I’m sure this is an idea that’s had an airing before and indeed when I mentioned it to my co-editors here, Comrade Aidan mentioned something apparently similar from Mark Thomas (who I think is a ninny, which drew all manner of opprobrium from BN Comrades plural).
Anyway, I was in the pub, as you do on a Saturday lunchtime and, again, as you do, I was chatting about what one could realistically do about the House of Lords to make it a better place.
My first suggestion was to call it the House of Ladies every other year. Isn’t it about time the gender assumption was turned on its head? Apparently I wasn’t thinking big enough.
Despite the widely perceived nonsensicality around the House of Lords, one must remember that to do nothing might actually be the best course of action. On the one hand you have unelected peers debating policies with the public having no means of recourse to challenge their discussions but on the other hand you have a lot of largely intelligent people providing reasonably objective reviews of legislation for relatively little expense. It is arguably difficult to improve upon that. I mean, does anyone believe that Baroness Williams getting stuck into this NHS Bill is a bad thing?
However, there is a flip side, of course. For one, the idea that Lord Sugar should be a peer for life because Gordon Brown wanted him to be a Business Tsar for four months is bonkers, as is the idea that bishops and landed gentry get a seat in the Lords by dint of their job or birthright, not to mention the unseemly act of PM after PM filling the chamber with as many of their party members as they can get away with.
The House of Lords currently has just shy of 800 members and I, at best, could name a handful of them, which is probably more than the vast majority of people in this country could manage. That is not a healthy state of affairs for any democracy so how can it change for the better? Let’s firstly rule some options out.
A House of Lords that is a pale imitation of the House of Commons would not realistically be fit for purpose. Is there a point in having an elected second chamber that would nod through legislation if it consisted of those from the same party as those in Government, and knock legislation back if it didn’t? I suspect most people out there don’t just want more of the same knockabout Punch and Judy politics.
The other extreme is to have a House of Lords full of independents, full of the heads of science and economics and literature and philosophy, all worthily discussing legislation before them and passing their honest, considered views before taking a vote. It’d be like BBC4 does UK Politics, a tantalising prospect but a bloody nightmare when you start to wonder about the specifics of who, what, when and why these people would be selected.
Something doesn’t necessarily need to be done but improvement is surely within our reach.
There is a worrying, and widening, democratic deficit in the UK right now. Elections went from being typically every four years to fixed every five years without people batting an eyelid, if they even knew it had happened in the first place. Are we happy about this? Who the hell knows.
There is a pressing need for the public to be more immersed in the politics that exists in this country, avoiding the artificial line between politics and normal life that makes the former tantamount to showbusiness for ugly not-as-beautiful-as-celebrities people. I just want people to be interested and if they aren’t interested then perhaps it is best to force them to be, even just a little.
My preferred type of House of Lords reform therefore is quickly becoming a form of jury duty where 800 or so people are selected at random from the UK public and serve for six months or a year, followed by another tranche of 800 people and another tranche and so on. There would be permanent staff at the House of Lords that would simplify legislation and provide the legal support but the revising of the output of the House of Commons would be strictly for the 800 to decide. It’d be like a more honourable Big Brother where the public takes on direct responsibility for part of the UK’s future by being the very ones that have to take the decisions of what should and shouldn’t pass in our name. I’d certainly prefer the public being involved in legislation on an ongoing basis rather than being asked (and, let’s face it, lied to) by politicians twice a decade.
My hope would be that a natural filter for bampottery and inappropriateness would apply whereby anyone unsuitable for the job would elect not to take part if they were selected, but those who did serve in the House of Lords would be paid the same salary, wage or welfare as they would ordinarily. It’s Big Society and the work experience scheme rolled into one. How couldn’t David Cameron sign up to it?
You may well disagree but I see very few faults with this proposal and I believe it would be a marked improvement on the status quo, and not only because the old leftie deep inside me would thoroughly enjoy seeing Lords inhabitants being turfed off their red leather seats and into the cold.
Could Joe Public do a better job in the House of Lords than Lord Blah Blah? It’s debatable but perhaps more to the point, who would dare suggest otherwise?
#1 by Calum on February 27, 2012 - 5:25 pm
At last, something I agree with 😉
I’ve been pushing this idea for quite a while; I don’t expect it to go anywhere because it means no jobs for the boys, but where similar bodies have been created (Ottowa(?)’s citizen’s assembly to rewrite their constitution, for example) it has worked well. I favour a much longer appointment, seven or fourteen years, on a rolling basis (perhaps simply replacing current peers as they shuffle off this mortal coil).
The other great advantage of this scheme is it requires very little legislation. