Tag Archives: david lidington

Should military action require parliamentary approval? 

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The role of parliament in authorising the use of military force has been much debated in recent years, and most recently due to airstrikes against targets in Yemen. The Unit hosted an event with three distinguished experts to discuss what role – if any – parliament should have in approving military action. Rowan Hall offers a summary of the key contributions.

Recent airstrikes in Yemen have revived the debate around parliament’s role in military action. In March, the Constitution Unit held an event on this very topic, with a panel consisting of academic experts Dr Veronika Fikfak and Dr James Strong, and former Cabinet minister and current chair of the Royal United Services Institute, David Lidington. This blog post summarises some of the points made at the event, a recording of which is available on YouTube and in podcast form. 

Dr Veronika Fikfak 

Veronika Fikfak began by outlining the current constitutional convention governing parliament’s role in military action and made three key points. 

First, citing the Cabinet Manual, Fikfak said that the role of MPs currently only extends to debating military action, not necessarily to voting on it. Although MPs have voted on military action in the past, this is not always guaranteed under the convention as it currently stands.  

Second, Fikfak said that the convention as it currently stands is explicitly linked to the period before military action takes place, not during or after it happens. She welcomed this, arguing that if parliament is to have a real say, it needs to do so in advance of military action. However, she did also note that this aspect of the convention has not always been observed.  

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Unionism and the Conservative Brexit deal rebellion

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jack_sheldon.1image_normalThis week, MPs voted in favour of renegotiating the parts of the Withdrawal Agreement that relate to the ‘backstop’. The backstop and the land border between the UK and Ireland has been one of the most divisive Brexit issues for the Conservatives. Jack Sheldon and Michael Kenny discuss what this tells us about the party’s attitude to the Union.

‘Something ghastly called UK(NI) has been created. Northern Ireland will be under a different regime. That is a breach of the Act of Union 1800’. Owen Paterson MP

‘I am concerned about the prospects of a Northern Ireland that risks being increasingly decoupled from the United Kingdom, and about how that could undermine the Union that is at the heart of the United Kingdom’. Justine Greening MP

‘I would really like to support the deal of this Prime Minister and this Government, but the issue for me is the backstop. I served in Northern Ireland and I lost good colleagues to protect the Union. I will not vote for anything that does not protect the Union’. Sir Mike Penning MP

Concerns about the implications of the Irish backstop for the integrity of the domestic Union contributed significantly to the scale of the 118-strong backbench rebellion that led to Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement being defeated on 15 January, by the extraordinary margin of 432 to 202. Following a debate and vote on 29 January, the Prime Minister has now committed to seek legally binding changes to the backstop, in the hope that this might win over at least some of the rebels before the next vote.

What do the arguments that have been made about the backstop tell us about the nature of the ‘unionism’ that prevails in the contemporary Conservative Party? This is a pertinent question, given that the sincerity of professed support for the Union from Conservatives has regularly been called into question by academic and media commentators in recent years, with increasing numbers of critics suggesting that leading figures from the Tory Party have harvested ‘English nationalist’ sentiments and are willing to put the future of the Union at risk. Continue reading →

House of Lords Constitution Committee reports on delegated powers

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photo_2017_1_cropped (1)tierney2.e1489415384219Last week, the Constitution Committee published its report on the increasing use of delegated powers by the government. Mark Elliott and Stephen Tierney highlight the key concerns raised and proposals made by the Committee in two principal areas: the ways in and extent to which legislative powers are delegated, and scrutiny of such powers’ exercise.

The House of Lords Constitution Committee last week published a major report on delegated powers. It is a component of a larger, four-part inquiry that the Committee is undertaking into the legislative process. The first report in this series, concerning the preparation of legislation for parliament, was published in October 2017; reports on the passage of legislation through parliament and post-legislative scrutiny will be published in due course.

Delegation of power

The Constitution Committee, unsurprisingly, does not begin from the unworldly premise that parliamentary delegations of law-making authority are inherently problematic; after all, they are, and will remain, a fact of life. The Committee does, however, adopt as its premise the position that the legitimacy of such delegations is governed by ‘constitutional standards’ whose enforcement amounts to a ‘constitutional obligation’ on parliament’s part.

