Nick Clegg’s gone on a PR rampage (the ‘public relations’ kind) with a clever wheeze of demanding MPs give up their Summer Holiday to find the time to fix the expenses crisis.
One of the suggestions is abolishing the House of Lords to be replaced with an elected senate. I have mixed feelings about this – obviously as a retirement home for former MPs and a holiday camp for big donors it’s fairly squallid.
Yet, at the same time, the Lords have been crucial in blocking the very worst of the Government’s anti-Civil Liberties legislation. “Don’t worry, it’ll never get past the Lords” has been the most reassuring 8 words on the political lexicon for a number of years now.
I quite like the idea of the Lords as a chamber immune to the temptation of populism for easy election victories. Imagine if, right now, Labour had full control of both Houses. 96 days detention, with Labour Senators joining in in the dash for ‘anti-terrorist’ votes? I dread to think.
If we must have an elected second chamber, political parties must be banned from it. Of course, I’m yet to be convinced that making the second chamber elected won’t just fill it full of politicians anyway.
Paul Lockett said...
28 May 09 at 10:27 am
I could only see it working well with a fairly proportional voting system to prevent one group dominating and all Senators being limited to one term to ensure they aren’t driven by populist vote seeking.
Stu said...
28 May 09 at 10:34 am
I like the Lords as they are, but what I would love to see is an elected Government.
We elect our Government by proxy at the moment, meaning it could totally change without intervention from the voters (Blair/Brown, Thatcher/Major etc). At the very least, when a Prime Minister steps down it should trigger a general election within 6 months, but also I’d like to see the Prime Minister directly elected – even if it’s by way of an ‘open leadership election’ in a Governing party.
Ian B said...
28 May 09 at 10:34 am
Have a vetoing house appointed by lottery. No parties, no stooges, no sinecure for cronies. A house of housewives and bricklayers, newsagents and bus drivers. It would be ethnically, gender, religiously, sexually and age representative of the population. Have half appointed each year, with each member serving a two year term.
Better still, require that every law be passed by a referendum, and that that law must gain the yes vote of more than 70% of the electorate. Not of those who voted, but of the entire electorate. Hardly any law could ever pass such a direct democratic system. We would finally have peace from those who torment us, and be free of lawmaking by pressure groups.
The passing of laws should be rare, major events in a mature society. The deluge of legislation under which we suffer indicates how broken our polity is. Representative democracy has major flaws; firstly the small number of representatives makes them an easy target for special interests. A lobbyist needs only convince around 350 people to vote in their favour- under a plebiscite system (which counts absententions as “no” votes as I propose above) the lobbyist must gain the support of tens of millions.
The second great problem with representative democracy is that of moral hegemony- MPs are under enormous pressure to kowtow to moralist hegemonic values. For instance, the heinous new law censoring cartoons and art, as with all censorship laws, is unopposed, because MPs must appear to be “moral”.
Representative democracy is the plaything of lobby groups. It does not work very well. It has an enormous tendency to over-legislate. It does not encapsulate the will of the people. Time to think of something better.
Darrell said...
28 May 09 at 10:38 am
You cant ban parties from it; you say that the Lords has been blocking the governments erosion of civil liberties but it has done that while being dominated by parties. Even if you banned the old ones new ones would naturally form so what is the point? Although, I wouldnt neccessarily be against some of the things Paul says; your way of doing it would create a potential constitutional time bomb and revert us to a pre-1911 situation where the two chambers fought each other to gridlock.
What you should really be pointing out that making the House of Lords elected only goes half-way to addressing the huge democratic defecit inbuilt into the constitutional monarchy state, the executive needs to surrender all the powers it holds under royal perogrative.
Bunny Smedley said...
28 May 09 at 10:44 am
Clegg’s proposal is bizarre. He seems to be saying that since we [sic] no longer trust our MPs to do something as simple as fill in an expense form, the only solution is to give them much more power whilst removing existing curbs on their activities.
Personally, I’d be much happier with the return of an all-hereditary, unpaid, unelected upper chamber, but then, unlike some here, I’m enough of an historian to see that more democracy rarely if ever leads to more freedom.
