ResPublica Trustee, Professor Simon Lee, responds to the Government's proposals for the reform of the House of Lords
First,
Nick Clegg’s argument for reform calls the House of Lords an ‘affront
to democracy’ because it is unelected. Yet the Supreme Court is
unelected but performs a vital role in our democracy precisely because
its unelected nature gives the judges the scope to stand up to
majorities on behalf of minority rights. As Edmund Burke said, the
constitution is more than a matter of arithmetic. When the Coalition
government gets round to arguing about our Bill of Rights, it would be
odd indeed for a Liberal Democrat to be committed to the position that
elections and majorities are all that should count in our constitution.
When the Diamond Jubilee is in full swing, again an unelected element of
our democracy, the monarchy, will be celebrated over the coming months.
The debate on Scottish independence or devolution deserves to be about
more than arithmetic.
The Deputy Prime Minister in his speech to Demos and the Open
Society Foundation last December said that the open society was why
Lloyd George, that Liberal leader and prime minister of both Liberal and
coalition governments, ‘battled the House of Lords’ and that, ‘Lloyd
George described the House of Lords as being “a body of five hundred men
chosen at random from amongst the unemployed”.’ Nick Clegg did not
mention that Lloyd George sold peerages (as well as buying off media
criticism by selling knighthoods and peerages to press barons) and
accepted a hereditary peerage for himself, becoming Earl Lloyd-George of
Dwyfor.
Nowadays, the House of Lords is more reflective of people who know
about the Big Society espoused by the Prime Minister. The Lords are seen
by such stalwarts of the open society as Liberty to be battling the
government. As Liberty observed last year, ‘The past few months have
seen a remarkable series of debates in the House of Lords as principled
opposition to the Public Bodies Bill united members of all political
denominations and none. Over the course of several debates, powerful
arguments have been made against the approach taken in the Bill. This
process demonstrates the very point that those opposing the Bill sought
to make, namely the importance of informed and detailed parliamentary
scrutiny in keeping a check on Executive excesses.’
This takes us to the second point of ‘badgering’. The government’s
proposal ignores the fact that the House of Lords works, that it has
many expert members from diverse spheres who have performed a valuable
role in scrutinising and improving draft legislation. Even this year,
the government has been defeated in the Lords by people who knew what
they were talking about in both debating high principle and in
exchanging detailed comments on the impact of government changes to
social benefits.
From before Clegg and Cameron were born right through their
lifetimes, the House of Lords has given such attention to a wide range
of causes, including unpopular ones. For example, the Earl of Arran was
asked why, when he had in the 1960s introduced two bills, one to
decriminalise homosexual acts between consenting male adults and one to
protect badgers, the more controversial one on homosexuality found its
way into law whereas the one about badgers was defeated. He is reputed
to have said that the answer was simple, that there were no badgers in
the House of Lords. In fact, the scrutiny of badger bills in the 1970s
and 1990s continued to be of high quality. As the government seems
intent on a badger cull later this year, perhaps the Lords will return
to the theme.
When Viscount Monck in 1973 asked the Lords to imagine that, ‘My
noble and learned friend and myself are walking quietly down a glade in a
wood at this time of the year, and, as is our wont, stopping now and
again to pick a primrose, and uttering those famous words of Wordsworth:
Oh to be in England, now that April's there. Then, suddenly, round the
corner comes a badger…’, Lord Chorley pointed out that ‘Browning wrote
the poem’ and the Earl of Arran, interjected to ask, ‘May I point out to
the Committee that the walk which the noble Viscount proposes taking
with the noble and learned Viscount would have to be by night, because
badgers are not normally seen in the day-time’.
Before the government sleep-walks into culling the Lords, it is time to take a more measured approach to constitutional reform.
ResPublica
have today published a collection of essays on House of Lords reform,
'Our House: Reflections on Representation and Reform in the House of
Lords', which draws together a number of commentaries from leading
figures of society,
including Bishop Tim Stevens, Convenor of the Lords Spiritual; John
Longworth, Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce;
political philosopher Professor Roger Scruton; former welfare minister
Frank Field MP; Sir Stephen Bubb, the Chief Executive of Association of
Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations; Lord Adebowale, the Chief
Executive of social enterprise Turning Point; and Lord Wei, former
Government Adviser on the 'Big Society'.
An online copy of the publication can be found here.