Some ideas for improving Britain's governance are better than none

IT IS one of the oddities of Britain's unwritten constitution that, when considering whether the country should send troops into battle, the House of Commons often ends up voting on the technical question of whether to adjourn. As Jack Straw, now the justice secretary, recently put it, “the question before the House is not whether we go to war but whether we go home”. The actual power to declare war is exercised by the prime minister, in the monarch's name. But it won't be for much longer, if ideas set out by Gordon Brown on July 3rd, in his first parliamentary statement as prime minister, are enacted.

Along with war-making, Mr Brown named other executive powers that, he said, ought to be limited or curtailed. For example, he wants Parliament to have a statutory right to ratify new treaties, and to have more oversight of the intelligence services and of public appointments. Jumbled up with those redistributions was a mélange of other plans, avowedly designed to transfer authority from the executive to Parliament, and from Parliament to ordinary people. He speaks of “citizens' juries”, and the need to make it easier for the public to petition Parliament. He wants to reform the (controversial) role of the attorney-general: the current one, he said, will not make decisions about whether to prosecute in individual cases (such as loans for peerages). He wants to lift the restrictions on protests outside Westminster—a small but totemic gripe under his predecessor, Tony Blair.

Constitutional reform is an area of policy that, perhaps more than any other, combines lofty ideological principle with base party motive. The Tories—who now hold virtually no sway in Scotland—duly raised “the English question”: the fact that English MPs have no say over issues devolved to the Scottish Parliament, but Scottish MPs (such as Mr Brown) get to vote on English matters. The Liberal Democrats—disadvantaged by the current electoral system—complained that Mr Brown had said almost nothing about electoral reform.

It is true that most of the big questions were fudged. Reform enthusiasts had hoped the prime minister would establish a “constitutional convention”—along the lines of the one that paved the way for Scottish devolution—that would lead to the writing of a constitution, or at least to a new Bill of Rights. Instead, Mr Straw is to hold a series of talking shops. There are to be yet more papers and more chat about how to finish reforming the House of Lords, in which, after Mr Blair's half-baked stab at it, 92 hereditary peers still sit.

Nor, on closer inspection, were some of the more concrete proposals quite as bold as they appeared. For example, surrendering the prime minister's exclusive right to dissolve Parliament (and thus call an election) will matter little so long as the prime minister commands a majority in the House of Commons. As Robert Hazell, of University College London, points out, if Mr Brown really wanted to give up his right of dissolution, he would have advocated fixing the parliamentary term. Scrutiny of appointments by parliamentary committees, another proposal, is an advance—but it would be a bigger one were they actually to have a veto. And so on.

Still, considering that Mr Brown had been in office for less than a week, and that some of his ideas were novel if not radical, the charge that they did not go far enough seems a little harsh. The real weakness may be not in his methods but in his avowed aims. As well as making government more accountable, he wants to revive public trust and interest in politics, which—as falling election turnouts and party membership arguably attest—have waned in Britain and elsewhere. But they have done so in part for reasons that have less to do with the shape of political institutions and the merits (or otherwise) of politicians, than with lifestyles, technology and globalisation.

The most common carp this week was that Mr Brown's proposals were cosmetically designed to help dispel his reputation for Stalinesque control-freakery. The truth is that there are probably very few votes to be won in constitutional tinkering. Which, perhaps, make it rather laudable that Mr Brown is having a go.