#44
The speech read aloud by HM the Queen to Parliament last week summarised the government’s legislative agenda for the year ahead. She began with the words; “My ministers’ first priority will be to reduce the deficit and restore economic stability.” Having a ‘Queen’s Speech’ at the start of each session suggests – wrongly - that the main function of parliament is to pass laws. Passing legislation is now secondary to the main role of the Commons which is to scrutinise the actions of the executive and hold the government to account for what it has and has not done. If politics were only about law-making, the Queen could simply have chortled; “My government will introduce legislation to outlaw the double-dipping of recessions and requiring money to grow on trees.”
One hundred and three years ago, David Lloyd George (Chancellor of the Exchequer in Asquith’s Liberal government) introduced a Budget which was rejected by the Tory landowners who then dominated the House of Lords. The fall-out from this led eventually to the Parliament Act of 1911 abolishing the power of the Lords to block ‘money bills’ and substituting a power of delay. The Tory peers gave way in 1911, just as their ancestors had done previously in 1832, when the king(s)[i] reluctantly backed the supremacy of the Commons and threatened to create Liberal peers in sufficient numbers to out-vote the inbuilt Conservative majority. The toffs decided they would rather pay death-duties on their estates than have the peerage diluted by bus-loads of merchants and manufacturers.
On the 2012 list of legislative priorities, reforming the composition of the House of Lords is down at number eighteen; way below ‘reform of the water industry in England & Wales’ but at least ahead of approving ‘the accession of Croatia to the European Union’. The present membership results from many accidents of history combined with ferocious political patronage[ii] and the need to provide day-care for retired MPs. In addition to 678 Life Peers and 23 Judges, there are still 92 hereditary peers[iii] and 25 bishops.
“A bill will be brought forward to reform the cemposition of the Hise of Lawds,” announced Good Queen Brenda, forbearing to add, “End not before time, my dears…”
I was surprised to learn that the preamble to the 1911 Act had stated its ultimate intention would be to replace the hereditary peers with an elected second chamber but regretted that “…such substitution cannot be immediately brought into operation.” Thirty eight years later, the Parliament Act of 1949 reduced the delaying power of the Lords to one year. The two acts (1911 & 1949) now function as one and (you may remember) were used most recently in 2004 to secure passage of the Hunting Act - intended to outlaw hunting with dogs[iv]. Some politicians prefer to have controversial ‘morality’ issues - gay marriage would be a case in point - debated in the Lords rather than the Commons but in doing so they should be aware that the Parliament Acts cannot be used to force through any legislation which has originated in the “other place”.
Those of you who are still awake may be wondering why the prospect of an elected second chamber has been allowed to languish for so long. The most plausible explanation lies in the enduring deadlock between opponents and supporters. Opponents of the Lords want to abolish it completely while its supporters are happy with its current status as a convenient repository for the accumulated wisdom of ‘The Great & The Good’[v]. Dozing away the autumns of their lives on the red leather benches of a chamber sometimes described as “God’s waiting room,” the motley denizens of the upper house remain – to misquote Donald Soper[vi] - the only empirical evidence we have that there may be life after death.
The continued exercise of significant political power in a democracy by this largely self-perpetuating elite is due to the very British habit of combining diffidence with deference. Very few politicians can stop themselves from fawning and swooning whenever a fully-crowned monarch sails into view, wrapped in a bejewelled white duvet and with retired military-men, wearing long grey wigs and black tights, staggering backwards in her wake. The dreaded ‘Downton Abbey Syndrome’ remains our national political affliction.
Even if we could get off our knees for long enough to replace the Lords with a largely elected Upper House, we would surely be worried sick that we had also created a concealed device which would one day explode without warning in the underpants of some future prime minister. When an elected chamber disagrees with an unelected chamber it is clear that the unelected chamber should give way. But if we had two elected chambers going head to head, how would they decide which should hold sway? Having re-invented the House of Lords as a part-elected, part appointed chamber and possibly also re-branded it as ‘The Senate’, it would be so very British to then hide behind the sofa with our fingers in our ears, waiting for the inevitable clash with the Commons over who can claim the most authentic democratic mandate.
A more creative solution would be to avoid the problem of electing parallel chambers by daring to reform more than just the composition of the Upper House. Quietly, and in the evolutionary manner made possible by an unwritten constitution, the Commons has, since 1979, substantially improved its scrutiny of the executive by developing a system of investigative Select Committees. Where once there were only five, the Commons now fields more than thirty active Select Committees covering the A-Z of government departments from Armed Forces to Work & Pensions. This has been a significant development and deserves constitutional recognition.
The mechanism of parliamentary ‘control’ is scrutiny: scrutiny of government policies alongside detailed scrutiny of legislation drafted by the government. A real reform would be to divide these functions coherently between two new chambers, with minimal overlap and duplication. Released from the obligation to undertake line-by-line analysis of innumerable bills, MPs should have the time they say they have always wanted to enhance the investigative work of the Select Committees and to pursue the issues raised by their constituents.
The Executive would remain embedded in the lower house where its survival would still be dependent upon having majority support. Legislative activity in this house would be focused on the annual finance act, i.e. enabling the government to implement its budget. The upper house would examine all other changes to the law. At present, all bills go through the same stages in both houses in an essentially repetitive process. Under a new system, bills would only need to be dissected forensically in the upper house. At the end of the existing parliamentary process, bills currently undergo what is called a ‘Third Reading’. In future, a bill could only become law after it had received a Third Reading (or equivalent) in both houses. If it failed to secure majority support in the Commons then its fate would have to be decided by a combined vote of all the members of both houses. And why not? No veto, no power of delay; just a simple majority of all parliamentarians. I commend the idea to Your Majesties…
….”Orf with his blinkin’ head!” cried the Queen[vii].
[i] Two kings were involved: Burlington Bertie (died 1910) and his successor, George The V Boring.
[ii] Of course you can’t buy a peerage – perish the thought - but large donations to the main parties help to get your talents noticed.
[iii] Survivors from a herd of about 700 culled by The House of Lords Act, 1999.
[iv] Apparently it didn’t succeed – if the packs of hounds still streaming across the countryside are anything to go by.
[v] Some of them were never all that ‘great’ and many had been, at times, not very ‘good’.
[vi] Methodist minister and later Baron Soper of Kingsway in the Borough of Camden
[vii] Another misquote, this time of course from Alice
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