Tuesday 11 October 2011

The End of the Peer Show?

Any deployment of the Parliament Act other than to pass Lloyd George's People's Budget is essentially an abuse. Do we have a bicameral Parliament, or not?

Their Lordships demonstrated their worth by continuing to obstruct the attempt to reduce accountability by reducing the number of MPs but not of Ministers, and are doing so again by saving for the people of England the statutory Ministerial responsibility that simply is the National Health Service and from which the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will continue to benefit.

Remember that Labour, the Crossbenchers and assorted others outnumber 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), and in any case a redrawing now, four years before the next Election, would make absolutely no difference, since the same trend towards deurbanisation will continue in the intervening period.

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. Yes, Daily Telegraph, that does mean your expenses "scandal" and your entrapment of Ministers by pretending to be constituents when you were not. 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 must 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, who would become a peer upon his or her nominator's death, and who would thus acquire the same right of nomination.

4 comments:

  1. There are several lords whose heir you could be, but it has come to something when that is the only way in for someone whose views were mainstream Labour when the Labour party was part of mainstream society and close to mainstream Tory when the Tory party was part of mainstream society. While that sorry state of affairs persists at least, God save the House of Lords.

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  2. Thanks for posting this under Benedict Brogan's ludicrous piece moaning about how nasty the Opposition are. I hope your suggestion under Nick Cohen's Speccie latest comes off, to balance rubbish like that.

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  3. Quite frankly, I would rather be ruled by a hereditary House of Lords than the current, and recent, bunch of self-serving nonentities in the Commons. In my opinion, formed over the past 50 years, most of the hereditary peers had the welfare of this country at heart rather than the sausage-machine candidates who satisfy the selection criteria as dictated by central office and imposed on local constituencies against their will. Their only loyalty being to the party machine.

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  4. There are, of course, potential ways of rebalancing that. But as for the hereditary peerage, the removal from our body politic of hereditary barons and their aristocratic social conscience followed logically and inescapably from the removal of trade union barons as the voice of organised labour, leaving only a bourgeoisie stripped of previous moderating influences such as religion and the realisation that a middle class can only exist by means of extensive central and local government action.

    Attlee not only created 82 hereditary peerages, and not only took an earldom on his own retirement. He also created eight promotions within the peerage. I don't see how his commitment to the principle could have been any clearer than that. But set within the whole of the above context. Of course.

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