Conference could divide itself into a number of working parties each considering part of the emerging reform agenda. It will be the new Speaker’s task to bring these working party reports into a coherent reform programme.

Such a Speaker’s Conference could involve all those backbench MPs willing to play a role in one or more aspects of developing a truly revolutionary change in how politics operates in this country. Such an agenda would cover the following.

• How voters select candidates – should this be by open primaries or are other, better, methods available to candidates to be more representative in their views of the constituents who return them?

• How would this reform on open primaries reflect how MPs are elected? Much of the debate now is how to make MPs in safe seats more accountable to voters by changing the voting system. Would open primaries change this aspect of the debate?

• Voters are increasingly footloose with respect to party loyalty. Will this willingness to vote for third party candidates give such groups a fairer representation? Or are new measures necessary? To what extent should the Boundary Commission be asked to take into account third party representation when drawing up new boundaries?

• Increasing voter power over the selection of candidates would impact on the whipping system. Successful candidates, while still coming in on party labels, would feel more independent than candidates chosen by small and often declining party memberships. What other measures are necessary to strike a more mature balance between being able to hold a government accountable for its programme and treating MPs as mature specimens of the human race? David Cameron is moving on this issue.

• To what extent would open primaries serve as an effective recall measure on poorly performing MPs? Is mid-term recall necessary and, if so, how can MPs representing unpopular views, and who make our national debates more representative by sticking to their line, be protected against intolerant pressure groups who could wield power way beyond their true influence? Gordon Brown is right to stress the dangers of reform here.
  

There are still 26 days left in debating what sort of Speaker we need in the next parliament. What could be one of those once a century flowering of debate on parliamentary reform looks as though it is going to take off, thank goodness. Hence my delight in seeing a rolling reform programme. Let’s hope much of what is proposed here may look old hat by the time MPs choose the next occupant of the Speaker’s chair. I am sure in 26 days time my blog entries will show just such a progression.

My next entry will be on how the Government needs to clean up its act.

One wag reported, on hearing the news of the death of Metternich, “Now what did he mean by that?” The actions and sayings of Alan Johnson will likewise be analysed. So what did he mean by raising the question of electoral reform?

Here was a cry for traditional British politics to re-emerge. What Cabinet Government was like is still within living memory of older voters. It was not uncommon then for major figures in a political party to engage voters in a wider debate.

Alan is right in insisting that the reform of Parliament has to go beyond electing a new Speaker. The new Speaker could have a key role in driving through a new contract between the Commons and the voter but also, as Alan suggests a new contract between the Commons and government.

This is the central issue of the Speakership election. But is Alan right to back the Jenkins proposals? Again what is so good about Speaker Martin’s delayed resignation is that the country now has perhaps a unique opportunity to debate not that tired old phrase “constitutional reform” but to remake our democracy.

We must move to a system where minority parties are better represented in Parliament. But is any reform which contains a list system, however modified, going to satisfy an electorate fed up to the teeth at what is sees as a conveyor belt of party hacks being thrown at it?

For that is a key aspect of the Jenkins proposals. An element of proportionality will be brought into the system by “electing” members from a list system dominated – yes you’ve got it – by the party caucus.

We surely do not want more of that. One of the tasks of reform is to lessen the grip parties have in a way which doesn’t destroy a party system delivering responsible government i.e. a Government that is able to be held to account.

I have long advocated the French system. This keeps the constituency link so that every Member of Parliament knows that the buck stops with them. But it does ensure that every MP is elected by 50% plus one of the voters.

On the first Sunday of an election those representatives passing that margin are declared elected. On the following Sunday French voters turn up to decide between the top two candidates from the previous week when neither had passed the 50% plus one barrier. This system is capable of delivering not only authority to the MP, but better representation for minority parties. Take my Birkenhead result in 1979.

On our first part of the post system, I gained 49% of the poll, the Tories were second, the Liberals third. Under the French system I would have probably won with Liberal Votes switching to me.

But suppose the Liberals had come a good second and I was still a good way from gaining the support of the majority of voters. I am not so sure in those circumstances that the Conservative voters, not to mention a whole chunk of Labour voters, would not have moved on the second ballot to elect a Liberal Member. The closer the parties are in votes, i.e. the further any candidate is from gaining 50% plus one of the votes, the greater the “upset” is likely to be.

The other system I have advocated is open primaries. I believe in Birkenhead the law should allow the local Labour party to put me up with other Labour candidates in a primary and allow all voters, Tories and Liberals, to select the candidate who will in all likelihood the next Member of Parliament.

Not only would such a system prevent the wasted vote syndrome that there is in the safest seats. But it would likely result in a large number of such seats seeing the successful candidate from the primary being elected in a General Election unopposed. The fight could have already taken place in the primary.

Why not let parties hold such primaries should they want to? A small change in the electoral law would give a green light to greater voter choice of their representative.

For more information please see my Policy Exchange pamphlet “Life Support“.

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.

