Columns

In his 1904 book titled One Step Forward, Two Steps Back focusing on the crisis in his party, Vladimir Lenin said that on the way to any eventual goal there must be temporary setbacks.

Queen Elizabeth delivers the Throne Speech in the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament at the Palace of Westminster in London on Wednesday. AFP

Sometime later this saying was stood on its head to read two steps forward, one step back in an anecdotal reference to the attempts of a frog trying to get out of a well.

Whether it is moving back one step or two, recently established governments in Sri Lanka and Britain have had to retreat sometimes abandoning their intended aims.

Besides having the threat of no-confidence motions hanging over the heads of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and a couple of his ministers, like the Damoclesian sword, to use a weathered simile, the government has had to concede ground on some provisions of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

While the Supreme Court declared that some provisions required not only a 2/3rd majority of the House but also approval at a referendum, which the Government apparently did not want to face, the committee stage saw the opposition making further inroads, diluting some of the provisions that intended to strengthen the powers of the prime minister. So do we have a head of government or not?

The opposition also managed to have the composition of the Constitutional Council changed to give MPs a much bigger presence in the council than previously envisaged. These concessions extracted by the opposition had to be conceded to get the legislation through.

But if the Government of Sri Lanka reconstituted to the point which blurs the distinction between government and opposition, and hopelessly dependent on a divided party which is also represented in government to secure a firm majority vote, newly re-elected British Prime Minister David Cameron has no such problem.

But he is not without problems as the Throne Speech this week clearly demonstrated. The truth is that many politicians and others believed the opinion polls that across the board predicted a hung parliament and therefore a coalition government as the most likely outcome.

However, to try and maximise seats in Westminster, some parties made promises in the last days before the May 7 general election which they thought they would not have to fulfil because they did not expect to win outright.

Against all odds, however, David Cameron led his Conservative Party to victory with a majority of 12 in parliament. While naturally glad having had the opportunity to gain an overall majority and thus form a Conservative government, Cameron has to look in two directions.

First, he has to face a newly strengthened Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) that completely decimated the others in the May election winning 56 of the 59 seats in Scotland and becoming the third largest party in the House. What is significant is that its leader Nicola Sturgeon is even more strident today about more devolution for Scotland, which voted at a recent referendum to remain in the union and continue to be a part of the United Kingdom.

Her distaste for the Conservatives is known and so the SNP is bound to be a thorn in Cameron’s flesh in the coming months and perhaps years.
It is true that Labour and Liberal Democrats are in some disarray right now and leaderless. But with the support of the SNP they are bound to keep sniping at the Cameron government, especially over the promised referendum on whether Britain should be in the European Union or not.

However, keeping his eyes peeled on those in the opposition benches will not be enough. He is aware that he needs to keep looking over his shoulder to make sure that his MPs will toe the line, for a handful of rebellious backbenchers could lead to his losing his slender majority.

One issue that could have sparked backbench revolt even before Cameron got his act together was his campaign promise that he would jettison Britain’s Human Rights Act (HRA) and enact a British Bill of Rights.

The Conservative Party election manifesto spelled out the purpose of the proposed reform saying that it “will break the formal link between British courts and the European Court of Human Rights and make our Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter of human rights matters in the UK.”
With the proposed Bill of Rights due to figure in the Throne Speech setting out the Cameron government’s policy programme, SNP leader Sturgeon fired the first warning shot days ahead of the Queen’s Speech.

“The Tory government’s priority is ending human rights and the opportunities for fairness they offer ordinary men and women. To scrap the Human Rights Act would be an appalling retrograde step,” she said, announcing that her MPs will seek to defeat the plan.

There is another issue concerning the repeal of the 1998 Human Rights Act that some may have missed. The Scotland Bill 1998 that devolved power to Scotland and established the Scottish Parliament lists certain statutes which cannot be amended or repealed by Westminster including the Human Rights Act. It further constrains the powers of the Westminster parliament from acting in a way incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights of European Community law.

The HRA introduced by the Tony Blair government has certain sections which have the effect of codifying the protections available in the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law
It is now being asked in some official circles whether this brief provision in the Scotland bill will establish in law a convention that Westminster seeks the consent of the devolved legislature — in this case the Scottish legislature — on legislation concerning Scottish matters. Then one might well expect the Scottish parliament with veto powers to use them to stymie Cameron’s plans.

If Cameron sees a serried opposition before him, he must also be aware of the snipers behind him. Some of the critics are senior members of his party. Among them are Andrew Mitchell, a former chief whip and Dominic Grieve, a former attorney general, not to mention David Davis, a former shadow deputy prime minister, and Ken Clarke, a former justice minister.

Both Mitchell and Grieve warned against withdrawing from the Strasbourg court. While Mitchell said he was “extremely skeptical about the government proposals”, Grieve warned that withdrawing from the European Convention would damage Britain’s international standing.

These are more than mere rumblings from the back and it would not take much to turn Cameron’s 12-vote majority into a minority

What is more, the Conservatives do not have a majority in the Lords which is packed with Lib-Dem and Labour Lords who would make it extremely difficult for the government to steer such vital legislation without running into a barrage of enemy fire from an upper house filled with liberals and lawyers.

That is why a key election pledge turned into a 12-word reference in the Queen’s Speech saying the government plans to bring forward proposals for a Bill of Rights. It certainly seems like two steps back.