They should’ve just suspended the House of Lords pending reforms. Can they do that?

…in order to “rebalance the upper chamber”, which is currently under a Labour majority.

Well Labour are the largest single party currently, but I wouldn’t call 211 out of 707 a majority.

Given that LibCon Lords currently constitute 55% of the non-crossbench total, and when Labour was in power its Lords constituted less than 50% of the non-crossbench total, you wonder why they are so worried about their legislation getting thrown out. Could it because the Salisbury Convention – which states that the Lords cannot throw out the government’s manifesto pledges – doesn’t apply to the LibCon regime? LibCon ran on two manifestoes and there is a mandate for neither of them, nor is there a mandate for the coalition agreement. So the Lords can feel free to vote down LibCon legislation on everything short of the budget.

“They should’ve just suspended the House of Lords pending reforms. Can they do that?”

That would leave the coalition government a free hand to push through any legislation they liked. Currently (I think) any legislation has to go through both the Commons and the Lords. The Lords can (and do) send it back if they are unhappy to ask for amendments. The Commons can return it for another vote twice more, after which the Commons can just push it through anyway. This does happen, but quite rarely.

The Lords do perform a useful act of being a check and balance for the Commons. This is why it’s very important to get the changes the coalition are proposing right. Previously we’ve had a second chamber full of Tory aristocrats or people appointed by previous governments to stack the odds in their favour, (Lords Archer and Madelson for instance). These people get to stay there for ever, (Archer has been in prison and they still can’t get rid of him).

If the coalition are creating a load of new Lords to ensure that they can get the legislation through to reform the place then great. If they just mess around and are only adding these people to make their lives easier (like Blair) then we’re stuffed.

LibCon ran on two manifestoes and there is a mandate for neither of them,

Why not?

They should’ve just suspended the House of Lords pending reforms. Can they do that?

I bloody hope not.

ukliberty asks why I think there is a mandate for neither manifesto.

Constitutionally, a party has a mandate for its programme if it wins a majority of seats. Morally, it has a mandate if it wins a majority of the vote. Neither of the governing parties won a majority of seats or votes. They have a majority between them, but since they ran on two different and incompatible manifestoes, there is a mandate for neither manifesto.

The half-hearted and poorly directed reform of the Hous eof Lords under Tony Blair was never good enough. But amazingly it made the chamber function for the first time in our democratic history.

The changes saw the majority lost from the Tories – and since then the upper chamber has been nicely split. This has dramatically upped the standard of debate and scrutiny taking place, instead of the old days of the Lords vting through or down whatever the Leader of the Tory party in the Commons told them to.

But apparently the aim of the upper house isn’t to scrutinise – according to the Tories (no surprise there) and the Lib Dems (maybe they really should drop the “dem” bit after all) – the aim of the Lords is to do what the Commons tells it.

I mean seriously – as some one who wants real reform I feel like giving up when stuff like this happens.

Might just as well close the lords and save ourselves a fortune for all the scrutiny we’ll get from a whipped majority.

Dunno what to make of this. Any short-term solution is going to be a messy, awful fudge until elections are instituted.

I can sort-of buy the notion that it’s a good idea to make the Lords proportionate to how people voted in the GE, but if we had separate elections to the Lords then it’s entirely possible that people might vote differently, as they already do with council elections (e.g. Lib Dem locally, Labour for the Commons and Tories for the Lords or something). I’m less bothered by the short-term issue than having a definite timetable and plan set out for a fully democratic second chamber. Until that’s in place, there will always be the suspicion that reform will take a back seat once the new peers are in place – exactly what happened when Blair got rid of the hereditaries. Once the first step had been taken, the momentum died as the government realised how convenient it was to have such powers of patronage (and how lucrative!).

So, let’s see the new plans and the timetable first, before we get new peers in place.

Rob

Lords should have their own entirely seperate elections. In the mean time though, pretending there is something democratic about loading a second chamber with a government majority is utterly ridiculous. It is the sort of thing Mugabe did as we all laughed at how such unsophisticated dictators always claim to be acting democratically when doing obviously undemocratically things.

