In his speech yesterday to mark the tenth anniversary of the Macpherson report, Trevor Phillips – chair of the new Equality and Human Rights Commission – drew attention to the fact that the House of Lords was more ethnically diverse than the House of Commons. Parliament, he argued, was not reflecting changes in British society. “For Parliament to be representative of gender,” he said, “we would need twice as many white female MPs and ten times as many ethnic minority women.”
That the Lords is more ethnically diverse than the Commons is not that surprising. When you have elections, a local selection process, and Members who may serve for twenty or thirty years, then it takes time for changes to work their way through the Commons. When a sitting MP retires after many years of service, the local party may be reluctant to see its power to select a new candidate diluted by interference from the centre.
With the Lords, appointment enables change to be achieved relatively quickly. We have seen in recent years more women, ethnic minority and disabled peers appointed. They are appointed on merit, reflected in their number being drawn on for promotion to front-bench positions. The youngest member on the Opposition front bench (and the youngest member of the House) is Baroness Warsi.
Their numbers could be boosted in future appointments. Given the turnover in numbers in the House, one can achieve significant change within a short period of time. This, to my mind, is one of the benefits of an appointments process, enabling a diverse membership to be achieved, much to the benefit of the political process.
The problem is though lord norton that the house of lords is to full and no more appointments should be made until the membership of the house has gone down to the size of the commons namely around 650. We all know that far to many lords share offices and that reducing the membership would allow less lords per office. There are more members of the house than there are seats in the chamber although this is not a large problem. But there is also the disgrace of those lords who do not turn up or those lords with poor voting records. Getting rid these members would be a start to brining the numbers of peers down.
Tory Boy: Thanks for the (swift) response. I agree that we should seek to reduce the size of the House. One way to do this is embodied in your last point. The House of Lords Bill, which Lord Steel has re-introduced this session, includes provision for peers to apply to retire and also for peers who don’t turn up to be deemed to have retired. Even without such provisions, however, one can achieve a reduction in numbers and yet appoint more peers from a diverse range of backgrounds. We know that in actuarial terms the House will lose about sixteen members each year. One could appoint, say, eight new peers each year, taking into account the need for diversity, thus generating new members while reducing the overall size of the House.
“more ethically diverse”? As opposed to the more consistently muddy grey ethics of the Commons i take it 🙂
Cath: Well spotted. I have corrected it to what Trevor Phillips actually said. The thought of a more ethically diverse House is, though, an interesting one!
Lord Norton
I appreciate the sentiments behind such things, but I tend to agree with Michael Bérubé that “diversity” is a poor word to use in these cases, a contentless word that muddies the waters around some admirable goals. The point of diversity is not actually simply diversity, but justice. Parliament should not be more representative because of aesthetics, but because that is more just.
It might seem like a small thing but I do think it matters. Those who oppose equal representation, or who seek to corrupt the spirit of the thing or even those who just get plain confused about the difference between means and ends can misappropriate the word in a way that isn’t as easy when we say what we mean to do, rather than the means by which we hope to get there.
This is nonsense. I don’t care what colour skin Lords have; nor do I care what their genitals look like; nor whether they are disabled.
What I do care about is (1) their political beliefs, and (2) the knowledge, understanding, wisdom and intelligence they can bring to solving the issues facing this country.
Getting a House of Lords that is representative of the people on my 1st criterion is easy: just choose them at random from the electoral roll. (This will have the side effect of automatically bringing proportionate representation of ethnic minorities, women, disabled people, and all other demographic categories — anyone who really wants diversity should support this proposal).
The 2nd criterion is harder: at the moment peers are mostly politicians. They shouldn’t be. Why not have people with a background in science, technology or business in the Lords? I think people Richard Dawkins, Tim Berner-Lee, and Richard Branson would be able to make useful contributions. Of course, there is a place for politicians: the HoL is after all a political assembly.
I therefore propose the HoL be made up of 1/3 chosen at random; 1/3 life peers (most of whom shouldn’t be politicians); and 1/3 elected, each to serve one term of 15 years without possibility of being re-elected (so they’ll do what’s right, not what’s popular).
Cabalamat: There is not an inherent conflict between appointing people on merit – the prime consideration – and drawing them from a range of backgrounds. On your second criterion, you write ‘Why not have people with a background in science, technology or business in the Lords?’ We do, especially in science and business. It may well be that the people you mention will in due course join the distinguished scientists and business people we have in the House.
McDuff: I take your point and language is important. However, the problem is coming up with a better term. Representation is often used but the term has at least four different meanings and in terms of being socially typical is not necessarily something we could or should seek to achieve in terms of strict proportionality.
“They are appointed on merit, reflected in their number being drawn on for promotion to front-bench positions.”
I think perhaps you are being a little generous in assuming the former from the latter. Though no doubt some, many or even all could/have been appointed on merit both main parties have used prominent appointments of minorities, easier to achieve in the lords without election, as political signposting of what type of party they want to project. In the same way the party leaders in the commons or at major speeches tend to pack the benches/area immediately behind them with young/minority/women supporters as it projects an electorally advantageous image. I’m not objecting to increasing numbers of any of the groups, only that we ought I think to be realistic about the PR agenda.
