The House of Lords Library has produced a useful Library Note on Public Attitudes Towards the House of Lords and House of Lords Reform. The introductory note observes that ‘there is perhaps some contradictory evidence in how people view reform of the House’. This is a nice way of referring to the findings of a 2006 Populus poll, where the responses to two questions were:
“The House of Lords should remain a mainly appointed house because this gives it a degree of independence from electoral politics and allows people with a broad range of experience and expertise to be involved in the law-making process
Agree 75% Disagree 19%
At least half of the members of the House of Lords should be elected so that the upper chamber of Parliament has democratic legitimacy
Agree 72% Disagree 21%”
Perhaps we should be led instead by the polls that refer instead to the priority people attach to the issue. At least the results there are clear!
How about asking the question about abolishing the Lords.
Would you approve of saving 600 million over 5 years by abolishing the Lords?
What about
Should any lord convicted of a criminal offence be banned from public office for life?
or
Should the ballifs be sent in to get public money back from Uddin?
Or
Should Trustcot et al be jailed for selling changes to legistlation for cash?
Should Peers who didn’t attend by claimed allowances be jailed?
Thought not. Nothing like manipulating a survey to get the answers you want.
Lord Blagger: This shows some of the problems with posing questions. Some questions derive from false premises. Abolishing the Lords would not necessarily save money, since you don’t know how much money has been saved by the actions of the House of Lords. (How does one assess in economic terms the consequences of the changes achieved, for example, to the Public Bodies Bill?) Should peers who commit criminal offences be barred from public office for life? Well, they should be expelled from the Lords, as provided for in the Steel Bill and clearly supported by the House – the Bill having now cleared committee stage – but whether they should be banned for life from public office is a wider question. (It may depend on the conviction. There is one peer who was convicted for an offence that is no longer regarded as an offence.) Peers cannot claim attendance allowances if they do not attend, and the authorities are quite rigorous in checking claims against attendance.
However, none of this is relevant to the point of the post….
600 million over 5 years saved.
How much has the lords saved? Nothing. Simple reason, it can’t vote on finance bills can it.
That omission is surprising coming from a constitutional expert. 🙂
Peers cannot claim attendance allowances if they do not attend, and the authorities are quite rigorous in checking claims against attendance.
Really. So how are they sneaking into one of the most secure buildings in the UK without any records being made?
Lord Blagger: Grief, give me strength. You don’t have to deal with Finance Bills in order to save money. Legislation other than Finance Bills can and does have massive economic consequences. I don’t have the faintest idea what you are talking about in your last point. Attendance of peers is recorded. You cannot claim without your attendance being recorded. That is a separate point from people entering the Palace.
It’s not a separate point.
How does a peer sneak in without that being recorded?
Or are you saying the head of security isn’t doing his job?
Would the peer convicted of an offense no longer considered an offense be Lord Montagu of Beaulieu?
@PS:
It would be interesting to discover the percentage of Parliamentarians who have this suspicion over their heads. And work out if it corresponds to the national level of the population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Douglas-Scott-Montagu,_3rd_Baron_Montagu_of_Beaulieu
Unsurprisingly, I have also found that most people’s opinion on this matter also varies depending on what the Lords are discussing at the time.
Many of my liberal minded friends cheered the Lords when they were trying to revise some of the more restrictive terrorism legislation – but cursed when it tried to block liberalisation of issues around sexuality, religion etc.
Those of us who lean towards preferring an appointed chamber as a bulwark against populism in the elected house may have to hope that the Commons tries to clamp down on civil liberties just before trying to make the Lords an elected House.
The public may support the status quo in such a moment.
IanVisits: I made the point in my History of Parliament lecture that in 1911 where you stood on the Parliament Bill was determined largely by your views on Irish Home Rule. If you were an opponent of home rule, then the House of Lords was a vital constitutional safeguard. If you were a supporter, the unelected hereditary House was an unacceptable impediment. Doubtless, the positions could have been reversed had it been some other issue.
