It seems incredible that a government with a majority of 161, in its eighth year of office, and facing the disciplines of an imminent election, can simultaneously provoke one of the largest House of Commons revolts of its period in office and inflame MPs of all parties by procedural incompetence.
Yet this is the double whammy that Labour inflicted on itself in a torrid five hours in the Westminster Parliament last week. At the end of a bruising yet compelling day’s debate on the Prevention of Terrorism Bill, Labour’s majority was cut to 14 on the proposed ”house arrest” powers. Meanwhile, its reputation for parliamentary management was in tatters after the Home Office failed to table its proposed amendments for MPs to debate.
Labour’s two major errors — underestimating the civil-liberty concerns of its own supporters and offending MPs by a shambolic approach to parliamentary procedure — were characteristic. Labour too often has a tin ear to the law and its approach to Parliament is frequently slapdash. Think the Iraq war legality dispute on the one hand. Think the botched abolition of the Lord Chancellor on the other. Monday combined the two and was a perfect storm waiting to happen.
Part of the explanation for the shambles is that changes in the composition of the parliamentary party mean that the modern Labour Party has simply lost the instinct for rigorous legal and parliamentary process that it once possessed. New Labour ideologues extol economic individualism but mistrust the notion of individual civil liberty. Too few MPs have the combined skill, independence and power to stand up to the centralised party machine. The result is too often bad legislation and inadequate parliamentary scrutiny.
Part of the problem, though, is that there are too few Labour MPs who know enough about the law or who are tough enough to use the parliamentary rulebook effectively. Standards have also fallen because there are simply too few lawyers to ensure they are maintained.
Back in 1945, there were 41 lawyers in Clement Attlee’s parliamentary party of 393 Labour MPs, 10% of the total. In 1964, when Harold Wilson first took office, there were 46 among his 317 MPs — 15%. But in 1997, when Tony Blair became prime minister, only 29 of his 418 lawmakers — a mere 7% — had legal qualifications.
Today there are 31 lawyer MPs on the Labour benches, of whom 13 are advocates (four of whom sit round the Cabinet table) and 18 lawyers.
So thin on the ground are Labour lawyers nowadays that in 1999 Blair became the first prime minister of the 20th century to have to appoint his attorney general from the House of Lords rather than the House of Commons. The current Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, has maintained this new tradition.
The lack of Labour lawyers reflects the increased professionalisation of both politics and the law. The era in which a sitting MP could also maintain a legal practice — not uncommon on the Labour benches in the 1970s — has largely gone. Last week’s events may have been a reflection of that.
The Conservatives have never had to face this problem. The Tory benches have regularly been full of lawyers — more than a quarter of the parliamentary party in 1965 were practising lawyers, for example. There are still as many Tory lawyer MPs as Labour lawyer MPs, in spite of Labour’s huge overall majority.
This instinct and experience showed in the Commons on Monday. Well led by the shadow attorney general, Dominic Grieve, and supported by lawyers Edward Garnier, Bill Cash and the ever formidable Kenneth Clarke, the opposition not only took the government’s case to pieces but also managed to unite uneasy MPs of all parties behind their efforts. — Â