Under Penalty of Catapult

I previously addressed the Canadian government’s comical obsession with reforming the upper house of that nation’s parliament. But the Mother Parliament is no less obsessed. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that assumed power in the United Kingdom two years ago has been itching to do some major constitutional reform of its own.

The British House of Lords has always been a sore subject. It is, after all, a vestige of pre-democratic class theory. The Lords was historically a small group of peers who inherited their titles. They exercised equal power with the House of Commons until 1911. That’s when the shit hit the fan. The Conservative majority in the Lords thwarted the Liberal government’s efforts to introduce new taxes. The Prime Minister tried to create a bunch of new peerages to give himself a majority in the Lords, but King George V refused. The government called for new elections, prevailed, and the King acquiesced. To prevent a repeat of this stalemate, the government forced through the first Lords reform bill, which basically took away the Lords’ power to veto legislation passed by the Commons. The Lords could still delay legislation for a limited time.

Ironically, one of the few times the Commons used the 1911 reform bill to disregard the upper house was to pass a second Lords reform bill, in 1949. This time, the Labour government wanted to do some large-scale central economic planning without interference from the peers. So the 1949 law further reduced the time the Lords could delay the Commons’ mob rule.

Neither of these reforms altered the basic nature of the Lords as a non-elected body, although what was once a small group of hereditary peers was, by the late 20th century, a nearly 1,000-member chamber dominated by peers appointed for life (I don’t think a hereditary peerage has been created since the 1960s). When Tony Blair’s Labour government took power in 1997, they successfully moved to expel most of the hereditary peers, leaving just 90 with about 700 more life appointees.

Now David Cameron’s coalition wants to finish the job and convert the Lords into a mostly elected body. Last year the government circulated a draft bill that would create a chamber of about 300 members, 240 of them elected for non-renewable 15-year terms. Their terms would be staggered every five years to match scheduled House of Commons elections. The remaining members would be appointed by the government. (The reformed Lords would continue to include some bishops of the Church of England. Don’t ask.)

The government further proposes Lords elections depart from the traditional first-past-the-post system used for the Commons and instead use a single-transferrable vote. This means voters can rank candidates and if their top choice doesn’t win, the vote is then “transferred” to the next-ranked candidate until a candidate is elected. The Liberal Democrat part of the coalition tried to implement a similar system for Commons elections via a failed referendum last year. (I’d note many U.S. libertarians favor such a system for this country.)

Actually, Lords reform really is nothing more than a Liberal Democrat pet project to keep them occupied while the Conservatives run the government. There doesn’t seem to be any genuine enthusiasm among the Conservatives for this proposal. There’s already been numerous objections to the proposed size of the House — 300 is thought to be too small — and fears that an elected Lords would lead to deadlock with Commons. This mirrors the fears raised by opponents of Canadian Senate reform.

Canada provides an interesting compare-and-contrast. While the Canadian Senate is exclusively appointed, its membership is also strictly apportioned by region and province. The House of Lords has no ties to British geography. The proposed reform bill would create electoral districts that are larger than existing Commons constituencies. But the number itself, 240 as proposed, is completely arbitrary. It could just as easily be 400 or 800.

In Canada, the Conservative government is pushing Senate reform in part to strengthen its natural political base in the western provinces. With Britain, the third-place Liberal Democrats are betting that a chamber elected by single-transferrable vote will strengthen its meager standing in Parliament. In both countries, reform critics fear the unknown long-term consequences of holding a second set of legislative elections.

There’s also the common question of why have a second chamber at all. In Canada, the leftist opposition party and several provincial leaders publicly support abolishing the Senate. None of the British elite seem to favor that. There’s widespread agreement than some upper house is necessary. The government itself notes an elected Lords “would continue to scrutinise legislation, hold the Government to account and conduct investigations.” (Similarly, Canadian Senate defenders note it is a “chamber of sober second thought.”)

In both cases, the push for an elected upper house is an admission that the presently elected lower houses aren’t quite doing a thorough job of scrutinizing the government. Obviously, that’s bound to happen when the government controls a majority (or near-majority) of the lower chamber’s seats. The merging of executive and legislative power in the Commons means there’s little incentive for the chamber to scrutinize itself. At the same time, neither the British nor Canadian governments want to give up the “supremacy” of the Commons; they want elected upper chambers, but they don’t want to alter the constitutional alignment of power between the houses.

In my previous post, I sided with the Senate abolitionists in Canada. What concerned me the most was an elected Senate would be a competing body for power rather than a check on it. In particular, I thought an elected Senate might lead to a greater centralization of power by displacing the elected provincial legislatures. That’s not really an issue with Britain. The UK is already a highly centralized state in spite recent devolutions to regional parliaments in Scotland and Wales. The elected Lords would not correspond to or compete with any existing local governments.

Like the Canadian government’s proposed reforms, I also find the British government’s ideas a tad unwieldy. In Canada, there’s a written Constitution with specific amendment procedures. The government is trying to avoid directly amending the Constitution by using elections to “nominate” Senate candidates the government would continue to formally appoint. The British constitution is basically whatever Parliament says it is on any given day. Still, both proposals require the implementation of a complex new election scheme. More elections doesn’t equal better government or a greater protection for individual rights.

If I were the British Liberal Democrats, given my position as a progressive third-party agitator, I would actually go in a completely different direction. Instead of reducing the Lords to 300 elected members, why not just use the current system and appoint every single voter to the Lords? I’m dead serious. Unlike Canadian senators, there’s no statutory limit on how many peerages the Queen may create. So just make everyone a damn baron.

In effect, I’m proposing turning the Lords into a permanent national referendum on the work of the Commons, which is to say the government. Obviously you can’t fit several million people into the Lords chamber, which doesn’t even accomodate the current membership. And you’re not going stage elections, like you would for the Commons, on every single piece of legislation. But you could devise an online system that allows for debate and instant voting on contested measures. Sure, it would take time and money to develop such a system. So would creating and maintaining the elected House of Lords. Why waste those resources just to have 300 more politicians on the public payroll?