A recent enquiry from Maude Elwes made me think about the extent to which non-political peers really are non political as opposed to just non contraversially inclined!
there cannot be many n-p peers who have never stood for anything at all, although one Labour
leader of the house,I think she was, recently, was said never to have stood for anything in her whole life, and yet there she was representing the views of the cabinet to their Lordship’s house.
Being exposed to the media, even the local press, at election time, can be quite gruelling especially in marginal constitutuencies, but I can only presume that
university teachers, union leaders, corporate businessmen and so on, have certainly stood and got elected for a variety of posts, within a smaller electorate during their lives.
“Politics starts with two, but when the third one comes along the problems begin; all that poo!” At that stage voting is not required!
If the house of lords were held in internet chambers and amendments to bills and acts were done online by a peer moderator accomplished with the software, we would see some real economies, as envisioned by Blag.
The house would become a museum to all those failed, and also other successful, democracies of Imperial years. It would pull big crowds in the way that the other place does now, far larger in fact.
It could meet once a year for the state opening of parliament.
Gareth Howell: Most – I trust all – peers will have engaged in politics, but one needs to bear in mind that when some people refer to non-political they mean non-party political, which is not the same thing. As politics is defined as the resolution of issues of policy that are to apply to a particular community, I would be concerned if someone had not bothered to involve themselves in politics. It is part of being an active citizen.
Market survey style referend-ums are the only effective way of holding a referendum.
Yes or no answers are not worth the bytes they are written with.
Petitions seem useful in drawing speakers’ office attention to a perceived essential debate.
Twm o’r Nant: There are indeed problems with yes or no referendums. I have previously drawn out the problems where people are not offered the opportunity to indicate preferences between options. However, yes or no referendums tend to be favoured because of the implications for campaigning and because they deliver a clear answer (supposedly).
And only when it suits a politician.
ie. EU referenda.
Clear manifesto promise.
All parties lied and reneged on their promises.
The Lords then go along with it.
Define “Democracy”;
then publish for our eyes the current definitions and parameters of “British Democracy” and of how that be primarily “by The People” before being “of The People”
and if you can’t or won’t do that. then what use are you as a present and future British citizen ?
let alone as a sustainworthy Earth-citizen ?
———
(Lord Norton, you know I am appreciative of your abilities and strength, but PLEASE do not come back with that old sore-saw “that’s not the point”)
milesjsd: Defining democracy is indeed crucial. I am amazed by how many people take the definition as given without realising that there are different definitions.
This morning we hear, once again, that political parties now want to be financially supported out of tax payers funds as they don’t have enough donors to keep them afloat. Not even from the rich givers in the Conservative corner. Now why is that?
This is typical of politicians who want to foist their policies on the tax payer when the same tax payer does not support their viewpoint. How much are they likely to assess as their minimum amount required for this first year. And what of the next and the next.
If we go by what councillors are paying themselves out of the tax fund they gather and their 50% increase this year alone, this gives you a benchmark of the future of this little lark.
Now, instead of the parties finding out what it is the tax payer ‘will back’ and ‘pay for’ themselves for a political party, and adjusting their policies toward that survey, they want to sting us to pay for all of them regardless of their ideas across the board, like it or not.
http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/taxpayer-funding-of-political-parties/
Political parties who cannot be supported freely by the public should quit their policies and come back with new people and new ideas for government leadership. Or, as I have written previously, work under the auspices of referendum.
However, by what I read this week it appears the Conservatives or is it all of them, are very unhappy with the result of the e-petitions website as it is awkward for them to pretend they are backed by popularity of the voter with this not showing their way forward being the majority satisfaction. Which should tell them those surveys they pay for are fixed.
Regardless, they now want to find a way to reduce the promise of the notice taken on peoples views by pushing it into a corner, as the issues creating an overwhelming signature for debate are not policies they want to address. What a surprise that is.
Surely this should be an indidcation that none of the offerings seen by the people as suitable for leading the country are acceptable to the electorate as a whole.
This is not something they can hide from. You cannot run fromt he truth. It will only create an increased resentment toward all who govern by what is seen as a fix.
Certainly is the case in the Lords.