What I meant was that if they are going to install lots of new peers so the House of Lords reflects the political balance of the Commons, the House of Lords won’t function as a check on the power of the Commons anyway (not that it has any right to, being full of people who have no democratic mandate to block the elected government’s legislation). If they are going to remove that check, then they should just abolish the damned thing, as this looks a lot worse.

I am in favour of unicameralism.

I’m also a unicameralist. Not sure the Tories agree with scrapping the House of Lords, though.

This kind of gerrymandering is to be expected to some extent, but few governments have had the audacity to do it quite so blatantly.

I’m not sure unicameralism is an answer: I don’t think any major democracy of any size has only one chamber. I’m not sure I like the concept of the lower chamber having no oversight… particularly not given recent baleful experience with huge Tory and NuLabour majorities.

The answer for the Lords is to announce elections, make sure they are held on a different basis to those for the Commons, reduce the number drastically to say 200 or 250, and/or make the term they serve different, or the term of Lords session different so there is always the potential for “cohabitation”, and then see what the outcome is.

I have a feeling that the results might not simply reflect the relative size of parties in the commons, altho it is possible it would. In practice you might find people voting for more independently minded candidates, or voting for minor parties or interest groups they wouldn’t support in a General Election for the commons.

I think the electorate itself should provide oversight of the legislature. Even if politicians in the upper house are elected to longer terms, they’re still a) party political and b) subject to populism.

Yes, the House of Lords have stopped Labour’s more authoritarian excesses. But that isn’t going to happen every time, so it can’t be used as an excuse to justify this anachronism.

If people gave more of a shit about the laws passed by the people they elect, we wouldn’t need a second chamber.

That, and a separation of powers so the government is separate from parliament, and has to negotiate with it to get its laws passed.

Galen

Agreed – a proper elected second chamber – elected differently and at different times to the commons – is the right answer.

But this isn’t a thread about reforming the house of lords sadly. It is about a government loading the second chamber so it does what they say. As such unicamerlism would at least save us money and reduce corruption.

The Scottish Parliament is unitary, is it not?

Currently the proportions of non-political peers are Lab 45%, Con 35%, LD 15%. I’ve been looking for the principle that TB used to define his “target” % of Lab peers, but I’m not sure whether there was one.

One advantage I can see of the “add more to rebalance” it approach is that it is not sustainable, so – like Jack Straw’s 92 hereditaries, it will keep reform rolling.

Personally, I see no problem with a large House of Lords – it has been a cheap legislature to run even when it *was* large (compared to the commons and expenses fiddlers aside), and very effective as far back as I can remember (to early Thatcher), and a revising chamber with access to a wide range of people seems an excellent idea.

A lot of new peers seems fair given the proportion, but I’ll be surprised if they do 150 or so straight away.

As with so many other things, a lot will depend on whether this is an administration which keeps promises.

BTW presumably it is more than 908 if there are any GB resignation honours. Hopefully TB has lost his opportunity.

And save one by putting the ex-Speaker out to grass chairing domino games somewhere.

16

The Scottish parliament probably isn’t that good an example given that it is essentially a devolved assembly without powers over certain “reserved” areas of national UK policy. Unicameral legislatures tend to be more common in smaller, “unitary” states with homogeneous populations… Hungary, New Zealand, Iceland, Sweden, Portugal. It is probable that an independent Scotland would follow suit.

Some states like Slovenia have a “National Council” with members elected by interest groups, rather than directly by the population, and some have part-appointed and part-elected upper chambers.

My point more generally is that larger countries tend to have bi-cameral legislatures, which may be partly to do with issues around federalism, and trying to accommodate the competing demands of mult-ethnic or sectionally divided countries, and partly due to the greater complexity and scale of legislation in larger states.

I realise (@15 margin4error) that the thread isn’t specifically about reform of the Lords, but to believe that unicameralism is “the answer” to the Tory’s attempted gerrymandering becuase it would be “cheaper” and therefore better is pretty simplistic.

Galen

True – and in the long term a functioning second chamber is a good thing. It just seems scrapping the lords would be cheaper than the gerrymandering and have the same result (a complete lack of any scrutiny)

Also I feel we should point out that it is as much the LibDem’s gerrymandering as it is the tories. We can hardly hope to keep the LibDems honest in government by blaming the tories for all the bad, and crediting the lib dems for all the good.

