The role of the Attorney General needs to be stated more clearly in the British constitution says a Liberal Democrat Member of the House of Lords.
Lord Tyler is a Liberal Democrat Life Peer, and speaks on constitutional affairs in the House of Lords.
British constitutional experts have toured the world leaving newly- minted constitutions behind.To this day, British influences can still be found. Following the Second World War,we advocated strict separation of powers in the German Constitution, the Grundgesetz (basic law), and insisted that power needed checks and balances.We have, however, been reluctant to take our own constitu- tional medicine. British political power is centralized not just geo- graphically in London but politically in the hands of the executive and in the hands of the Prime Minister. In 2006 Parliament made a deci-
sion to remove the role of the Lord Chancellor.As a Member of the executive, the Speaker of one part of the Legislature and the head of the judiciary, the Lord Chancellor main- tained a high level of power.The for- mer Prime Minister, Rt Hon.Tony Blair, attempted to remove the office altogether in a cabinet reshuffle, but
soon discovered that it was referred to in hundreds of years worth of leg- islation. If you insist on maintaining a constitutional mosaic, it can hardly be a surprise when making fundamental alterations to the picture proves exceedingly difficult. Yet now the three roles are sepa-
rate.The House of Lords has finally elected its own Lord Speaker, the Law Lords are to be removed to a Supreme Court in 2009 and the Lord Chancellor is still a creature of the government. In fact,so much so that there is even no need to have the
314 The Parliamentarian 2008/Issue Four
holder of that office in the House of Lords: the present incumbent is Hon. Jack Straw,MP, also the Secretary of State for Justice, who sits in the House of Commons.At last, one of the anomalies in the “unwritten” constitu- tion of the United Kingdom has been corrected, almost by accident. A key remaining area of the con- stitutional mix-up is, however, the role of the Attorney General.The holder of that office, currently Baroness Scotland,QC, is legal advis- er and a Minister of the government. She attends all cabinet meetings – at the Prime Minister’s request – and, as a partisan figure, is naturally con- cerned with the day-to-day political decisions that have to be made in government, and is responsible both for the criminal law and for superin- tendence over the prosecution servic- es in England and Wales.As the House of Lords dismissed the contro- versial proposal for the 42-day pre- charge detention in October 2008, she was sitting on the government Front Bench.The Attorney General is just as partisan as the Ministers beside her.The overwhelming question, then, is whether it is right or reason-