Darrell said...
28 May 09 at 10:44 am
Incidentally, if we have an elected senate a written constitiution is a absolute must have as well because the seperation of powers and functions has to be clearly defined; like it is in the US.
Ian B said...
28 May 09 at 10:53 am
your way of doing it would create a potential constitutional time bomb and revert us to a pre-1911 situation where the two chambers fought each other to gridlock.
Gridlock is good. The less they can do, the less harm they can do. In an ideal world, a government of liberty would be elected, would take the axe to most of the legislation that governs us, and then implement a political system that would make future lawmaking virtually impossible. The worst kind of state is one in which lawmaking runs smoothly and easily.
Paul Lockett said...
28 May 09 at 11:11 am
Darrell, further to what IanB said, I think the pre-1911 gridlock was a constitutional time bomb because it saw a democratically elected lower house being obstructed by an unelected upper house which was drawn from a very narrow social group. From a democratic viewpoint, that doesn’t look good.
Having two elected houses and requiring the support of both before any law is passed doesn’t create the same constitutional problem, because both are able to claim popular support.
I am in agreement with you on the principle of a written constitution.
Darrell said...
28 May 09 at 11:22 am
Paul,
The point is that both Houses would have an electoral mandate so the potential for conflict, without the safeguard of a written constitution defining powers and parameters, is worse than pre-1911. Your relying on the same logic that the Great Powers did pre-WWI that balance would bring peace; and look how that worked out. If Clegg is serious about the elected second chamber what he is in fact talking about is the logical abolition of the entire constitutional monarchy state apparatus.
Generally I dont think gridlock is good because it makes government impossible; which might appeal to an anarchist but certainly does not appeal to me. There would have to be a codified constitution to ensure that both Houses have clearly defined boundries and one would have to be sovereign, historical precendant would favour the Commons but id be open to argument there.
Ian B said...
28 May 09 at 11:24 am
The figleaf of “popular support” is what excuses tyranny. How many times do we hear them say “we have a mandate”? Yet this mandate is nothing more than “a slightly larger minority voted for representative X, in preference to at most two other choices, to wield monarchical powers at whim”.
Sometimes they claim popular support, “there is a demand in teh country for silly law X” (translation: there is a campaign in the media for it), other times when it suits them they declare that they have to make “hard choices” and shouldn’t kowtow to “populism”.
What proportion of us actually voted for Labour to be our tyrants du jour? 25% or so? A handful of per cents more than the other team? This is a mandate for them to do whatever they wish? Of course not.
Ian B said...
28 May 09 at 11:30 am
Generally I dont think gridlock is good because it makes government impossible
It doesn’t make government impossible. It makes legislation impossible[1]. Government and legislation are not the same thing- though over the twentieth century too many people have come to believe that they are. It is not the job of government to endlessly pass new laws. It is the job of government to administrate within the legal framework that already exists and sometimes occasionally amend that framework, when needs arise.
This confusion between administration and legislation impels politicians to continual pass laws in order to be “seen to be doing something”. They long, long ago ran out of good laws to pass. Now all they can do is inflict unnecessary bad ones on us.
A government with no legislative power at all would still be a government.
[1] Or, difficult.
Darrell said...
28 May 09 at 11:37 am
Ian,
No not really, because even taking your definition of government they wouldn’t be because they would have no power to change that framework. They would be a giant bureaucracy which is what you seem to think a government should be more of; fair enough, you can argue about degrees of what the government should do and I will go some way to accepting the point that knee-jerk legislation is often bad but a government still needs to be able to change laws to be a government even by your definition.
Ian B said...
28 May 09 at 11:47 am
As I said, lawmaking should be difficult. The point is, administration itself does not require the capacity to change the framework of regulations the administrator is administrating within. As an example, if somebody is appointed to administrate refuse collection, they have certain responsibilities- to ensure there are adequate dustcarts and dustmen, that the rubbish is collected at the due time, that it is disposed of appropriately and so on. There is no necessity for them to have the power to change the rules regarding rubbish collection. You might say instead that those rules- what should be collected, and when, are made by the clients (public) and not the administrator, who is merely a functionary. The same can be applied to higher offices- health or defence ministers.