#19

There are other reasons why a unicameral legislature would be better than cost. Democracy can be expensive and I would make any fundamental decisions of democratic principle on the basis of cost. Some of us simply believe that the electorate is a better means of ensuring checks and balance than another chamber. We oppose unelected lords but don’t want a chamber which would have the legitimacy to compete with the Commons, which would apply to any elected second chamber regardless of how it was elected.

While I am not sold on the Chartist demand of yearly parliamentary elections, I would prefer that as a way of ensuring accountability over an elitist system of having experts (whether appointed of elected) act as a revising chamber.

obviously missed out a fairly crucial “not” in the paragraph above, I’ll leave people to decide where it should go!

Some of us simply believe that the electorate is a better means of ensuring checks and balance than another chamber.

‘Simply’ seems apposite.

We oppose unelected lords but don’t want a chamber which would have the legitimacy to compete with the Commons, which would apply to any elected second chamber regardless of how it was elected.

No, we just say that the Commons is the primary and the Lords (or whatever) the secondary. It wouldn’t be the first time there has been an elected, secondary chamber.

While I am not sold on the Chartist demand of yearly parliamentary elections, I would prefer that as a way of ensuring accountability over an elitist system of having experts (whether appointed of elected) act as a revising chamber.

God forbid experts should have the opportunity to scrutinise legislation. They might find something wrong with it!

In Germany the second chamber plays a more specific role than purely scrutinising legislation passed by the primary chamber: it is indirectly elected, consisting of representatives of each of the country’s regional governments, elected by the people in those regions by different methods.

I suppose this model wouldn’t really work here, as England constitutes so much of the UK that the regions aren’t roughly equivalent in size. What other countries with two legislative chambers would people recommend?

@ukliberty, no guarantee that the elected peers (can we call them Senators please? I don’t like all this peer peer shit and I hope they don’t have crappy titles like Lord or Baroness once we elect them) would be experts at scrutinising legislation. Look at the Commons: it’s full of lawyers but most MPs are shit at holding the government to account. Yes they don’t quite have the power to hold the government to account, but they don’t have the guts to demand the power to do so. The craven swine.

I am of the opinion that if the people elect a parliament to decide laws, there should be nothing between the people and the parliament – no second chamber. If the government fouls up, with a fair voting system in place there would be no one to blame but the people and they can replace them at the next election. Less politicians, more people power please.

ukliberty

except that experts need selecting somehow – and that tends towards patronage and thus towards party affiliation.

And so you get the Lib Dems and Tories planning to pack the Lords with their “experts” so that no real scrutiny need take place.

To paraphrase Churchill – democracy is the worst option except for all the other ones.

If the Lords aren’t going to be fulfilling whatever purpose they’re there for – why not just abolish them, and establish a new chamber? They’re useless dinosaurs atm.

OK, in what way is the House of Lords a problem? Is it actually a problem or are people merely offended by the nature of its constituents? If the former, how well would a particular proposal solution solve the problem and what new problems would it cause? If the latter, can I suggest people find something more important to complain about?

As for costs, I wholeheartedly agree with this: “Democracy can be expensive and I would [not] make any fundamental decisions of democratic principle on the basis of cost”. But if you’re really anxious about cost, you like to know that the Lords costs about 0.02% of revenue (the Commons about 0.08%).

>And so you get the Lib Dems and Tories planning to pack the Lords with their “experts” so that no real scrutiny need take place.

I’d suggest that “experts” have an excellent record in the Lords, unlike political peers for Prime Ministerial convenience – another one of whom has just disgraced himself this morning.

>(can we call them Senators please? I don’t like all this peer peer shit and I hope they don’t have crappy titles like Lord or Baroness once we elect them)

Nooo. Not Senators. We already the execrable “Supreme Court” as if it was an ersatz rice dish. “House of Lords” is just fine.

@blanco

Useless dinosaurs?
I think you need to read up on who’s been protecting your rights for the last 30 years.

UK Liberty

I’ll set out my problem with the House of Lords. (I did somewhat in my first comment on here, so I’ll elaborate on it)

The House of Lords, throughout our democratic history, has been a block vote for the Tories. This meant that rather than “scrutinise” it tended to allow through legislation that a good second chamber would have sought to ammend or oppose, whenever the Tories had gained democratic control of the Commons. And rather than “scrutinise” legislation when Labour gained democratic control of the Commons, the Tory whip remained and so legislation was often blocked or delayed for no other reason than party affiliation mascarading as scrutiny.

