Of all the cockamamie ploys favoured by this government, House of Lords reform is close to being both the most pointless and the most aggravating. Iain Martin hints at this in his recent Telegraph post but he is, in the end, too kind to the Deputy Prime Minister. This is the sort of wheeze favoured by undergraduates blessed with second-class second-class minds.
It is close to pointless because even if anyone outside the tiny world of “progressive” think tanks thought this a vital issue there is no evidence that it is in the slightest bit necessary. Which explains why it is aggravating. Th House of Lords, as presently constituted (that is, by patronage, divine blessing and a modest measure of hereditary good fortune), may not “make sense” but, despite everything, it works. Actually, it works because it does not “make sense”. The revising chamber’s moderation is predicated upon the manner of its selection. The House of Lords is an unusual institution: it has senses of propriety and shame and, this being the case, can usually be trusted to act within the spirit of its conventions, without testing the boundaries of its actual constitutional powers.
Electing the damn thing will change all that while further increasing the political parties contrl of the upper chamber. Cross-benchers are likely to find elections a pretty bleak business. Yet it is their presence, plus that of the bishops and at least some of the hereditary peerage, that prevents the House of Lords being controlled utterly by the established political parties. This is very much in its favour. So too is its lack of any kind of democratic “mandate”.
There is a fashion for supposing that insitutions must be transparent and democratic. Perhaps this is often the case. It is not universally true or useful, however, and the House of Lords is one such example of where an increase in democracy can only compromise its present efficiency and, consequently, imperil a system that, however anachronistic or odd it may be, actually works reasonably well. The House of Lords may be “broken” in theory; in practice it works quite well.
So reform – Mr Clegg proposes electing 80% of the upper house to 15 year terms – is a solution in search of a problem. Again, the test of government policy should be whether it is necessary, not whether it makes sense. The Deputy Prime Minister’s proposals satisfy neither examination.
Nor, oddly, do they even make sense in terms of wider and long-standing Liberal Democrat policy. One can imagine a British future in which a federal Britain requires a kind of mini-Imperial revising upper chamber in which matters affecting all four parts of the Kingdom can be resolved satisfactorily. But that is not what Mr Clegg proposes. Instead he seems determined to foist another set of elections upon an electorate that endures too much campaigning as it is and amongst whom there seems little enthusiasm for further professsionalising politics, far less handing more powers to the established political parties. (That said: there is a case, I think, for allowing the devolved administrations to appoint a modest number of peers themselves, so as to give them a small, but useful, voice at Westminster.)
No, it will not do. There is a case for anachronism and muddle and while few people might build a revising chamber along the lines of the House of Lords were they starting from scratch it is nevertheless the case that it functions well enough as it is. Like the NHS or the electoral system, it is a peculiarly British institution that may defy logic but which works just about well enough. Mr Clegg’s proposed reforms are answers to entirely the wrong question and, my word, you might think that after his unhappy experience with the AV referendum he might think again before embarking upon some half-assed, hare-brained piece of constitutional tinkering the need for which has not been established even in theory, far less in any practical or, god help us, practical sense.
And, of course, since one of the House of Lords’ strengths is that is (partially) insulated from the frenzies of popular opinion it is better placed than the Commons to resist foolish enthusiasms and thus, in its better moments, protect the individual from the attentions of an already overmighty state.
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