PLG: Day 1 structure of the register, protection of title

Wednesday 28 January 2009, Thought for the Day on Radio 4 was with the Right Reverend Tom Butler, Bishop of Southwark. As part of his job he is obliged to take up a seat in the House of Lords. His thought for the day was provoked by a 'cash for questions' allegation but led him to speak about the mundane details of the tedious work of a Lord: many hours of rather tedious examination of a bill, line by line. This, he went on, is 'the main contribution of the Lords to our democracy, not dramatic speeches to the gallery but meticulous revising of proposed legislation'.

Put this alongside the fact, now more and more openly acknowledged, that since 1997 the government has passed more laws than at any other time ever, and that many of those laws have been in the form of statutory instruments (which limit the possibility of debate severely), and it is perhaps not suprising that some Lords might be trying to regulate their work flow in the time honoured way of invoking an economic sanction.

No, it's not right and the individuals concerned should certainly be put into question. But there is also another way of looking at it, to wonder how the overall scenery could be contributing to a rash of unusual symptoms.

Tom Butler's thought ended with the words 'I see a House with mostly pretty dedicated and impressive characters working long and hard for the common good'. This was almost exactly the way a fellow member of the public gallery described what she saw at the HPC PLG for C&P later in the same day.

The first meeting of this group had been an unpleasant experience to observe. This was not all due to the inconvenient layout of the seats for sure (which had miraculously been rearranged in spite of letters to the contrary the day before). It was mostly about the implicit force with which the machinery was being applied with the result that debate, discussion, dispute were stifled. Today that was not so much the case.

Nevertheless, the thorny issue of centralised power imposing a state of affairs without a rational debate still has a part to play. But this is a part that has to remain concealed in order for the state to save face. And it is in everyone's interest, apparently, to maintain the mask in place.

There is the substance and there is the structure, and somehow the structure has been bent out of shape, which poisons the stuff of the substance. So, both of these things need to be addressed.

The business of the day took its lead from Michael Guthrie's summary of responses to a section of the call for ideas. But here again, it is impossible to go forward without first attending to the detail of the process. It will be the subject of the next blog.