Now as some one who actually thinks Labour’s reform of the Lords was woeful, ill-thought out, unfinished, and disjointed – I have to admit something.

If the aim of the second chamber is to scrutinise – then Labour’s reforms – more by luck than judgement – worked. The standard of debate and ammendment rose dramatically – perhaps because neither the government nor the opposition had a whipped (officially or otherwise) majority in the Lords to do with as they pleased.

Working like that – experts make sense. They can benefit legislation.

However.

Those experts are selected by patronage.

And as we can see right now – any system based on patronage enables a government to load it with a block whipped vote so as to overcome the pesky irritation of scrutiny of their legislation.

And as such – if we are about to expand the Lords so as to stop it scrutinising anything (and remember, Labour don’t have, and so can’t use, a block vote of 50% in the Lords to work as a blocking force – so this is hardly 1910) – then why not just scrap the Lords instead of pretending it serves a real purpose.

Of course reform would be better. Democratic reform. But that;s not on offer. A majority aligned with the government is on offer – so even that 0.02% of revenue is a clear waste of money.

after all – Spending £3 on a full can of coke is less a waste of money than spending 50p on an empty one if you are thirsty.

Matt

They have had an excellent record since botched reforms left the Lords with no majority for either the government or the opposition.

Alas that short lived era of decent scrutiny is set to end.

I love the ahistorical view that the Lords used to push through Conservative bills. Anyone who can remember as far back as the 80s will remember the struggles of Thatcher to get bills through the Lords. At times, she really did have to call out the backwoodsmen and use a lot of persuasion to get things through. And I think she resorted to the Parliament Act rather less frequently than Blair/Brown, even after they packed the place with supporters. It was never an automatically Conservative-aligned chamber. And the hereditary peers did include a lot of very expert and experienced people who would tend to vote on the basis of knowledge, unlike some of the placemen we find there nowadays…(Mandelson for example, knows far less about business than, say, the Duke of Westminster)

Urgh, the Lords is such a horrible embarrassment

31 You are talking out of your bottom.

The number of bills that passed on first reading was much higher under Thatcher than Blair. She did not have the obstruction that Labour always has with the Lords.

The tories just believe that they have a divine right to rule and this is another example of that. Despite the fact that they made such a fuss about Blair’s political appointments this just shows that the House Of Lords is viewed by the tories as only relevant when we have a Labour Govt. Then it becomes a second goalkeeper if you like, with the job of slowing down and obstruction of the elected govt. That is why Blair was forced to take the drastic steps he did.

The tories will not stand for such opposition and so they gerrymander the system. And their friends in the media will not say a word, unlike all the fuss they made when Blair did the same. The House of Lords for the last 200 years has been The House of Tory.

OFF TOPIC – BUT JUST ANNOUNCED:

BA workers strike banned by the courts- it is becoming almost impossible to go on strike in the UK today

The reason the strike is banned – because out of over 11,000 votes 11 (ELEVEN) voting papers were spolit and the union did not reveal these 11 spoilt votes to its members in the results in some (but not all) e-mails and texts…..

it’s a total stitch up, no other body in the UK has to jump through the legal hoops unions have to – and these are the largest, democratic voluntary bodies in the country, far more open and democratic than political parties or businesses

it is a total fucking joke

organised workers effectively have NO RIGHTS in the UK today

Just shows that the judges are right wing and anti worker.

The brownshirts will not not be happy until we have a slave labour.

@sally

I note around 250 defeats of the Govt 1979 to 1997.

@margin4error

There were more defeats 1997-2010, but then Mrs Thatcher didn’t try to bring in compulsory ID cards or 90 detention with trial. I’d be interested to see an analysis.

I also note that *all* the reporting on this is currently just on guesses and speculation, including my own.

I’d think that something like 100 new working peers was OK and necessary now. 150-200 would be taking the p.

Tory peers average age is 70+, so that clearly needs something doing. Likewise, LDs are only 15% of political peers, so that needs a boost.

Whether we get sensible reform will be one test of the “New Era” of politics.