There democracy is that the Lords get to vote.
Democracy for the electorate is choosing you representatives. Something the Lords don’t do. That sort of democracy is for the Plebs.
We need to start by deciding what we want from the Lords.
It seems to me that two requirements are that they are free of political control and are properly prepared for their roles.
The perfect solution is to identify families with an established commitment to the nation, and to determine rules by which a member of the family could serve.
This could be given an imaginative name, such as Hereditary Peerage.
@Robert Leach:
Sounds good doesn’t it? Except in a very short period of time, or, more likely, no time at all, the idea becomes what can I make out of it, what is in my best interests,, I am more important than the country.
I am going to tell you a true story.
Some time ago, I caught a taxi outside the entrance to the House of Commons. It was winter and evening. As I got in, a member of the House of Lords, who had been to drinks in the room with a name that doesn’t correlate to its spelling, had plonked himself on the back seat and was saying he had been waiting for some time and rather than wait longer, would share my cab with me, paying the tarrif at the end of the journey. I moaned but finally agreed as he what not dislodgeable.
So we talked politics for a little while. I asked how he could reconcile his increase in benefit from the boom and bust of policies with that of those on the bottom rung who lost everything. And quite sincerely, he looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘so what, you have to take what you can, and let the others fall by the wayside. The charities pick them up. And if they don’t, well, they are not worth bothering about, are they.’
I have never forgotten his face and his eyes as he spoke. It runs through me like a turbulent river. Not long after that, his predictions came to pass. Thousands thrown out of their homes because they lost their jobs and couldn’t service the mortgage. Then the money men came along sucking up the leavings, like vacuum cleaners at cut in half prices, with the intention of buy to let property empires. Those on benefits were openly accused in the press of scrounging, tabloids daily filled the mind with its the poor to blame. Cut off their heads and leave them to starve. And so on. Yes, it was a new beginning with a Conservative government in heat and ready to deliver its loins at speed.
Which brings me back to my thought of yesterday, backed by a piece in the FT today by, Michael Ignatieff, headed, One Professor to another: listen to the people or fail.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/71dcd80c-1110-11e1-ad22-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1e4EQduqm
Which is good advice.
However, today is different, the financial markets have lost their way, and greed is about to do them in as a result.
Germany is fighting for its life and not as easily taken in by the UK/USA pact of bygone days.
Do we know who is the money behind those banks, you know the World Bank and that IMF?
See how Virgin, Richard Branson, was handed our nationalised bank at a cheap rate by the air head, Osborne. Leaving the tax payer mugged again. Who is the money behind that deal? Well the American, Wilbur Ross, in cahoots with Stanhope Investments an Abu Dhabi concern, and then Virgin. So the biggest shareholder is the USA.
Remember the Quatari land grab they gave away recently, leaving the tax payer holding, once again, holding the straw. These politicians are in it for what they make on the side, just like Blair. Watch out for the amount they come into, all of a sudden as they leave office. Or, check out the family behind them who get a sudden rise in bank balance of some kind.
However, as you know, most of this is kept off shore.
It is the tax payers they are robbing. Which is why so many are suffering and they tried to tell us, how many weeks ago, the the root of the trouble was our kids who looted the shops for a wide screen TV or a pair of sneakers. Today it’s those same kids who don’t want to work and must therefore lose their entitlement to benefit and starve.
I tell you it won’t be long before the propaganda machines will be telling us, they are feral children and should be shot because they are too dangerous on the streets, just as they do in Brazil. That country where they are now making a fortune.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m1VsFOUePw&feature=related
Lord Norton,
There is an old saw among churchworkers that I am reminded of by your post. A man had trouble finding time to pray and also trouble quitting his smoking habit and found that he could pray while he was out on a smoking break. He asked his pastor if he could smoke while he prayed and his pastor ueged him to give up the idea and show some reverence. He later rethought the idea and had the question presented anonymously to the same pastor as to whether he could pray on a smoking break and the clergyman was eager to assert that he was on the right track. This is a fairly typical part of the human condition I am afraid.