Heir Power

Jim Callaghan once threatened to resign as Labour Leader rather than accept Tony Benn’s policy of abolishing the House of Lords. As that House was constituted in 1980.

Yet the Coalition is preparing to replace that House with a new second chamber elected by means of regional party lists. When rightly obstructing the attempt to reduce accountability by reducing the number of MPs but not of Ministers, Their Lordships demonstrated that Labour, the Crossbenchers and assorted others outnumbered the two Coalition parties. Whereas an elected second chamber would have a Conservative-Lib Dem majority on a permanent basis. A Labour skew in the current electoral arrangement is, so to speak, an urban myth; the real problem is that the poor no longer vote, since they no longer have anyone to vote for. But in any case, a redrawing now would make absolutely no difference, since the same trend towards de-urbanisation will continue between now and the next General Election.

Thank goodness that there is still some part of our parliamentary system from which it remains possible to speak from outside the nasty but inevitable union between, on the one hand, what has always been the anti-parliamentary New Left and, on the other hand, the sociologically indistinguishable New Right’s arrival at hatred of Parliament as the natural conclusion of its hatred of the State. From that union, together with the SDP’s misguided Alliance with the Liberals around their practically Bennite constitutional agenda, derives the Political Class’s desire to abolish the House of Lords.

For those who keep such scores, the House of Lords has a higher proportion of women, a higher proportion of people from ethnic minorities, a broader range of ethnic minorities, and far more people from working-class backgrounds generally and the trade union movement in particular, than can be found down the corridor. More significantly, and despite the very hard efforts of successive governments, it also retains a broader range of political opinion, more reflective of the country at large. But that is under grave threat, both from the party machines and from the way of all flesh. The future composition of the House might be secured, at least in part, by providing for each current Life Peer, at least who attends very or fairly regularly, to name an heir, by no means necessarily or even ordinarily a relative, but rather a political and a wider intellectual soul mate. That heir would become a Peer upon his or her nominator’s death, and would thus acquire the same right of nomination.

Meanwhile, what of the 26 Anglican bishops whose position, very tellingly in view of how secular Britain allegedly now is, is never seriously challenged by anyone? How about 12 full-time, fixed-term parliamentary voices of the United Kingdom’s Christian heritage, whom the media could easily and usefully dub “Apostles”? Plus 12 full-time, fixed-term parliamentary voices of moral and spiritual values generally? Each of us would vote for one candidate, with the top 12 elected at the end. Casual vacancies would be filled by bringing in number 13 and so on. This would be more than fair. No one seriously disputes that Britain is far more than 50 per cent Christian. That, after all, is why no one ever seriously challenges the presence of Christian voices, as such, in our legislature.

The question is the best way of ensuring that that voice is heard. Just as the question is the best way of perpetuating the second chamber’s breadth, especially its political breadth. Turning it into a bolthole for all those Lib Dem Minsters who are about to lose their Commons seats is not the way to go about that.