Reform of the House of Lords
I have just noticed that Dr John Parkinson (a politics lecturer at the University of York) has a comment in the Guardian regarding the House of Lords reform, the government is revisiting this question. Earlier I appreciated the comments about the same thing by Nosemonkey at Europhobia.
Basically the argument is that it is not vital for democracy that members of the House of Lords be elected: Given that, one of the most important roles of democratic institutions is to scrutinise the government, forcing it to defend its proposals in public, and to amend those proposals if they are found wanting.
That is one of the roles that the House of Lords should be playing in British democracy, and in many ways it performs it rather well. The point to emphasise is that it does so in large part because the majority of its members are appointed for life. Appointees are not dependent on parties for their future career.â€
I suppose I could make the point that what we need for the House of Lords is something akin to what we had before TB started to muck about with it. But I cannot see any reason why the lottery of birth should be an automatic entry ticket into the government of the country.
I think the main points should be, not how the members get there, but the power of the second chamber to control possible excesses of any government, independence from executive interference, and a return to a division of state powers.
A commenter at Europhobia said “being free of political attachments has to be a pre-requisite†I would agree with that. I would add that the second chambers other job would be to see that the Government worked within the bounds of its authority.
That of course presupposes that there are boundaries to the power of the executive. Dr Parkinson says according to the “majoritarian” view of democracy, parties that win elections win a mandate to implement their manifesto promises without interference. Majoritarians think that anything else would be undemocratic: it would be to frustrate the free choice of the people.”
But when a party writes a manifesto it might say we will bring in laws to combat terrorism, serious crime, and street crime, all things with which we would agree. It does not say we will bring in laws that enable us to bypass parliament, to lock you up without trial, and create mandatory punishments without due process of law, these may well achieve the aims of the manifesto, but they hardly translate from the manifesto.
Unless we live in a dictatorship there should be limits to the power of government, even if those limits are to be found in their own pre-election manifestos. A major part of the second chambers job aught be to ensure that government power is moderated
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But it was the fact that the Lords got their position by lottery of birth that made them an effective check on the power of the Commons.
British MP’s will sell their grandmothers if it means they might win an election. How many times has a leadership candidate or prospective parliamentary candidate abandoned their long held beliefs and principles and toed the party line for the furtherance of their career? I can give you a few examples in the last few month off the top of my head.
The Lords had no reliance on popularity with either the electorate or the party and, rather than turning them into raving dictators, it made them into effective opposition and overseers of the career politicians in the Commons who stand to lose if they lose support of their party.
Since the last “reform” of the House of Lords, the Labour Stazi has appointed itself a majority in the upper house where previously it had been a Conservative majority.
The proposed “reform” to make it an elected upper house is nothing to do with democracy or accountability but merely an attempt to legitimise the situation whereby the upper house is 99.99999% guaranteed to have the same party in control as the Commons.
If the people vote for a Labour government in the Commons, they sure as hell aren’t going to vote for a Conservative government in the Lords are they?
Once the same party has absolute control of both houses there is no opposition or oversight and the Lords becomes an expensive talking shop - this is what the Commons has been reduced to over the last few years.