The Committee goes on to articulate two key principles by reference to which the legitimacy of delegations of power ought to be judged. First, it is ‘essential that primary legislation is used to legislate for policy and other major objectives’, with delegated legislation used only ‘to fill in the details’. Against this background, the Committee laments the ‘upward trend in the seeking of delegated powers in recent years’. Second, and relatedly, the Committee states that it is ‘constitutionally objectionable for the Government to seek delegated powers simply because substantive policy decisions have not yet been taken’ — a phenomenon in which there has been ‘a significant and unwelcome increase’. Having thus nailed its colours to the mast, the Committee goes on to identify a suite of constitutionally dubious trends and practices to which its attention was drawn during the course of the inquiry and which it has itself discerned in recent years through its constitutional scrutiny of all Bills that reach the House of Lords. Continue reading →

Brexit and the territorial constitution: déjà vu all over again?

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wincottd (1)Brexit has led to conflict between Westminster and the devolved administrations, with the UK Attorney General recently going as far as referring the Welsh and Scottish Continuity bills to the UK Supreme Court. Here Daniel Wincott argues that the Brexit process has highlighted the flaws in the UK’s systems of intergovernmental relations and that action is needed to prevent repeating the mistakes of the past.

The territorial constitution is particularly fragile. Pursuing Brexit, Theresa May’s government has stumbled into deep questions about devolution. The territorial politics of Brexit is a bewildering mix of ignorance, apparent disdain, confrontation, cooperation and collaboration. Rarely have the so-called devolution ‘settlements’ appeared more unsettled.

The UK’s system for intergovernmental relations (IGR) between devolved and UK governments has been hidden in obscurity. Arcane processes – Legislative Consent Memoranda (LCMs – also known as Sewel Motions) and Joint Ministerial Committees (JMCs) – are now more widely discussed.

Brexit has revealed limits and weaknesses in existing devolution structures. UK intergovernmental relations is an unappetising spaghetti of abstruse acronyms, but compared to other multi-level states it is also remarkably informal and limited. Opportunities to develop the system may emerge, but it could also collapse under the pressure of leaving the EU. Continue reading →

Devolution, Brexit, and the prospect of a new constitutional settlement for the four countries of the UK

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bigpic (1)Over the next 12 months the UK’s national and devolved institutions will be taking decisions that will rank amongst the most significant political events in Britain’s post-war history. In an attempt to contribute to the debate on the role of devolved bodies in the Brexit process, the Welsh Assembly’s Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee has produced a report on the subject. In this blog its Chair, Mick Antoniw AM, offers his personal view on the government’s current approach to Brexit and calls for a constitutional reordering of the UK once Britain leaves the EU.

Leaving the EU has turned out to be more than a mere decision to leave a Europe-wide economic and social bloc and has brought into sharp focus the future role and status of the UK in the world. What do we represent and how are we perceived? How much influence in world economic and political affairs do we really have? These questions, however, go even deeper in that they also call into question the very purpose, long-term future and stability of the UK as a country. 

For almost 50 years, since the passing of the European Communities Act, the answers to these questions have been masked by our membership of a European project that with economic and technological globalisation has been developing into a political and social union based on its collective economic strength. 

The Social Chapter, the central role of the European Court of Justice, the developing role of the European Investment Bank and the development of the EU as a trading bloc in its own right created a legal as well as an economic framework for an expanding Europe. Within this context the UK’s increasingly dysfunctional and conflicting internal constitutional arrangements have been masked and constrained by the broader EU constitutional framework and jurisdiction. 

Pandora’s Box has now been opened. British nationalism’s nakedness has been revealed and our political and constitutional nudity is now there for all to see, exposed by the absence of any clear post-Brexit plan. Now that Article 50 has been triggered, the countdown to leaving the UK has begun and on 29 March 2019 we will be out of the EU, ready or not.  Continue reading →