Blair and Brown both failed their test. This time round, we shall see.

bah. Without trial.

“There were more defeats 1997-2010, ”

Thanks for making my point.

On this prinicple, what about all those thousands of votesr locked out from voting in the general election?

shall we say the result is null and void now because of that?

Sally

If you can back up your case, please do.

You just made my case thanks.

From 1979-1997 there were fewer govt defeats in the Lords than there were between 1997-2010. Even though the tories were in power for 5 years more they had fewer defeats.

This is not new. Lloyd George was forced to bring in the Parliament act to get his budget through because of Tory obstruction. The House of Lords is nothing more than a giant Tory goalkeeper, there to obstruct non tory govts. When we have tory govts it is used by the tory party to push their agenda through quicker.

That is why Blair was forced to do what he did. And how the tory party wined about it. Still, the next govt will have to appoint 2-300 more peers and the whole system will be very soon in disrepute because we will have thousands of Peers.

Lloyd George was forced to bring in the Parliament act to get his budget through because of Tory obstruction. The House of Lords is nothing more than a giant Tory goalkeeper, there to obstruct non tory govts.

I don’t think Lloyd George was adverse to the House of Lords!

Just shows that the judges are right wing and anti worker.

That’s strange. Only last week a judge ruled in the PCSU’s favour against the Civil Service.

Lloyd George was forced to use the same tory corruption methods because the House of lords was the house of tory. Still was, up until Blair changed that. Call me Dave is going to put it back.

There were more defeats 1997-2010, but then Mrs Thatcher didn’t try to bring in compulsory ID cards or 90 detention with trial. I’d be interested to see an analysis.

Quite. And it wasn’t just Tory peers who voted against Blair’s illiberalism. And um, voting against illiberalism isn’t a bad thing, imv.

>You just made my case thanks.

I don’t think so. You are being very simplistic.

x defeats vs y defeats is too crude to prove anything, nor does it take account of quality of legislation as drafted (does it need revision?), how much legislation was passed, or the attitude of the administration.

In his first 9 years in office Mr Blair created 3000+ new offences, 1200 by primary legislation. In the last 9 years of the previous administration, Mrs Thatcher and Mr Major created around 500 offences by primary legislation. So you’d expect more defeats for Mr Blair’s lot just because they were pushing through more business.

Source:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blairs-frenzied-law-making–a-new-offence-for-every-day-spent-in-office-412072.html

On that – more comparable basis – it’s pretty clear that the HoL provided effective opposition to both the Tories and to Labour.

I repeat – if you have an analysis to back up your case, do post it.

margin4error, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, stuffing the second chamber with drones is bad. But I think we need a second chamber. Note that the Condem spokesman has denied the figures claimed by the Times.

How marvellous! More of my friends going to the House of Lords!

Ok, there are 3 options here:

1. The staus quo
2. Lib Dem and Tory peers created to make the Lords proportionate to the vote at the election
3. Elected House of Lords

Now 2 is being done in the interim until 3 is achieved, but regardless, surely 3 is better than 2 and 2 is better than 1?

So these new peers gets us to 2 when we’re currently at 1. And if 3>2>1, and 2 is only for the interim, then what’s the fucking problem? If you’re going to have an unelected second chamber, even just for a short time span, surely making it proportionate is better than not?

x defeats vs y defeats is too crude to prove anything, nor does it take account of quality of legislation as drafted (does it need revision?), how much legislation was passed, or the attitude of the administration.

In his first 9 years in office Mr Blair created 3000+ new offences, 1200 by primary legislation. In the last 9 years of the previous administration, Mrs Thatcher and Mr Major created around 500 offences by primary legislation.

Wait, so “x defeats vs y defeats” is “too crude”, but comparing numbers of new offences created without “account of quality” is not?

@Alex

And the full-stop is upside down, too.

Feel free to argue that elapsed time is a better measure than actual amount of Parliamentary business, but you won’t have many takers .

UK Liberty

I agree a second chamber is a good thing in principle – but stuffing it with a government majority effectively means there isn’t a second chamber anyway – or at least not one that does what a second chamber should, which is scrutinise and so improve standards of legislation.

