LONDON LETTER:Change comes slowly in the House of Lords and a new reform plan is not proving popular
IAN ANTHONY Hamilton-Smith, or Lord Colwyn, was one of 90 hereditary peers elected by fellow holders of ancestral peerages to stay in the House of Lords after Tony Blair’s reforms of the upper house in 1999.
Next week, he may find himself the next lord speaker of the House of Lords. The role has a lower public profile than that enjoyed by the speaker of the House of Commons, but it possesses one of the nicest offices in the Palace of Westminster.
Besides having been a dentist for 40 years, Lord Colwyn runs a highly regarded jazz band, the Lord Colwyn Organisation, which offers itself for weddings, dances and other celebrations.
However, the noble lord may find that his Westminster duties keep him late in the office in the months ahead.
The biggest reform of the House of Lords in a century has been put forward by Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who wants to begin the creation of a fully elected or almost fully elected senate, with elections for one-third of the places from 2015.
Under the plan, senators would be elected for salaried, one-off, 15-year terms from multi-seat constituencies, using proportional representation by single transferable vote. They would be barred from running for a place in the House of Commons immediately after their term ends.
Reform of the House of Lords has been described as “the longest of long stories”.
Faced with Conservative opposition in the House of Lords to Lloyd George’s 1909 “people’s budget”, Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith introduced legislation two years later to curb the powers of the noble lords.
From then on, the lords could delay but not block Commons legislation.
Labour’s Clement Attlee went further in 1949 when he cut the time that the unelected peers could block the will of MPs.
Some lords were unhappy even before the most recent reform plan was published, particularly because of the more adversarial atmosphere in the club since the arrival of newly ennobled former Labour ministers such as John Prescott.
Lords were forced into all-night duty when Labour challenged legislation that would make constituencies more equal in size, cut the numbers of MPs and set down a five-year life for the current parliament. For some, the tone of the debate was unseemly.
But they are far more unhappy about Clegg. Judging by a recent Lords debate, when more than 100 peers spoke, the upper house is livid.
However, many outside believe Clegg’s ambitions, like so many others since Asquith, will eventually run into the sidings.
Once better known as the speaker of the Commons, Baroness Betty Boothroyd declared that never before had “an institution at the heart of the British constitution been marked down for destruction on such spurious grounds”.
For its opponents, the House of Lords is a bastion of privilege, unrepresentative of the United Kingdom.
For its supporters, it is, as Boothroyd put it, “the greatest revising chamber in the world”.
And, for all of its faults, there is some truth to the latter boast.
The Lords’ EU affairs scrutiny committee draws on a venerable membership and offers lessons to other parliaments – most especially the Oireachtas – on how dry EU laws should be examined properly.
Clegg argues that the House of Lords – which now has more than 800 members following an influx of Conservative and Liberal Democrat peers after the coalition took over – lacks “sufficient democratic authority” because it is not directly accountable.
“That is absolutely true, but nor are the monarchy, the judiciary, the chiefs of the armed services, the prime minister, his deputy Mr Clegg or – let us face it – the cabinet directly accountable,” Boothroyd argued.
However, the difficulty with the reform is clear, since the balance between the House of Commons and the House of Lords would be threatened if lords were replaced by senators who had their own electoral mandate.
Praising the revising role played by the peers as he unveiled the reform measures to the lords, Thomas Galbraith, or Lord Strathclyde, said the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition did not “propose to change the role, but rather the composition” of the upper house.
Clegg said something almost identical to this in the Commons in May.
However, Lord Strathclyde has spoken differently at other times.
On May 17th, he told peers that direct elections would give them “the authority of the people who would elect them”.
Later, in the same debate, the Conservative peer said an elected upper house “would be more authoritative” and would have a greater impact on “another place” – the quaint terminology used by the Commons and the Lords when they speak of the other.
Urging people to look at the way the European Parliament has developed, constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor warned of parliamentary gridlock, saying elections were “likely” to make the House of Lords more rather than less powerful, “whatever restrictions are imposed upon representatives”.
“The Lords, as at present constituted, evades this dilemma since, not being elected, it can make no claim to be a representative chamber, and so cannot challenge the legitimacy of the Commons,” he said.
