"Separation", Indeed

As well as joining in the characteristically adolescent banging on about "corruption" (the other such is about "hypocrisy"), the BBC has joined the Lib Dems (whose very existence is a sign of just how perpetually adolescent our society has become) in still banging on about the BAE "scandal", one of the very few authentically Labour things that this Government has ever done.

That "scandalous" act reasserted the priority of high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs, as well as of the national interest generally (regrettable though it is that this is defined as cuddling up to the Saudis), and of Parliament and the Government drawn from and accountable to Parliament, over the Liberal notion of an American-style "separation of powers" involving in practice (as in the US) the supremacy of an unelected judiciary, and that still drawn (unlike the Bar generally these days) from a very narrow social, socio-economic and educational base indeed.

How the Lib Dems get away with selling themselves as a party of the Left is, like how they get away with selling themselves as the Nice Party, one of the great mysteries of British politics.

Where, exactly, is the "scandal" in the dropping of the investigation into BAE and Saudi Arabia? At the very least, it is as nothing compared to John Major’s appointment of Jonathan Aitken (whom I freely accept is a changed man these days) as Minister of Defence Procurement on the direct orders of the Saudi Royal Family. Remember that? Some of us do.

Is it a Labour Government’s defence of the skilled, high-wage, high-status jobs of the British working class that is "scandalous"? I should say that it was just surprising, and a bit late in the Blair day. And I write as one who, in principle, would ban entirely the sale of arms abroad, provided that the Government had already fulfilled its responsibilities to the relevant section of the citizenry by diversifying its employment accordingly while fully preserving its skills, wages and status.

But we long ago chose to get into bed with the House of Saud, and we have bizarrely become even more intimate with them (of all people) since 11th September 2001. So now we must lie not only in that bed, but in that embrace.

And do any of you believe that foreign policy, defence policy, or even the jobs of our own people (fellow-citizens, fellow-voters, fellow-taxpayers) should have no bearing on these matters? If so, then you should clear off to the Liberal Democrats, if anywhere. You are in no sense conservatives, nor in any sense Socialists, nor really in any authentically British political tradition at all.

If the BBC considers that "the separation of powers" has been "breached", then will it be demanding that all Ministers resign their seats in either House, that the Law Lords renounce either their peerages or their seats on the bench, and so forth? Has anyone who is allowed on the BBC ever heard of the Law Lords? Or of the Home Secretary’s role in determining sentences? Or of the numerous quasi-judicial functions of Ministers? Or of the fact that all members of the Executive are required to be members of the Legislature? Or of the fact that the judges make the whole of the Common Law?

This "separation of powers" line was also put about when the position of Lord Chancellor was abolished overnight in favour of something apparently sketched on the back of a beer mat. But the House of Lords is still chaired by someone in much the same outfit, which was actually presented by Blair as a serious, and even conclusive, argument for abolition. It is just that Baroness Hayman is not the Lord Chancellor. But so what, from that point of view? Meanwhile, there is still no Cabinet Minister accountable to the House of Commons either for the major front-line public service that is the Court Service, or for the enormous Legal Aid budget of public money.

Like the other examples given above, the office of Lord Chancellor was often described as an "exception" to "the separation of powers". Quite apart from the fact that such a doctrine cannot, by definition, admit of exceptions, so that their very existence disproves the doctrine itself, there do seem to be an awful lot of these "exceptions", and they do seem to matter rather a lot.

In reality, the "powers" have never been "separate", nor can they ever be so. One of them has to win in the end. In Britain, we have decided that it is to be Parliament, and thus the elected House of Commons within Parliament. Would we rather that the Prime Minister always had the last word? Or that, as in the United States (among other places) an unelected judicial body of lifetime appointees could simply rule that any matter it liked was "constitutional", and thus reserved entirely to itself? This is why, as is their wont, judicial theorists and constitutional lawyers habitually engage in more than a spot of wishful thinking where "the separation of powers" is concerned. They wish to see an American-style krytocracy in this country.

The wretched Human Rights Act has been a major step in that direction. But mercifully, we still have instead the supreme legislative, executive and judicial authority of the Crown (i.e., of the nation embodied, regardless of party or anything else), exercised either by Parliament itself or by Ministers drawn from and accountable to Parliament. Within Parliament, the House of Commons has come to be elected by universal adult suffrage and, since the Parliament Act of 1911, to be supreme.

The Crown is the ultimate contradiction of the Franco-American, and in no sense indigenously British, theory of the separation of powers. And it is thus the ultimate guarantee that the United Kingdom (and each of the 15 countries with which we share the Crown) will remain a democracy, unlike either absolutist and historically coup-plagued France, or krytocratic America, to name but two.

"Separation", indeed.