Straight Talk

To hear this, tune in to the BBC News Channel on Saturday at 4:30am or 10:30pm, or on Sunday at 1:30am, 3:30pm or 11:30pm:

Andrew Neil: If this General Election doesn’t make a major change in the number of women on both sides of the House, do we need to go to positive discrimination?
Betty Boothroyd: I’m totally against positive discrimination. I think you would have expected me to say that. I am more concerned with merit and with ability than whether you’re a woman or whether you’re a man, or whether you’ve got a black skin or what ethnic grouping you come from. It seems to me that we’re throwing merit and ability sometimes out of the window in order to try and get what you call positive discrimination some way or other.

And:

Andrew Neil: What about the new Speaker, is he getting it right?
Betty Boothroyd: I think he’s making a good stab of it actually. He’s a young man who’s got a lot to say for himself. And I tell you, I went to see him about four days after he’d been elected – at my invitation – and I wanted to tell him a few home truths.
Andrew Neil: So you invited yourself?
Betty Boothroyd: I invited myself, yes, and he was very welcoming, kissed me on both cheeks, and one or two things I said to him quite seriously, look, when the House sits on a Friday I expect you as Speaker to be there on a Friday, it is a 5 day working week here. When a Secretary of State is making a statement, I expect you as Speaker to be in the Chair as a courtesy to that Secretary of State, especially as you and I always want the Secretary of State to come to the House first - all of these things which I felt had slipped sometimes, must be pulled back, there were one or two things like this. And another thing I said to him – which I’m still very concerned about - I want the Speaker to wear the uniform of the Speaker everyday. I had been just before I went to see him – and I was encouraged to do this - I’d been at a defence establishment function, people in uniform there, they said to me, Betty, we’re proud of our uniform, why isn’t the Speaker? Seven hundred years of this. I said, right you’ve encouraged me to go and see him. I said, “Look” - I’ve told him about this - I said, “Nurses like their uniform, boy scouts, girl guides; you’ve 700 years of history behind you.” He said he didn’t feel comfortable. I said, “Well, look, I’m not going to volunteer what I’ve just said to you, John, but if I’m ever asked” - and I’m asked by you – “having told you what I thought about it, and what I think about it, I’m going to say that, and I just think you’re letting the side down a little bit, by not doing that.”

First, she signs up to Balanced Migration. And now this.

Baroness Boothroyd stands firmly in the tradition of the trade unionists and activists who dismissed an attempt to make the nascent Labour Party anti-monarchist. Of the delivery of the Welfare State, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and full employment by a political movement replete with MBEs, OBEs, CBEs, mayoral chains, aldermen’s gowns, and civic services; a movement which proudly provided a high proportion of Peers of the Realm, Knights of the Garter, members of the Order of Merit, and Companions of Honour, who had rejoiced in their middle periods to be Lords Privy Seal, or Comptrollers of Her Majesty’s Household, or so many other such things, in order to deliver those goods within the parliamentary process in all its ceremony.

The tradition of Peter Shore’s denunciation of the Major Government’s decision to scrap the Royal Yacht, and his support for Canadian against Spanish fishermen not least because Canada and the United Kingdom shared a Head of State. And of the Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party, founded out of the trade union movement specifically in order to secure for the British workers of Gibraltar the same pay and conditions enjoyed by other British workers.

That tradition is the great bulwark, not least against "Conservative" Governments past or future (and especially against any Blairite "Conservative" Government such as David Cameron would inflict on us) of concern that power should not be transferred from elected parliamentarians to unelected judges. Of concern that any elected second chamber should not subvert the authority of the House of Commons.

The great bulwark of concern that electoral reform should not mean voting for parties rather than people, should not destroy direct local representation, should not give power to anti-constitutional or anti-democratic forces, and should not prevent necessary radical action on behalf of the poor or otherwise disadvantaged. Of total opposition to the constraint of any future Parliament by any written Constitution. And of total opposition to any State funding of political parties that detaches them even further from wider civil society.

That tradition, that bulwark demands a restored voice in the House of Commons at the earliest opportunity.