Denis Homepage
Trinidad Express
Tobago News
Trinidad Guardian
Politics vs the Constitution
This is an edited version of the second part of Denis Solomon's contribution to a panel discussion on "The Way Forward" (Asking the right questions) organised by the Constitutional Reform Committee at OWTU Headquarters, San Fernando, on Saturday October 13, 2001.
October 24, 2001
By Denis Solomon
The politicians have not dared to ask these questions because it is not in their interest for people to realise that the main function of Parliament is representation, not simply in the sense of turning the government's plans into law, but in the sense of controlling the executive. In this country we do not elect a government. The government is a committee of Parliament, and like all committees it should be the servant—not the master—of the body that gave it birth.
Originally the executive was the King, and Parliament existed to advise him.
The King has been replaced by the Cabinet. All the more reason for the legislature to fulfil its function of control, and thereby make permanent and continuous the popular sovereignty that is expressed only intermittently in elections.
In the western-hemisphere republics, this is achieved outright by separation of the legislature from the executive, with the powers of the two evenly balanced, making each dependent on the other for the planning and exercise of governance.
But in the British system, from which ours supposedly evolved, Parliament also jealously guards its function of oversight of the executive. Britain is a monarchy in name but in fact a hereditary republic; we are a republic in name but in reality an elective, and near-absolute, monarchy.
The British Labour Party, under Tony Blair, won the last two General Elections by unprecedented landslides. Now, all politicians (all human beings, in fact), once they achieve power, will try to exercise it with the minimum of restraint. Tony Blair, in the euphoria of his party's success, soon gained the reputation of a control freak with his efforts to impose the will of the executive on the Select Committees of Parliament. These committees help Parliament to control the executive by examining all aspects of public policy, expenditure and administration. There are at present seventeen of them, in addition to numerous Committees of other types. They have the power to summon witnesses to give evidence and produce documents.
Our House of Representatives has five committees in all: two Public Accounts Committees, a Standing Orders Committee and a Privileges Committee. None of these has anything to do with ongoing control of the executive. The fifth is a standing Finance Committee of the whole House of Representatives, chaired by the Minister of Finance (how a Senator can chair a Standing Committee of the House of Representatives is another question).
The membership of the Westminster committees is roughly in proportion to the party representation in the House of Commons as a whole, which means that at present Labour Party members are in the great majority, and the majority of the Chairpersons are Labour MPs. Despite this, all the committee chairpersons jointly signed a letter of protest to the Prime Minister, warning him to desist from his efforts to interfere with the work of the committees.
So you can readily see that asking the right questions about the relationship between the executive and the legislature leads automatically to pertinent questions in other areas. For example, the Senate. It will be impossible even to think about Parliament controlling the executive while the Prime Minister has the right to boost his Cabinet by bringing people into it from the outside, through the upper house. Remember the controversy over the appointment of the seven losers? Well, there everybody asked the wrong questions. The public asked whether the Prime Minister had the right to appoint anyone he wanted to the Senate. Of course he had. But the President, by implication, asked the wrong questions too: whether it was right to appoint losers, and in such numbers.
There is nothing whatever wrong in appointing the loser of an election to the Senate. I have been an election loser, and I say without hesitation that I would make—have in fact made—a better Senator than half the clowns who are there now. As for the numbers, the real question is this: how you can ensure Parliamentary control of the executive as long as the government has an automatic majority in the Senate, and as long as he can appoint Ministers from among his appointees, with those Ministers having the right of access to the lower House? This inevitably leads to the question of the size and composition of Parliament. How can a Lower House of thirty-six members have an effective Committee structure? It can't, and probably couldn't even if its numbers were doubled. I have said that the answer to this also lies in the Senate: most or all of the Parliamentary Committees should be joint committees, with members from both Houses. And the Senate should certainly be increased in size, not only for this purpose but to provide continual representation for relevant groups and institutions in society in the drafting of legislation of concern to them. It would also provide the necessary bridge between political and technical, and even judicial, administration. There is every reason for the Chief Justice, all the mayors, and the heads of the protective services, for a start, to be ex officio members of the Senate.
But above all, government representation must not be a majority, but rather a very small minority.
The test of the appropriateness of the questions is always the fact that they are precisely the ones the politicians are reluctant to ask. The need to ask the right questions extends throughout every aspect of our national life. I would like to conclude by raising just one more: the question of the status of political parties. Both factions in Parliament, at different times, have asked why a person should be allowed to remain in Parliament after crossing the floor, and both have indignantly answered in the negative. The result was the Crossing the Floor Act. Yet whenever the situation has arisen in reality, the faction that stood to benefit from it has refused to apply the law. The latest such occasion is the "accommodation" worked out between Manning and the Musketeers. Never mind that the Musketeers say they are still UNC members, and that Manning calls it a "strategic alliance" instead of a floor-crossing. The principle is the same.
The crossing the floor act was imposed on the nation by politicians in an attempt to have the integrity of their parties guaranteed by the supreme law of the land, and thereby stifle healthy disagreement within them.
If an MP abandons his party, that is a matter between him and his constituents. Whether they retain him or not is for them to decide. The three musketeers are in the process of finding this out the hard way.
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon