Reform at the Centre: the Primacy of Politics

Abstract

In principle the sweep of constitutional reform was intended to embrace at any rate some of the central institutions at the heart of the British system of government. Parliament was on the agenda and in far-less-specific terms so were the political executive and the administrative organisations serving it that together make up the civil service. It has to be said at the outset that with one exception none of these central institutions was after 1997 the target of a specific measure of constitutional reform to which the government was politically committed. The exception was the second chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords, which figured in the original catalogue of reform measures promised in New Labour’s manifesto before the 1997 election. Here the initial commitment was quite straightforward: to abolish the hereditary principle in relation to membership of the second chamber. In relation to the other principal institutions at the centre the undertakings were vaguer and did not call for immediate action. The House of Commons was to be modernised and made more effective, though it was not explained what that might mean. There was something like a promise to look at electoral reform in relation to the Commons, but certainly no clear commitment to move towards a form of proportional representation for parliamentary elections. As for the political executive not surprisingly its shape, structure and operational principles were to be left to pragmatic adaptation at the discretion of the prime minister, and much the same can be said of the civil service.