One thing that is absolutely vital for Reform UK to do before the next election is to write a comprehensive manifesto. Anything the party and Nigel Farage would like to do in the five years after Labour’s near inevitable fall must be spelt out. There is no room for waffle, no room for complacency. Nothing should be, as Labour is doing now, brought in but not pre-announced.
Ermine goes very well with tweed
The reason for this urgency is the constitutional set up of the country, our bicameral system. Due to a combination of bad faith, spite and personal moral horror, nobody from parties run by Nigel Farage over the past 20 years has ever received a peerage (barring Baroness Fox – but that award was for decades of efforts fighting for freedom of speech, not her short interlude as a European parliamentarian). Indeed, probably the biggest political unforced error by the establishment in recent years was in not giving Farage a peerage in 2016 after the referendum. It would have been entirely right and proper. They might not like it, or him, but such recognition would have been appropriate, and I believed at that moment, Farage would have accepted it. Theresa May learned to regret her bitterness, which led directly to her resignation. There is no way Farage could have led the Brexit party to its crushing European parliamentary election victory from the Lords, nor could he have come back to lead Reform last year.
Why does this matter?
Imagine the trajectory of the polls continues over the next four years. (Remember, on Friday, Reform topped a poll for the first time.) Perhaps there is a Reform UK majority, or perhaps a Reform/Tory deal of some sort happens. On the day after polling, Farage or whoever leads the coalition is summoned to Buckingham Palace and asked to form a government by the King. They do so, perhaps giving Badenoch the role of minister for engineering, and start to push their legislation through the Commons.
Of course after it has passed through the Commons it has to make it through the Lords.
Starmer talks a good game when it comes to Lord’s reform, but I cannot see that there is the will or time to go through the protracted political trench warfare to get it completed. I imagine that the hereditary Lords will get the boot – a huge mistake – and perhaps the bishops – another mistake – but full root and branch change, unlikely.
Instead it will be the Lords as it is now, but with four year’s worth of Labour catch-up (today there are 275 Tories and 175 Labour). An even greater slew of the technocratic elite. If Farage wins – if any Reform coalition wins – then they will see themselves as the opposition. They will oppose everything that government sends. It would be like their anti-Brexit rear-guard on steroids. They showed that they had no love for democracy when it threw up what to them was the wrong answer. Farage in No. 10! Could there be an answer wronger than that?
The only defence against this is to have a significant and comprehensive manifesto. The Lords are covered not just by the 1911 Parliament Act that bars them from blocking finance bills or budgets, but also the Salisbury Convention. The Convention grew out of the Attlee election when Labour had a significant majority in the Commons, but the Tories had an absolute majority in the Lords. To break the impasse, Viscount Cranborne put the principle succinctly,
‘Whatever our personal views, we should frankly recognise that these proposals were put before the country at the recent general election and that the people of this country, with full knowledge of these proposals, returned the Labour party to power. The government may, therefore, I think, fairly claim that they have a mandate to introduce these proposals. I believe that it would be constitutionally wrong, when the country has so recently expressed its view, for this House to oppose proposals which have been definitely put before the electorate.’
This means that if legislation is explicitly in a manifesto, the Lords should not thwart it.
Still, the increasingly assertive (and self-satisfied) life peers have begun to rip the convention up. In 2015, the Lib Dems stated clearly that they would not abide by it over ‘right to buy’, and the Remain majority in the House felt that their feelings – which they grandly claimed to be the voice of the silent majority, despite the Referendum – also ran roughshod over it during the Lords’ debates over Brexit.
Whatever happens, and no matter how well drafted his manifesto, we would be in for constitutional warfare between the houses. Farage may well find himself with a stark choice: either call a snap, ‘who governs Britain’ election, or create 500 peers, or both.
In which case I would like to point out that ermine goes very well with tweed.
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