Last Friday, the House debated a Private Member’s Bill introduced by UKIP peer, Lord Willoughby de Broke. His Constitutional Reform Bill was certainly not lacking in radical provisions (withdrawal from the EU, repeal of the Human Rights Act and the like). I spoke and used the opportunity to link the Bill to the government’s approach to constitutional reform, drawing attention to the fact that both lacked any clear intellectual coherence.
In responding to the debate, the minister commented on the provision in the Bill providing for a referendum on reform of the Lords. He said that the Government had published a White Paper on reform in 2008. “There followed”, he said, “almost a year of wider debate and discussion of the proposals contained in it.” I intervened to say: “He is talking about the 2008 White Paper being widely debated. It has not even been debated in your Lordships’ House.”
Suffice to say that I have never known such a long period of silence on the part of a minister before responding to a comment. The Government said it planned to have a debate on the White Paper before the summer recess in 2oo8. No debate has ever taken place. When the minister did eventually get to the dispatch box, all he could do was employ the standard phrase meaning that he had no idea what to say: “I note that statement”, before saying debates were a matter for the usual channels.
Of coursde, the whole problem with constitutional reform is that it is similar to foxes discussing how to secure the henhouse. There is always going to be conflict of interest. Imagine a proposal to reduce the Commons to half the seats – you’d have all the MPs fighting to make sure they’d be in the half that got to keep their jobs, regardless of whether that was in the national interest or not.
The same goes for reforming the Lords – I remember proposals to remove the hereditary peers and make it a wholly-appointed chamber, which would let the party in power appoint themselves a majority. I’m not convinced this would be an improvement, but had it been pushed through ten years ago, there would have been little that most of us could have done about it.
What you need to do is tour the country and talk to people in town hall meetings and get feedback and suggestions that can be incorporated into a set of proposals that come from the people, not the incumbents.
I mentioned elsewhere on the blog how I’d reform the Lords; five-year fixed terms, 20% up for election each year in May, repeal the Parliament acts to give the second elected chamber equal powers. That still leaves out a few small details of voting scheme and how many to elect.
If you did not get nonsense like that, you might not recognize wisdom so easily!
Laughter emoticon.
Dave H and Twm O’r Nant: I am all for getting out and about and explaining what the House does. The more people know about it, the more supportive they are of the House as it presently exists.
I see that the Lords continues to employ its main weapons; conviviality and good memory.
Poor little UKIP, I understand where they’re coming from, but they propose no real alternative, just provincialism and decay.
Troika21: I like to think that we play to our strengths!
If only they could be more effectively channelled/reinvented in to an “English Regional Assemblies” party, parallel with the other regional assemblies of W/S/NI, they would be doing something mighty valuable.
Then we could be rid once and for all of these blesséd/curséd county councils, not just 300 years out of date, like the redundant Lord Chancellor (peer’s office),
but concocted 900 years ago, lost in the mists of time.
eg Wessex= Devon/Cornwall/Somerset/Dorset.
Now THAT is a region by any European standard.
The problem with regions is that they are potentially too big to look after local interests. If you’ve got a large population centre in an otherwise-rural area, then by the nature of things, you’ll have a make-up that favours the rural area or the urban area with its policies, depending on which side has the majority of seats. Obviously with a larger area there are economies of scale to be had that smaller units may lose, but that could be fixed by allowing and encouraging those small units to form a group for joint contracts for necessary services.
I agree that the hierarchy of councils we have now is inefficient, and it’s not always obvious who is responsible for what, but this is presumably what the unitary authorities seek to address by combining the functions of both.
I’ll get back to you later once I’ve dealt with my more pressing issues, my business, my family and all the attacks by the government on my brethren, home educators.
Thecountrysfinished: You may find the best way to deal with some of these issues is actually to raise them with parliamentarians.
Dear Lord Norton
I comment on the Billm of withdrawl from the EU. If I remeber rightit was Vladimir Bukovsky, now at Cambridge, who read some classified documents in the Kremlin after the Berlin wall fell. Acording to the documents some West-German SPD peopler and Italien communists thought that socialism was threatend because of PM Thatcher, even in Europe. As a responce they wanted to build an European Union with forms coppied from the Soviet Union and at a later stage push socialism all over Europe. Because the Soviet Union fell the russian card did not come out as planned to the support of this plan but the EU structurs came in place.
Oddly the EU Commissions does not have elected people, but it is still regarded as OK and democratic enoughth but the House of Lords has not elected mempers by the people are regarded as undemocratic. My view is that it is because the Lord’s is not build on a socialist mold that the Labour Party and other objects. Come out of the closset and tell the truth gentlemen of the later party! With regards mr. David Fredin
Sweden
Dear Lord Norton
Sorry for the spelling errors with a few extra letters above in my comment I was was in a hurry at the time as my time at the Council Library was runing out, no good excause but I still want to apologize to You and the readers after I saw it. Sincerely David Fredin