I had the good fortune to see the House of Commons in the evening of its golden age in 1954. Winston Churchill was Prime Minister; Clement Attlee was Leader of the Opposition; Rab Butler was Chancellor of the Exchequer; Hugh Gaitskell was Shadow Chancellor; Nye Bevan was a leading Labour speaker; Herbert Morrison was Shadow Leader of the House; Anthony Eden was Foreign Secretary. Most of these men had worked together in the victorious wartime coalition and had respect and often affection for each other.

The debates were at a high level; I remember hearing from the press gallery Churchill’s last major speech, on the threat of the hydrogen bomb. The House of Commons was full of people with historic experience. It was an institution that the nation had elected and trusted. The contrast between the House of Commons in 1954 and the House of 2009 is a painful one, though there are still some excellent MPs.

On June 29 of this year the House of Commons gave a second reading to the Parliamentary Standards Bill; on July 8, the House of Lords gave the Bill its second reading. I attended that debate. The objective of the Bill is to restore public confidence in the House of Commons after what the Secretary for Justice, Jack Straw, rightly called “a collective failure effectively to regulate itself”.

The proposed remedy is to carry out the Prime Minister’s own rather rushed proposal for the “immediate creation” of a new Parliamentary Standards Authority. This will involve the radical innovation of transferring responsibility for the discipline of the House of Commons to a quango, with potentially a further appeal to the law courts.

The authoritative House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution has reviewed the Bill and found that clauses six and ten “both threatened to undermine freedoms which are essential for Parliament to operate properly”.

The select committee also criticised the haste with which the Bill is being pushed through Parliament. “We do not think that the case for proceeding with this Bill on a fast-track timetable has been established and we do not support any curtailment of the usual legislative timetable.” It is the Government which is in a hurry.

I do not believe for a moment that the Parliament of 1954 would have passed this Bill; indeed it would certainly have been rejected by both Houses. It breaches the assurances of the independence of Parliament that were given in the 1689 Bill of Rights. It continues a process of stripping Parliament of its powers, which has been the most characteristic feature of the Labour administration since 1997. Some of these abdications of power may have been justified, but their cumulative effect on the House of Commons has been lethal.

Powers have been transferred from the United Kingdom Parliament to the devolved parliaments or assemblies of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Power has been transferred from the UK Parliament to the European Union, culminating in the dishonest ratification of the Lisbon treaty. Powers have been transferred to a wide variety of new quangos.

The courts, which used to have their ultimate Court of Appeal in the House of Lords, will now have a Supreme Court, specifically separated from Parliament. The office of Lord Chancellor, nominally held by Jack Straw in the House of Commons, has lost most of its functions and almost all its authority.

The traditional constitutional doctrine still is that each House of Parliament is sovereign over its own business. This is based on the ruling of Lord Chief Justice Coleridge in Bradlaugh’s case in the late 19th century. Bradlaugh was trying to force the House of Commons to seat him, although, as an atheist, he would not take the oath. Coleridge found that it would be intolerable for any court to override the Commons, because the ultimate appeal would go to the House of Lords.

Now the ultimate appeal against a finding of IPSA, the new parliamentary standards authority, might go to the Supreme Court, or even to the European Court of Justice. Either course would further undermine the sovereignty of Parliament.

It is true that the House of Commons has been damaged by the expenses scandal. There is a problem, which everyone recognises, in the loss of public confidence in the present House and in the loss of morale among MPs themselves. That explains the sense of hurry. Yet hurry usually signals panic.

The decline in the authority of Parliament, and particularly of the House of Commons, has followed the loss of power, most of which has been voluntarily relinquished, much of it by the Labour governments since 1997. At the same time, there has been a failure of the House of Commons to scrutinise or check the executive – one of its primary functions. We now have a weak Government and a weakened Parliament.

The public is not easily fooled. Hasty and ill-considered legislation, which further weakens Parliament, will not reassure people. Still less will it restore the battered morale of MPs. They know just how badly the expenses scandal has been handled. They know that this Bill is a violation of constitutional standards. Reading the House of Commons debate in Hansard, one is struck by the pungent criticisms that have come from Labour members.

The House of Commons is the elected heart of our democracy. Early in this scandal, I took the view that it would require a new Speaker, a new Prime Minister and a new Parliament to restore confidence. That still seems right. It is the next Parliament, with many new members, that will have to restore the self-confidence of the House of Commons. It has taken Labour 13 years to destroy the balance of the British constitution. We need a general election.

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