When the Speaker stands up today at 3:30, he has to deal with what might become a complete breakdown of trust in our Parliamentary system, by voters, as a result of the expenses fiasco. The question of expenses rightly angers the public, but the Speaker is now offered a unique opportunity to reform Parliament.

His statement will hopefully cover five areas:

1. He should announce zero tolerance to fraudulent claims. Those in the outside world guilty of the worst abuses that have been uncovered would face prosecution. MPs should not be exempt from the criminal law. My guess is a lot of local parties will also begin the process of deselection. Failure to do so will see incumbents challenged by anti-sleaze candidates, who will probably win their seat.

2. The Speaker needs to announce immediate measures governing all allowances while awaiting the Kelly Commission on Standards in Public Life to report. All expenses from the beginning of this financial year should go online, the moment they have been agreed by the fees office. A slim-line Additional Cost Allowance should be announced with the clearest of guidelines outlining what can be claimed – not what cannot be claimed. The Communications Allowance should be abolished, no allowances should be used for supposed “services” received from local parties, and MPs should be forbidden to allow their local parties to use their offices in the constituencies.

3. The Speaker should announce that he has requested the Kelly Commission to report by mid-July. MPs can then debate the proposals before the summer, but they need to approve them without changing a dot or comma. The Fees Office would then have the summer recess to bring in the totally new system operating from the autumn.

4. The Commons must recognise that we live in an age of party governments, and that parties are crucial for delivering responsible government. Failure to get through their election programme would result in governments not being accountable for broken election promises. As a part of a new clear contract between the government and the Commons, while accepting the need for party government, the Speaker should announce today that it is up to the House of Commons to decide how the Government gets that programme through the House. He should set out that he intends to propose new machinery for managing House of Commons business, so that the Commons itself will in future organise its own timetable to consider Government measures, as well as its own measures.

5. The House of Commons must now better represent the views of voters. This should naturally follow from the Commons gaining control over its own timetable. The Government needs to be much more relaxed about the details of their programme so that MPs, better representing their constituents, can make measures contained in government Bills are more fit for purpose. Similarly, the Commons needs to elect the Chairmen and Members of each of its own Committees by secret ballot. The Select Committee system should also be enhanced not only in a pre-legislative role on Bills. It needs to extend its works so that serious issues raised by constituents are reported upon making it easier for those issues to be translated into future reform programmes.

Further reading:

Expenses are just a symptom, parliament must be remade – Sunday Times.

“And take upon’s the mystery of things As if we were God’s spies….”

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Today’s Times has another exposé, not this time on MPs’ expenses, but on the spy rings that operated against this country leading up to the end of the Second World War and beyond. Here’s a personal note.

This paper has a strong record in exposing espionage. It led the campaign over what was known as the “Fourth Man” in the Cambridge spy network. The great investigator was Peter Hennessy.

Hennessy was getting too close. The Times was fed, I guess, misleading information from questionable sources in the security services and named the wrong B (as he was known).

B turned out to be Sir Anthony Blunt.

Years on the Times returns to this topic and writes up an exposé on the Oxford spy ring. They name Arthur Wynn as a key player.

I know Arthur’s wife, Peggy, from my days at the Child Poverty Action Group. She was and remains a grand figure influencing British life in two significant ways.

The first was the research she undertook looking at how families were unfavourably treated in the tax and benefits system. She wrote a seminal work, Family Policy, which was a fitting tribute to the work Eleanor Rathbone began in her campaigns for family endowment and documented in her great book, The Disinherited Family.

In my days at CPAG, and on official visits to Sir Keith Joseph, then the Health and Welfare Secretary of State, Margaret Wynn’s book would be either on a shelf behind him, or on the table itself. It was he who told me about the importance of the book, that I should read it and as they say – the rest is history.

But not quite. That book certainly started to change the Heath Government’s policy towards families which has more recently run into the sands. For some reason best known to themselves, the Government has devised an unbelievably generous tax and benefits system which is totally blind towards whether the family has one or two parents. Not a move Margaret Wynn would have supported.

But Margaret, who is still alive, and her husband had an even more dramatic effect on British politics. As part of my job with CPAG I edited the group’s journal – Poverty.

The Wynns- submitted me a piece on the worrying trend of a falling birth rate amongst more prosperous families and a significant increase in the birth rate of poorer families. Keith Joseph, a CPAG member, read the piece and used it for a speech just prior to the challenge to Heath’s leadership.

He pointed to this trend and to the dangers it held for a prosperous country. Of course it had overtones of the Eugenics debate of the 1930s which had widespread support and which was quickly buried, thanks to the evil Hitler regime’s policies on racial purity.

But not to look at how societies are changing, and what benefits or challenges this throws up, is simple irrationality bordering on the idiotic.

There followed a huge hullabaloo in the press and as a result of the media coverage Sir Keith Joseph announced he thought he was not suitable to challenge Ted Heath for the leadership of the Tory party. It is at this point that Mrs. Thatcher realised that, if there was to be a challenge, she had to be the challenger.

Two rather good footnotes to history on God’s spies of families, do you not think?