Yes, they would be a giant bureaucracy, but no bigger than it currently is, since it would do the same things. It simply wouldn’t have the power to self-modify the rules it operates under.
The idea that government (local or national) should be the servant of the people, not its rulers, has been lost. It needs to be reasserted very strongly. The legislative power is out of control. Any government that has the power to, for instance, impose smoking bans or ban rude cartoons, has lost all sense of proportion and is proof itself that it should not be trusted with the legislative power.
Paul Lockett said...
28 May 09 at 11:53 am
Darrell, you are assuming that having two houses with a power of veto would automatically result in total and perpetual gridlock, which I see no reason to assume. Yes, there is the potential for veto, but there is also the potential for agreement. You could make the same point about the executive coming into conflict with the Commons. Would you use that to justify absolute power for the executive?
I think the potential for it to function is already borne out in the UK via the devolved administrations which have minority executives and assemblies without an overall majority. Yes, the potential for gridlock exists and may even come about on occasions, but I’ve yet to see any evidence that it invariably results in the business of government grinding to a halt.
Ian B, I agree with your point in the main, but that is why I would only support an Upper House in some proportional form, either via a different voting system or sortition, to give a more representative upper house able to offer a check on the lower house.
Darrell said...
28 May 09 at 12:11 pm
Paul,
No I wouldn’t, I would however say it points to the absolute neccessity of a written constitution to accompany these measures; to sweep away the royal perogrative too which is the chief source of over-mighty executive power in this country vis a vie how the executive dominates Parliament.
Ian B,
Yes but at some point it needs to be determined what day the refuse is collected on to make the system run smoothly so the two are intertwined, unless of course you want people to leave rubbish in the streets when they feel like it and the resultant public health hazard of rubbish rotting in the streets. I think I am in agreement with your main thrust but that merely means that the government should try the how, what, where and when it legislates not that it should lose legislative function totally. To say it should is throwing the bathwater out with the baby somewhat…
Ian B said...
28 May 09 at 12:15 pm
Paul, whatever system of houses we have, my major concern is still their susceptibility to lobbying and indeed organised media campaigns. That will afflict any representative democratic system. Additionally, politics only attracts certain kinds of people whose primary skill is successful negotiation of party bureaucracies, and who have the time, position and motivation to do so. However the houses are arranged, they will never be in the least representative.
I am unasbashedly a social liberal- and my “libertarianism” is more interested in social liberalism than the economic (I see economic liberalism as a necessary requirement for more general liberty). I am, and always have been, most interested in such issues as censorship, sexual behaviour laws, consumptive laws, freedom from harrassment by the state when one goes about one’s private business and so on. I have thus been endlessly frustrated throughout my life by the obvious fact that our rulers are always intensely social conservative, and interested in why that is the case.
My own experience is that ordinary people tend to be far more socially liberal than our rulers. The problem is that there is the public morality, and the private morality. Politicians are obligated to follow the public morality, which is profoundly conservative and has been since the victorian era. No dickering around with the arrangements of parliament is going to change that.
There is a reason that our elections are secret ballots, and why secret ballots are generally preferred. They allow people to vote as they really believe, rather than being subject to peer pressure. When one’s opinions are in the public domain, one is under enormous pressure to follow hegemonic values. Very few politicians would, for instance, dare to say that drunkenness is a good thing, even if privately they love to sink a dozen pints on a friday night. So parliamentary systems are driven to implement this public morality, e.g. with anti-drinking legislation. The millions of people who like a beer just can’t get a voice in parliament because of this public nature of it. Likewise no politician woud dare to say he rather likes porn movies and loves to sit down with Bra Busters 3 and a box of Kleenex, though again this is a popular behaviour of millions of ordinary citizens.
It doesn’t represent the will of anybody. It doesn’t work. If we are to be free to go about our lives as we wish, then we need to be far more radical than changing chambers around a bit.
Paul Lockett said...
28 May 09 at 12:40 pm
Ian, I tend to agree with what you say, but I don’t see any way of addressing that beyond what I’ve suggested. Do you have any ideas?
