Hubris loses

Whether you agreed with the proposed House of Lords reform or not, one thing that has been outstanding in the past two days of debate has been the standard of the contribution by MPs.  Speeches have been lucid, considered and well-argued received with courtesy by those listening whether supporters or opponents.  In the absence of most of the front-bench ‘big guns’ and more accurately because of their absence, we have had two days of debate in the House of Commons rather than the normal Rottweilers howling at each other across the despatch box.  The result was a climb-down on the programme motion to limit debate to 10 days in the face of a massive Conservative revolt pushing the substantive bill into the autumn….essentially not a crisis averted but a crisis delayed.  The government may have won the second reading but it no longer has control of the timetable and there are obvious parallels with the Lords reform proposed by Harold Wilson in the 1960s that failed as the result of widespread filibustering.

Now the party blame game has begun.  The Labour Party has been ‘ostrich-like’, for instance.  Michael Gove’s defence of the Prime Minister’s authority  on Newsnight was combative but unconvincing.  It was clear that scores of Conservative (and one should add Labour) MPs were prepared to defy the party whip to vote against a measure they view as fundamentally flawed.  This cannot be seen as a victory for the executive however one construes it.  It was a victory for backbench opinion, a triumph of reasoned debate over executive hubris.  So there now are calls for consensus on reform but David Lawes, patronising in his tone, appears unwilling to accept the argument of the need for a referendum (it was included in all three party’s manifestos in 2010 so there’s no need).  This shows contempt for the people, perhaps of reflection of the loss of AV, and is eminently anti-democratic.  Yet again we appear to be in the grip of a political elite that knows what’s right for the people and that’s that. 

Without consensus, there is little chance of the bill passing the Commons without substantial time being expended and then the prospect of having to use of Parliament Act to force it through the Lords.  Now you may argue that there are other priorities than constitutional reform and waiting a few more years is a drop in the ocean given that the process of reform is already over a century old.  It is difficult to know how the issue will progress.  The current bill will encounter widespread opposition and is unlikely to pass the Commons, however long it is debated, in its current form and however poor the bill is now a mangled act will be even worse.  The only way forward is through consensus.  Many of those who opposed the programme motion and the bill did so because of the nature of the bill, the refusal to allow a referendum and the bill’s lamentable lack of clarity not because they opposed House of Lords reform per se.  Unless the government and opposition can agree on a bill including a referendum, then the saga of House of Lords reform could be with us for several more decades.

If Columbus had been a Liberal Democrat, he’d have discovered the mid-Atlantic!

One of the unenviable features of Liberalism has always been its sense of moral righteousness.  It’s the view that we’re right and, even if you don’t realise it, what we’re doing is for your benefit and if that means acting anti-democratically that’s fine…a modern version of Rousseau’s ‘being forced to be free’.  This has been evident in the proposed bill on House of Lords reform and in the lamentably weak speech Nick Clegg, an increasingly bankrupt political leader if ever there was one, yesterday proposing the legislation.  For a committed democrat to turn round and argue that, because all the parties agree about the need for reform, there’s no need for a referendum on a major issue of constitutional reform, is evidence of just how bankrupt he is.  Yes the parties do agree about the need for reform but they don’t agree about what that reform should be. His defence of no-referendum was so weak as to be laughable but then he’s already lost the AV referendum and would probably lose one on the House of Lords so why bother!!!  Well, precisely because he did lose.  The people may not always be right when it comes to referendums but that does not mean they shouldn’t be asked.

This matters because the proposed bill is a bad piece of legislation and should be opposed.  It is poorly drafted, imprecise, ambiguous and creates more problems than it resolves.  It replaces the patronage of the Prime Minister with the patronage of party, fails to define the relationship between Commons and Lords, seeks to introduce a system of PR based on the list system (one of the least democratic versions of PR: you vote for the party and we choose who sits) and is a recipe for constitutional conflict.  It also could well be a very expensive reform, something unwelcome in a period of austerity and for that reason alone logic should have dictated a delay until the economic crisis is resolved.  Constitutional reform, whatever its justification, is a luxury when there are more pressing issues.

 

The parliamentary supremacy of the House of Commons has, since the Parliament Act of 1911, been based on the fact that the Commons is democratically elected while the Lords consisted of hereditaries and latterly appointees who have no democratic mandate.  The proposed reform will establish elected members in both houses with equally democratic mandates.  In fact, you could argue that the Lords elected under a proportional system have a greater claim to represent the people than the Commons only elected under first-past-the-post.  So why should an elected Lords accept the supremacy of an elected Commons?  In additional, though elected through party patronage, because they cannot be re-elected after their 15 year terms, why should the Lords subject themselves to party discipline?  In fact, they could well be even more independent than the existing members (a good thing) but this would undoubtedly create constitutional conflict between the two houses both of which could claim a democratic mandate for their actions.  Prime ministerial patronage will still exist as PMs can appoint ministers to the Lords who would then remain for 15 years even after they lost their ministerial portfolios.  So a bloated Lords with its increasing membership of party hacks! 

The problem with the proposed reform is that it fails to reform the relationship between the two houses.  The Commons can no longer use the democratic mandate argument to justify forcing legislation through the Lords but this appears not to have figured in the thinking behind the legislation.  Yes constitutional crisis may well result on the development of constitutional conventions governing the relationship between the two houses as in the past, but the function of previous constitutional reform has been to enable either the government to act or the people to be represented.  This bill does neither and consequently fails what should always be the basis of constitutional change….clarity.