Not surprisingly, given developments in the House of Commons, one question frequently asked in conversations in the Lords today was: what would be the position if the police sought to enter a peer’s office in the House of Lords?
The positions in the two Houses are not identical. The House of Lords is a self-regulating House and the Lord Speaker does not have powers equivalent to those of the Speaker in the Commons. The position is somewhat ambiguous in relation both to the Lord Speaker and the Leader of the House, who is a Government minister but also has a greater role than her Commons’ equivalent in acting on behalf of the House.
The questions being asked informally were raised this afternoon during debate on the Queen’s Speech by the Leader of the Opposition, Lord Strathclyde. In response, the Leader of the House, Baroness Royall, announced that she had already asked the House authorities to prepare a report setting out the current position on this aspect of privilege in respect of the House and its members. ‘I will ensure that, once the report has been completed, copies are made available to noble Lords as speedily as possible.’
Though one trusts there will be no cases where there is a need for the police to seek entry to a peer’s office, it is nonetheless prudent to clarify the position. Sometimes events move on and our powers and privileges are not discussed and clarified in order to keep pace with them.
The worst thing about this is that Parliamentary Privilage should not have to be clarified, it should be codified!
It, like a worryingly large portion of our constitution is little more than constitutional convention that has absolutely no force in law, and that the Damian Green affair has shown to be easily ignored should anyone have the will.
I hope that pressure is put on the government to introduce an emergancy bill to codify parliament as a proverbial embassy, subject to the parliamentary authorities and not the police.
I don’t hold out much hope though.
In relation to the law, and the presumption of innocence, I find it astonishing that the Lords ruled that it was lawful to hold the DNA of innocent people on a database !!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/04/law-genetics
Why on earth should these people have had to take their case to court in Europe ? Surely this could have been resolved here at far less cost to the taxpayer ?
From the other side of the pond it looks simply amazing that this sort of thing should be an issue at all. Of course an MP has a right to be secure in his documents and effects, this right is just derived from the right that everyone enjoys to be secure from police interference in their daily lives.
But that is the rub isn’t it? In the UK no one actually has the right to be secure in their documents and effects from police searches. Just as no one has the right to secure their own genetic information from police inquisition or the right to be either charged with a crime and presented with the opportunity to rebut the evidence or set free, when detained. As such the practice of delineating rights for MP’s or those who sit in the Lords is not an instance of deriving those rights from the basic protections afforded by the law and democratic norms. Instead it looks like the carving out of privileges unique to the elite which have no real basis in democratic values. After all, it is not just MP’s who perform a valuable service to society that would be made more difficult in a climate of increased police scrutiny – every man’s life is valuable to himself and it is made less and less his own life and more and more an asset of the state when the authorities can come in and take information about it or detain the person with out oversight and without presenting justification. In saying this, of course, I run the risk of having such an opinion simply dismissed by my old-world cousins who seem not to value the service the individual provides to society in coming up with his own views on how he ought to live and executing them. (Mill where are you when we need you?) But, even if this point of view is dismissed as a futile and academic defense of a libertarian position – it should be pointed out that without carving out some sphere of privacy and liberty that the citizen enjoys there can be no room for a free press, a confidential environment for doctor and patient, lawyer and client or teacher and student. When the state revokes the sacredness of one’s own judgment and its natural connection to the governanace of one’s own life – there is little room left for it to recognize the sacrosanct work of doctors, lawyers and the press. (To name just a few.) Further as this trend continues it starts to look as though the state’s judgment is the only one that matters and so makes it less willing to answer to, much less consider, a point of view other than its own.
I for one am very suspicious of codification, YAPB. It can easily be used as a ceiling, not a floor, for the rights of the House.
Convention can have a far more powerful application than law, and the Speaker is learning about it now.
I know that I am an odd combination of a nonsubject, one with some almost socialist beliefs and sensibilities and yet to the right of the Tory Lords on many things. I believe it was a tragedy to forbid the Lords wearing armor and weapons in chambers. Rather they shoould have been allowed to include properly finely crafted single shot guns. I see photos of protesters calling for destruction of the royal house, see bombs on busses and trains and say that the vast security structure has not created perfect safety. A couple of armed hereditary peers who assist the Speaker and have small hereditary chartered forces at home would remind all that the UK trusts its most invested and distinguished participants in society. Further, such a display would serve as a a bastion of private rights and a perpetual resistance to unbridled statism. Finally, I know the UK has abandoned the paranoid style in discourse. On the other hand as an American I am proud to say I believe it still has its place. The paranoid analysis is that a few brave lads with huge egos and not too much sense (which is to say Knights) might give any future coup a lot more trouble than moderns are able to understand in their security seminars.
This must seem gibberish to some. But Britain remains a symbolic culture and a powerful symbol is lacking in the balance.
The statement of Lord West today in the Lords had some important news in it. He referred to a conversation he had with Black Rod about what Black Rod would do if something similar were to happen in the Lords. From Hansard: “I have spoken to Black Rod and he has told me that, if the police arrived here, he would stop them on the boundaries of this place. He would then talk to the Lord Speaker, the Clerk of Parliaments and perhaps the Leader of the House, and take advice before allowing anything to happen. That is what would happen in this House; it is not appropriate for us to tell the other place what it should say.”
If the Sergeant at Arms had the same attitude, the Commons wouldn’t be in the mess they are right now.
This is all a bit like designing a disaster recovery system and ‘not’ being able to test it. Any volunteers?
Ref: Times Online RedBox Sam Coates Political Blog
http://timesonline.typepad.com/politics/
Why the Speaker was Right
http://timesonline.typepad.com/politics/files/snpc-04905.doc