PS – Any soundings yet as to the sense in the house as to whether peers will defeat the Government’s plan to exempt parliamentary expenses from the FOI Act? I assume an easy win in the commons so the Lords looks like the only hope.
We all look the same under the skin its the wrapper that some have difficulty with. At the risk of offending McDuff’s sensibilities once again, the Lords represents all three of the classical forms of governance: Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy.
Of the three, democracy best suits our current way of life. Given that the house is split into three parts who serves what? I see life peers as creatures of the Commons and staunch defenders of democracy.
The hereditary peers represent themselves, democracy and the Monarchy. The Monarchy represents itself and Parliament with all of its forms. It has no day-to-day formal voice in the Lords nor should it have, some would argue. Perhaps a compromise might be reached in the distant future to allow this?
I liken the Lords to the well-cultivated landscape of the land owning aristocracy in that a balance is maintained between its political forms. In this respect it represents a purer form of democracy than the one to be seen in the Commons.
However, we are in a time of great change and the democratic process may decimate one of the parties in the Commons. Should this happen the balance of the Lords too will suffer and democracy may not be best served by it. I don’t see a resolution to this?
Cabalamat
There seems to be an inherent contradiction here, unless you believe that people’s perceptions of race, ethnicity, gender, level of physical disability and sexuality are unimportant to “the issues facing this country.” Or perhaps you believe that “knowledge, understanding &c.” is unrelated to experience.
It would be nice if everyone could be as colour/gender/disability blind as you apparently are. But what would be even better is if people could be aware of colour and gender and sexuality and think about them in terms of mutual understanding of capacities and needs rather than in terms of who is mooching off of who, or who is an abomination before God. And even better than that would be an appreciation that if we treated “white” as an ethnicity and “male” as a gender the same way we treat other subsets of humanity that we’d have a worse reputation as violent crazy entitled moochers than any other group and that this should give us all pause for thought. But since none of these things is realistically possible in a period of time short enough that anyone here will be alive at the end of it, what we should seek to do is to try and govern in such a way that is fair, just and equitable to all the people who happen to share this particular administrative division of the planet with us, and that seems easiest to do by allowing people with non-white-male experiences to take on at least a proportionate share of the positions in government.
Lord Norton
I appreciate that there are difficulties with finding alternative words, and that “diversity” is so entrenched now that it’s hard to see it moving. Nonetheless, I think it’s worth my raising the point whenever I see it. The more people who stop to consider whether having representation of disabled people can really be justified better in terms of “diversity of membership” than in terms of “doing justice to disabled people” (or Arabs, women or transsexuals for that matter) the better.
Perhaps the root of both my issues with the word and the fact that the word is hard to replace comes down to the fact that “diversity” in fact covers a number of things, each just a bit too complicated to in fact be adequately summed up with a single word. In the modern world I know there is pressure to be able to summarise things in three seconds for an increasingly impatient media, but with all these 24 hour news services and blog posts to fill up there does seem to be at least some room for a couple of extra words.
Putting Fascists and people who believe the Prime Minister is secretly an Illuminati Lizard into Parliament would also lead to a “diverse” membership.
21 January 2009
Your Lordship,
What are the foreseeable consequences of missed votes in the House of Lords, as outlined by Melissa Kite, ‘Tory peers miss two thirds of votes (The Telegraph, 17 January)’–without dwelling on which parties have the best/worst attendance records?
Certainly ‘retiring’ peers who fail to show up is one option, that allows for a decrease in numbers (and the possible nomination of more conscientious members). But does this tilt one way or the other for those who favour an appointed upper chamber as opposed to an elected chamber?
Perhaps more importantly, if a benefit of ‘part-time’ peers is their continuing involvement in professional life, will ‘enforced’ participation result in a decline in available expertise (as ‘working’ peers will decline the honour)? Also, if a complementary chamber is the preferred accompaniment to the confidence chamber–the House of Commons–isn’t there the danger that this shift in focus will induce peers to be more pro-active, leading to clashes with the Commons?
smm
Lord Norton,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7837324.stm
Have a look at point 7 in this article – it again makes the point about why British voters are so much more closely aligned to their MPs and why they bother them with problems which an MP may not be able to do much about. Although in the non-British part of the UK, Northern Ireland, the system appears to be rather different.
A slightly different take on diversity:
http://stuartsharpe.co.uk/2009/01/22/forget-foi-and-forget-mps-expenses-we-should-have-all-the-information/
(and a plug for this site)
McDuff: I take your point about language. Words do matter and I appreciate your point about the use of the word diversity. However, ‘justice’ is not really an adequate substitute, since it encompasses far more than what is being discussed here. The challenge is to come up with a word that captures more precisely what we wish to convey.
Organic Tory: I am not quite sure what merits the assumption that one should be present for every vote. There is a much stronger case for ensuring a link between hearing a debate and then voting. Usually, when a vote is held, the number of members voting – in either chamber – far exceeds the number that has listened to the debate. The benefits of a House of experience and expertise – many members maintaining their work outside the House – far outweigh any perceived benefit of a large turnout in every division that is held in the House. For those members not able or willing to turn up very often, if at all, then I favour enabling them to apply to retire from the House, as provided for in Lord Steel’s House of Lords Bill.