The debate in both Houses yesterday, when the Government came forward with its White Paper and draft Bill for Lords Reform, concentrated to a large and understandable extent on the relationship between the Commons and Lords.
This morning I’ve been watching the discussion in the Lords Constitution Committee, where Members questioned the Deputy Prime Minister at some length on this point. In brief, everybody seems to be in favour of retaining the “primacy” of the Commons, and is worried that a legitimate, democratic, second chamber could threaten or even remove it.
Of course, previous analysis, as well as the current proposals, have addressed this point very fully. Not only do other full democracies have simple mechanisms to prevent gridlock, but the Government’s proposals acknowledge that the different electoral system, the long non-renewable terms, and the fact that there would never be a more recent mandate for the Lords as a whole, would maintain the current political asymmetry. If you add in the Parliament Acts, the relationship between the Prime Minister and senior Ministers with the Commons, and the longstanding restriction of financial matters to MPs, the safeguards are pretty formidable.
Retaining primacy is an additional argument for those who favour maintaining some 20% of the new House as appointed, since that too would distinguish it from the fully elected Commons. It is, therefore, curious to hear Labour spokespeople – who are committed to 100% elections – also arguing that the draft Bill would undermine that primacy.
Naturally, this will all be a matter for the forthcoming Joint Committee of Peers and MPs to address. However, one aspect intrigues me. What if these proposals, based fair and square on the previous work of successive governments, and now so firmly endorsed by the Prime Minister and the Coalition Cabinet, eventually leads to a Bill approved by MPs?
Will then all those of my noble colleagues who have been huffing and puffing about primacy simply accept the conclusion of the Commons? Or will Peers be allowed a self-serving veto, to save their own political skins? Either the House of Commons has primacy, or it doesn’t. Discuss!
It’s a funny word! It won’t be affected in any circumstances, any of the options in the draft bill.
I am really rather warming to the task of Lords’ reform.
I shall have to attend the Hon Gentlemen’s pews in due course!
It is getting interesting, noble lord Tyler!
The real problem here, Lord Tyler, is that there just isn’t an appetite in the country for Lords reform. Of course, if the Lords HAD been reformed there wouldn’t be any appetite to change it back either…
My point is that inertia is going to win the day in the country, just as it did with the ‘AV Referendum’.
Down the proverbial ‘Dog and Duck’ pub, people will be discussing Ken Clarke, they may be discussing Chris Huhne, they may be pondering a few other political stories, but by and large they will be talking about this weekend’s football and the man who tried to take a pony on a train.
The enclaves of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Islington may be pushing for Lords reform, but there just isn’t enough political capital in delivering it, and Nick Clegg will just look silly if he walks the troops up to the top of the hill, only to have to walk them down again.
I’m ambivalent about Lords reform. The appointive nature makes me a bit uncomfortable, yet the quality of the work suggests that there is something right about the current arrangements.
On the one hand, Lord Tyler is correct that the Parliament Acts will still restrain the Lords (or whatever it ends up being called), but most of their lordships’ restraint is the result of self-denying ordinance. That is part fear of the Parliament Acts, part fear of Lords reform, and part recognition that the Commons is elected and they are not.
Lords reform doesn’t quite get rid of the latter two, but it does reduce their restraining influence. A reformed Upper House would likely no longer fear reform, but abolition is always a possibility. The Upper House would no longer feel the need to defer on the basis of election, but the Commons will still be the “responsible house”, i.e., the one whose confidence the Government requires.
If the new Upper House feels significantly less restrained, will the Salisbury Convention disappear? It might. It is easy to imagine members of the new body saying, “The voters sent me here to hold the Government to account and make sure only the best legislation makes it on to the statute books.” In the end, members will be more likely to obstruct bills that they sense the Government will not want to spend the time necessary to invoke the Parliament Acts. That could make scenes like the filibustering of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act more common.
Correction or clarification please, Lord Tyler,
because there has never yet been a “government of the People, by the People, for the People”, let alone a “full” democracy:
what we have, ‘foisted upon us’, is at best a Three-Party-State, in effect coming down to a One-Party State
(which to a quite large extent had actually been increased under the originally-more-democratic New-Labour, and is still being increased by both LibDems and Conservatives, and ironically by the Peers themselves who want to increase their traditionally-non-accountable tenures and powers rather than be “elected” by the Lower House and/or The People)( and The People still are neither enabled nor empowered to participate effectively ):
so what on Earth is the real-life Sense, apart from all its various pure-verbal-meanings, and its possible-improving-future, of your (or ‘the’) term
“full democracy” ?
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(I intend to submit supplementary, and consequential, thought and question, to this Matter).
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Good on you Miles.
Thinking about “Survival-Strategising”
and “progressively-participatory-democratisation”
such “ppd” could surely be planned ?
I mean, perhaps something akin to, but better-advertised than Church-Restoration-Fundraising, with a tall graduated time-cum-amount (solo Y-axis) –
“ring-the-fairground-bell” ?
“target-for-tonight”
“Target-Democracy”
(something uneasy in there ‘though)
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