Mail on Sunday 9 July 2012
The case for reforming the House of Lords is simple enough.
In a democracy those who make the people’s laws should be the people’s representatives. Not appointees of the Prime Minister; or the descendants of the male favourites of past Kings; or those of the female ones they went to bed with.
We send our young soldiers to other people’s countries to die for democracy – and kill for it too. Yet we haven’t got it in our own country. With the rest of the world on the streets calling for democracy, we Lords can’t be bunkered down in our golden Chamber, resisting it.
More than 50% of these appointed peers come from London and the South East, while only 25% of the people do. How can we take decisions for the whole country when we only represent a tiny portion of it? There are seven times more peers aged over 90 than under 40. At 71, I am a positive stripling! How can such a gerontocracy represent our whole vibrant nation? And once a Lord forever a Lord. At present you can never be removed. Even if you cheat or go to jail. How can we help bring new standards to politics, when we can’t even kick out the criminals in our own numbers?
We are not just facing an economic crisis. We are also facing a political one. The people have completely lost confidence in the politicians – and with good reason. The gap between government and governed has grown dangerously wide. If we will not refresh our democracy we could see it under threat. How can the Lords be excluded from that process?
Why dysfunctional? Because the Lords has two jobs to do. Revise the laws that come from the Commons and hold the Government to account. The first we do well. The second we do not at all. We are graciously permitted to go round with a golden poop-scoop clearing up the legislative mess left by the House of Commons Elephant at the other end of the corridor. But when it comes to holding the Executive to account we are wholly incapable of doing it. How can we hold the Government to account, when we are the creatures of its patronage? If the Lords had been able to do this job properly, we would probably never have had the Poll Tax or, I fancy, the Iraq war either. Lord Hailsham famously warned of the dangers of an “elected dictatorship” in the House of Commons. If ever there was a time for a strong democratically based second Chamber to buttress our democracy, it is now.
Whatever view you take of the Cameron/Clegg proposals nobody can seriously call them ‘ill-considered’. They were preceded by a Royal Commission, four White Papers and three Joint Committees. If this is so “ill-considered”, how come every Party called for it in their manifestos at the last election? (Labour, now cynically inventing reasons to scupper the Bill to make trouble for the Government, have believed in it for decades).
The Cameron/Clegg reform Bill does not “trash” the Lords, as some claim; it retains the best of what we have now and discards the worst. The new more democratic “Lords” will remain different from the Commons; they will be more separated from the short termism of a five year electoral cycle; less likely to cow-tow to the whips and the media. But the Commons will remain more powerful and able to get its way if it insists. Which means more democracy, but no deadlock; more power to scrutinise, but no power to paralyse. That’s proper democracy in action, not a sham based on an ancient gilded anachronism that should have gone long, long ago.
Some write of the “amazing expertise” in the existing Lords. They are right to do so: we have some very eminent, independent figures there. But they are far outnumbered by the retired, the rejected, the defeated and the sometimes down right dead-beat from the House of Commons. For them (us) and for the many who became Lords not because of their public service, but because they bank-rolled a political Party, the Lords is indeed a most comfortable and convenient retirement home. But is that a reason to keep it? Of course some of those ex-MPs can be experts too. But that’s not why they were put there. My colleague Alex Carlile, who wrote in this paper last Sunday, is not a Lord because he is a great legal eagle (which he undoubtedly is), but because he is a former Liberal Democrat MP. I should know. I recommended him for a peerage in the first place.
And that expertise will not, as he claimed last week, be ‘lost’ in the new “Lords”. Quite the contrary. The present Lords has some 80 active ‘crossbench’ experts amongst our 800 appointees. The new “Lords” will have 90 appointed experts out of 450. You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to see that the influence of non-party “experts” on Lords decisions will not go down in future, it will go up!
Alex also argued that the reformed Lords will be “decided in the tribal atmosphere of party committees”. Actually the electoral system proposed will actively discourage this and leave the ultimate choice to the voters. And that’s the point. At present the voters don’t get a choice at all; its only the Prime Minister’s choice that counts.
If we don’t reform, then the number of Lords could well rise from 800 to over 1000! All of whom can draw their untaxed allowance of £300 a day – for life. Cost? £18.7m and counting. More than double what it was a decade ago. And set to double again in the next decade. Everyone else is having to trim; the Lords is getting fatter and fatter.
Some say our priority now should be the economy. And so it should. But Parliament can do more than one thing at a time. When Britain’s young men were storming the beaches of Normandy, fighting for our very existence, the Commons was debating the post war education system. If that crisis could not stop us making this country fitter for the future, why should this one?
Others ask “why reform now?”
Because we have to refresh our democracy to put politics in touch with the people again. Because the Lords can’t be exempt from that. Because the Lords can’t do its job of holding the Government to account while we are its creature, rather than the people’s servants. Because while everyone else is having to cut, the Lords, already bloated with Members, is only set to get fatter. Above all, because in a nation proud of its democracy we should be ashamed that part of our “Mother” of Parliaments remains an undemocratic left-over from a by-gone age.
I came into the Lords to see it become a chamber created by the will of the people, not the patronage of the politicians. Next week the Commons will get its chance to do this. They should take it. This is the people’s business which has been delayed too long.
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