Today, the “Debate on the Loyal Address” continues in both Houses. The Lords is having a second day concentrating on constitutional issues, and that will doubtless mean yet more indignation in our House about the government’s proposals for Lords Reform.
I have been struck, listening to in particular (but by no means exclusively) to Labour Peers, that the question of primacy of the Commons has become the obsessive hobby horse of so many in the Lords. Curiously, most MPs I speak to, of all parties, do not worry so much about the prospect of a fairly assertive second chamber, able to be difficult and get in the way of the government of the day.
MPs, particularly backbenchers, are often frustrated by their inability to act as a brake on the executive, when part of their role (on the government side at least) is to sustain the government in power. Many of the Labour Peers are, however, former Ministers. There are erstwhile Chief Whips and Secretaries of State aplenty.
I think this may impact on the particular end of the telescope from which they view this issue. There is a philosophical assumption on the part of some that the overriding consideration of our constitution should be for “the government to get its way”.
It is a fair perspective. There is certainly merit in having a system which permits a party (or parties) to secure office, and to deliver a programme on the basis of what was promised to the electorate. Students of the US system, awash with checks and balances, will know the difficulties there of getting anything done – take, for example, the endless wrangling required to introduce free healthcare.
The Westminster system, by default, is the polar opposite. As the respected columnist, Andrew Rawnsley, once put it, “Within his own universe, no democratic leader is potentially more powerful than a British Prime Minister with a reliable parliamentary majority and an obedient Cabinet.” Most committed parliamentary reformers take the view that this is a defect, not a strength, in our system. Hence Lord Hailsham’s condemnation of “elective dictatorship”.
Liberals in particular view with suspicion the idea that temporary stewards of the State Apparatus (a government) should secure a brief election victory, on a minority vote, and then be able to legislate virtually unchecked for five years.
For reformers, the question of primacy of one House over another – though important to ensure a functional constitutional balance – is secondary to the issue of Parliament’s position relative to the Executive. The refrain about primacy of the Commons can all-too-easily mean “primacy of the Executive”: the ability of the Government to overturn logical, well-argued, long-discussed arguments in the Lords at the whim of a pliant, whipped majority in the Commons.
A stronger second chamber – however composed – would challenge this orthodoxy, and reinforce the position of Parliament as the country’s sovereign body. However, we can hardly expect former Government Chief Whips to be happy about that!
Meanwhile, how can the opponents of reform use the primacy argument to dig into the last ditch, threatening filibustering, to resist a reform bill which arrives from the Commons?
Sorry, but this still has the issue turned on its head. You rightly point out the Commons has flaws; it does not therefore do to change the Lords to remedy those flaws, especially when such a ‘remedy’ is not a remedy at all, but a recipe for fudging and backroom deals.
Fix the Commons, by all means. Heck, I’m in favour of reforming the Lords to make the appointments system much more open, accountable and not a tool of party patronage; but election is the very anathema of reform.
Malden Capell: As an individual have you ever formed or become part of a group to better represent your interests. The blogs prospectus for an indirectly elected house is very simple: the Commons deals with all the people the Lords deals with people that have formed groups but not all of them. Not your cup of tea?
Malden Capell: As an individual have you ever formed or become part of a group to better represent your interests.
Are hereditary peers well organised as a non-parliamentary group, or did they merely resolve in to committee at Boodle’s or White’s?
It would seem that hereds almost HAVE to seek election to the hous of commons before they can enter the HofL as political peers, without being nominated by the other hereditary peers as one of their own number.
It may not matter since the vast number of Hereds who were disqualified in 1998 may only have been a technicality in any case, and that absolutely any Hered who wants to be, and remain a hered peer, in the house of lords only needs to ask politely to be admitted.
Otherwise it is reasonable that he takes a seat in the house of commons first, like all mortals, for four years or so, before entering the house of lords as a new “political” peer.
No elitism now!(like hell)
Senex: I don’t follow; this Blog’s prospectus is not for an indirectly elected House – Lord Tyler himself wants it to be directly elected.
I’d have more time for people who advocate an indirectly elected House of Lords, or even its abolition, than I would for those who advocate direct election. At least the former are logically consistent!
The first glaring mind-functional error in this Matter:
not only does any ‘almighty’ British PM not have primacy over the whole ‘universe’ but has no primacy even over the mere Solar System let alone over the Constitution and over the Majority of The People,
is a mere semantic one – a reeking red-herring;
whilst the real Primacy belongs to The Earth’s Lifesupports
(which under present Global and British Self-Aggrandising Governance will soon be reduced to being insufficient to support even 1 healthy human being let alone the current unhealthy 7 billion and the planned even-less-healthy 11 billion)
and to those human-beings who nurture, protect, preserve, and sustainworthily-ration the consumption, extinction and destruction of those living-renewable and finitely non-renewable Lifesupports,
amongst whose as yet minisculely unmeasurable, and certainly ineffectualised, under-taught both in places of education and to General Populations, and under-published, number
no Government on Earth, much less any self-aggrandising “Leader” thereof, has ever been countable nor truly otherwise proven worthy to be counted “good”, “constructive”, “powerful”, “statesmanlike”, “sustainworthy”,
even as being personally and lifestyly “Earth-citizenship-worthy”.
Malden Capell: Bloggers here are anonymous and from one post to another there can be no reliance that the reader is dealing with the same person.
For example, on Nov 25, 2009 a blogger called ‘Adrian Kidney’ using the same avatar as you contributed to the blog editorial comments containing the prospectus.
To this day Lord Tyler has never published on the blog a detailed prospectus for an elected house.
The primacy of the Commons is based upon nothing more than Cromwell’s codified constitution given in the ‘Instrument of Government 1653’ which declared:
“that the people are, under God, the original of all just power; that the Commons of England, being chosen by and representing the people, have the supreme power in this nation” See link below.
The story of ‘Cromwell’s Other House’ is a story of the head of state wanting a check on the power of the Commons. The Commons offended the public’s dignity then and it offends the public dignity now.
The appeal if any, of the blogs prospectus for an indirectly elected house is that it belongs to everyone, and to no one in particular. It’s the message that matters.
“One of the great weaknesses of all our discussions over the past 10 years has been that no one has had a bone to chew on.” Lord McNally, June 8, 2010
LotB readers including you have been chewing on a bone for some time now.
LotB: A Bloggers Prospectus for an Indirectly Elected House
http://lordsoftheblog.net/2009/11/25/putting-our-own-house-in-order/#comments
Cromwell’s Other House,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwell%27s_Other_House
Cromwell’s Codified Instrument of Government
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_of_Government_%281653%29