David Owen on Constitutional Reform

Unlocking Democracy by Peter Facey is your first book, the history of 20 years of Charter 88, a British pressure group that advocated constitutional and electoral reform (owing its origins to the lack of a written constitution in the United Kingdom).

Yes, and it’s looking forward with contributions from a lot of different people, such as David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg, Helena Kennedy… It’s a pot-pourri for anybody who wants to start on the issue of how to reform the British political system. It’s got a very good, broad perspective, and then I go into much more detail with the other four books that I’ve chosen.

Which of the particular contributions did you like?

Well I think it is interesting, with an election in Britain, to get the rather general views of the three party leaders. But for me the fundamental issue about Charter 88 is that it came at a point when the SDP [the Social Democratic Party] was more or less folding up, and I was always very impressed as foreign secretary with Charter 77, which is really an international campaign for doing something about human rights, and what seemed to me in 1988 absolutely crucial was that we had to involve the non-politician.

The founders of Charter 88, I think, managed to keep it all-party, and they did manage to build support for quite a lot of the constitutional reform that the politicians agreed on, or at least, had championed. Much wider support. That was very necessary when you think that we went into referendums on Scottish devolution, and Welsh devolution, which was only just won.

And we have to remember that 1988 was a period of real constitutional stasis, wasn’t it? I mean, hardly anything changed in the constitution since the aborted devolution vote back in the late 1970s.

Yes. That was in 1979, and I, in fact, supported it as a member of Jim Callaghan’s Cabinet. But it was very obvious that the Labour Government, and certainly the Labour Party, was very split on devolution, and took a long time to convince Labour that there had to be a legislative devolution.

I like to think that the SDP during the 80s, which was a very strong campaign for constitutional reform, helped generate that movement. But as I say, it needed something much more, and Charter 88 came up really as the result of a letter in the New Statesman.

It’s done extremely well. And Anthony Barnett and people associated with it, such as Geoffrey Bindman, have done great work in my view.

So what is your second book?

Well I think this should be The New Constitution by Vernon Bogdanor. It’s a quite remarkable book.

Vernon is an interesting man. Funnily enough, he was David Cameron’s tutor at Oxford – and said that David Cameron was one of his brightest ever pupils. He was a Conservative, he came into the SDP – I don’t quite know where he is, politically, now. He’s Professor of Government at Oxford University. I think he’s got a broad perspective, and the important thing about his book is that he says that we absolutely do, by now, have a written constitution. It’s a myth going on, talking about the Great British anomaly of not having a written constitution.

He argues, I think very convincingly, that if you put together the continued treaties of the European Union, and you add to it legislative devolution in Scotland and in Wales and the power-sharing constitutional arrangement in Northern Ireland, and on top of that you add the fact that we made the European Convention on Human Rights, which is nothing to do with the European Union, which came in after the Second World War, and built up a great deal of authority, and now made that justiciable in the British legal system – that is what most countries would call a constitution.

Does he talk about future constitutional reform?

Yes, he outlines most of the new ways that it could be done. You find in the book for example a really detailed analysis of hung parliaments – governing without a majority. The Human Rights Act is discussed, and all the complexities of it, and the problems that the Human Rights Act is actually creating in Britain at the moment (with holding terror suspects and so on).

On devolution, he discusses in some detail fixed-term parliaments, which I think holds the actual key to whether or not we can make substantive changes, and of course all the history of and the potential of referendums, which in my view has been an extremely important reform.

Without the referendum in 1975, I don’t think we would have had the subsequent, fairly long period – nearly 25 years – of broad acceptance of British European Union membership. Certainly without it I think we would have not have been able to handle the Labour Party when they came out in favour of leaving the European Union without even a referendum.

I think a referendum for constitutional questions is very important – widening democracy out from the political elite – and I think referendums have been an extremely important step in stopping us going into the Euro. In the financial crisis, at least in terms of growth, we have been able to devalue, we’re not in a fixed rate system of the Eurozone.

Well let’s move on to Europe, because your third book is Peter Norman’s The Accidental Constitution.

This is a book for people who really want to understand Europe.