As such until the move to electing it one way or another (I’d like a rolling election system that sees a third of peers elected every four years – and no peer can stand for second election) – why not leave it as it is (as it at least does roughly what it should at present) or scrap it to save money?

As I say, spending even a small sum on an empty can of coke is a waste of money if you are thirsty.

Alex

No – 2 is not better than 1

Read my earlier posts to see why.

1 is just fine until we get to 3. 2 means giving up on second chamber scrutiny – and that’s awful.

Or to put it another way – if Labour had a majority in the Lords all these years, imagine the rubbish legislation that would not have been amended.

Well that’s what 2 effectively does for the Con-lib government.

In theory the “creation of piers” to quote “1066 and All That” should be a very temporary thing. The coalition document promises:

a committee to bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation. The committee will come forward with a draft motions by December 2010

Now both Lib Dem and Con party leaders are relative HoC newbies. They don’t bear the scars of previous attempts to alter in any way the HoL. There are numerous problems:

Whenever two political types are gathered together, they will produce three different plans for HoL reforms. To form a committee and expect it all to be over by Christmas is much more optimistic than expecting the same about the First World War. And with about the same amount of shrapnel.

The question nobody seems to be asking is: what is the House of Lords for? What should it be: a revising chamber; an assembly of experts; a body representing the country in a different way (geographic, religious, demographically, whatever); a very posh retirement home?

Following on from that: what powers should it have?; how do you elect it?; how often and for what terms; how big should it be?; what remuneration for its members?; etc.

Assume that some sort of commission finding staggers back eventually to the HoC, weighed down with options, minority reports and notes of dissent. The Government then has to produce some sort of bill. Does it give a range of options or does it try to railroad one preferred choice through. Think of the problems Labour had with a simple bill and an enormous majority: the thing collapsed because no one option had a majority. This Government has a hung parliament with a lot of potentially restive backbenchers.

Then once it actually reaches parliamentary discussion don’t constitutional bills have to have full chamber committees and unlimited time? In the sixties the unlikely combination of Michael Foot and Enoch Powell managed between the two of them to kill HoL reform completely. No doubt this time the oratory will be less good, but the awkward squad may be bigger.

And if you have a “wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation” it will have more democratic legitimacy than the Commons. Even using party list (which I suspect most of us loath) is better than FPTP, which after all is just party list with a list of one and only one winner.

And then you’ve got to get the full thing through the existing House of Lords.

I suspect that with our new Lords and Baronesses, if created en masse in a centenary celebration of the Parliament Bill, will be with us for some time to come.

Roger

I suspect further that the government knows all of that full well. These are not stupid people after all. Blair may have been naive in his early attempts, as no one had ever tried before – but he and everyone else learned very quickly that the Lords is not a chamber easilly reformed.

So the argument that they are only stuffing the Lords ballot box for a short while, is in fact a lie. They are stuffing it for at least two years if we assume a best case scenario. And only fools do that.

1 is just fine until we get to 3. 2 means giving up on second chamber scrutiny – and that’s awful.

Or to put it another way – if Labour had a majority in the Lords all these years, imagine the rubbish legislation that would not have been amended.

Well that’s what 2 effectively does for the Con-lib government.

Not it does not. There are 186 crossbenchers. When you take account of them, Co+LD does not make a majority.

So this has no effect on “scrutiny”.

Alex

As a rough look at the figures, how about this.

172 + current government peers = 432
172+ current total of peers = 876

That would leave them four short of a majority. (Lets overlook exclusions and other exceptionals like those working for the EU and thus who can’t vote)

Are you saying that of more than 100 cross benchers – not even four are in fact undeclared supporters of one or other of the government parties?

And that’s before we weigh up non-attendance and the various exclusions.

So for all practical purposes – we are talking about a majority.

All this talk about rebalancing according to the share of the popular vote is garbage – it does not take account of cross benchers, who are predominantly Tory or habitual non attenders. The proposed new appointments would give the Coalition, and possibly the Tories on their own, an overwhelming majority to do what they want – especially since most of the appointments will be the from the Party faithful.

Net result will be until direct elections are agreed is that the House of Lords will in effect cease to function as a revising chamber or as a check on the power of the executive. Strangely enough I didn’t see the temporary abolition of the 2nd chamber in any of the election manifestoes.