Ian B said...
28 May 09 at 12:53 pm
Revolution next tuesday, 8am, assemble Trafalgar Square, bring sandwiches and a kagool.
Seriously, it’s easy to think up better systems. How to get them is the Hard Problem. The major problem is that most better systems are directly oppositional to the various vested interests of the state. It’s hard to get politicians to vote themselves less power, and there is a mass of special interest lobbies pushing for a more activist state, be they progressive lobby groups or business groups or whatever.
I’m just not much excited or convinced by the idea that rearrangements of the current system will achieve much practical change down here at street level. I literally dread looking at the news sites every day for fear of what latest wheeze our rulers have come up with to impose upon us, and really have just reached the stage of wanting some way to stop them. I can only think of one good law brought in by Labour, which was the equalising of the age of consent for gays, and that was just correcting a previous wrongness done by our rulers anyway, and even that wasn’t done in the spirit of liberty, it was pandering to a special interest group.
So the only “ideas” I have are to argue and try to persuade people, which isn’t much use I admit. I just wish I could walk into parliament and say “Stop. Whatever you’re doing right now, stop it. Go home. Fuck off. You’re fired”.
Paul Tyler said...
28 May 09 at 5:35 pm
These very relevant concerns have caused us all some hard thinking, but we have wrestled with them for years now. Of course, every solution is a compromise, a trade-off between the obviously unsustainable appointed/hereditary House of Lords we have now and yet avoiding a reformed Senate which both mirrors the Commons and challenges it excessively. Take a good look at the proposals in the White Paper published last year: you will see how Liberal Democrats square the circle with Senators elected by STV, in 1/3 batches every 4 years, for fixed and single terms. Freed from strict party whip discipline but subject to electors’ recall in certain circumstances, we could get the best of all worlds. What is certain is that we cannot afford to let the reactionaires in the other two parties to delay reform indefinitely.
ayld said...
28 May 09 at 9:44 pm
Since banning parties isn’t going to work, this is why I think an 80% elected Lords-by-STV would complement an AV+ Commons and 20% appointed non-politicos (Crossbenchers, independents, chancellors, retired businessmen etc. and NO rewarded political retirees. That’s what honours are for, not a paid-for ticket to legislate on our realm for the rest of your life.)
Anton Howes said...
28 May 09 at 9:45 pm
It’s worth remembering that Cabinet members used to have to contest a by-election every time they were appointed.
Churchill even lost his seat at one point in 1908 after being appointed President of the Board of Trade under Asquith.
Matthew Huntbach said...
28 May 09 at 10:04 pm
Elect the Senate by pure list PR.
The parties can then use it effectively for nominees since their top of the list is bound to get elected – but risk too many placemen and the list won’t get the votes.
Bishops and hereditary peers could put up lists to see who REALLY wants them when it comes to the cold hard cross on a ballot paper. Ditto businessmen etc.
It would give a space for the smaller parties who get squeezed out by STV. Elect a hundred by pure list PR every 5 years, with each having a 15 year term. That gives the long-term independence. 1% quota to get in. So, yes, the BNP etc would get a few seats. This is democracy – if people vote for them so they should.
I wouldn’t want the First Chamber elected on this basis, and a Second chamber elected like this ought to be weakish in terms of final power – I’d say not much more than the current Lords.
Essentially I’m proposing what would probably turn out to be pretty similar to the Lords in terms of membership. But entirely democratically elected.
TJ said...
29 May 09 at 11:49 pm
Why not have the Lords elected for terms of (say) 12 years, and also have a term limit of one term per person?
Have 300 lords with 1/3 elected every four years.
Also set a time-limit of say, 12 years, until people who have served in the Commons can subsequently run for office in the Lords.
Combine this with an upper age limit of 35 for lords and you have a chamber that consists of older (and hence more experienced) non-career politicians that are not required to respond to every tabloid-editor’s whim or whip’s demand and can use their own moral and intellectual judgement on whether to accept or reject legislation.
Also you need to have separation of the legislature and executive, have independence of tenure of the legislature (i.e. elections every four years), and use the STV PR system to select MPs in the Commons.
And I still want my pony.