Nobility and Independence
Thank you for the interesting comments to my last post on reform of the Lords.
The message that comes through here as elsewhere is that the Lords is valued in being some kind of check on the present Government. Whilst Tony Blair has absolute control of the Commons, he is occasionally confounded by the Lords and this is a good thing.
There is a valid fear that an elected Lords might be less willing or able to contradict an elected Commons. The suggestion is that it is the fact that Lords do not have to face election that makes them more independent and less bound by party whips.
I am not sure if it is the independence conferred by being free of elections that gives the Lords its strength or the simple fact that the Government does not currently have an overall majority of peers. An elected chamber based on a proportional system would produce a similar effect of denying the Government an overall majority in the Lords under both recent Labour and Conservative administrations.
The real test of their Lordships independence or otherwise must come from an analysis of their voting records. The most excellent Public Whip tells us precisely how whipped or independent are members of the House of Commons. I think there are plans to extend this service to the Lords.
This would be very interesting as it would allow us to see if their Lordships follow the party line as closely as the Commons or not. This would in turn demonstrate whether the most important feature of a second chamber is that the governing party should not have an overall majority within it.
Another useful feature of the Lords is the fact that some of its members have no political affiliation. It seems to me to be a desirable feature of a second chamber for it to contain a sizable number of smart people who are not politicians, and do not have a “party line” to follow, or not as the acse may be, but who can judge prospective legislation on its merits.
Your previous post discussed the fact that “the parties” should put up useful and able candidates, rather than a bunch of duffers, and that the electorate shouldn’t vote for idiots.
In practice, however, the electorate doesn’t behave that way. We all know that there are constituencies where a privet hedge in a red rosette will get elected, and others where any amiable bumbling fool in a blue one will win. There is no reason to expect anything different in an elected Lords. This isn’t a claim that voters are stupid, by any means – if you are, say, a dyed-in-the-wool traditional Labour voter, the way to try and achieve the best outcome from your point of view is to stuff the houses with wearers of red rosettes. Even if you decide that your local man is a moron, and that the country would be better served by an independant candidate, you can’t risk voting for him if the next county over are electing amiable monkeys in blue, as to do so just dilutes “your” side.
Even if you assume that the main parties scour the country for the best, most able candidates, and assign the very best to “safe” seats, you’ll still lose out, because you will be unable to select from the large pool of smart people who are unable to sign up to all the policies of a particular party.
A second chamber should add something to the governance of this country. A mere copy of the first chamber (even one elected by some proportional system or other) doesn’t seem to have very much to offer. Whilst political parties are a useful construct for the purposes of chosing policy, they seem to add far less in a revising house.
The structure I see is that a theoretically democratic system has been hijacked by a small number of undemocratic organizations, the political parties.
Supposedly, this is similar to the way theoretically management-run corporation can be hijacked by shop-floor unions.
Perhaps passing laws which took democracy into the parties would break their power to defy the public opinion.
Automatic term limits and secret ballots for the party leaders would go a long way towards breaking their virtually dictatorial control over the party and therefore the country.
How about something like this?
1. The House of Commons is changed to a fixed term of 4 years, to end the trend of elections being called at the time that is most convenient for the ruling party, and also enabling point 3 to work
2. Each local authority elects (by popular vote, using proportional representation with the entire local authority as one ‘constituency’) a number of candidates in proportion to its population (although with minimum and maximum numbers to prevent the south east swamping everyone else)
3. Each member would serve a fixed term of four years, like local councils, but they would be held in the middle of each Parliament (ie 2 years after each General Election) so that the Upper House would not just be a pointless carbon copy of the House of Commons
4. Only the House of Commons would have the ’sole right of initiative’ to propose new legislation, but consent of BOTH Houses would be required before Bills became law (since the Upper House would be fully democratic, the justification for the Parliament Act is removed)
This would make the Upper House (call it a Senate or whatever, it wouldn’t be the House of Lords anyway since it doesn’t have Lords in it any more) both a powerful counterweight to the populist party politics of the Commons AND a more democratic institution than the House of Lords currently is.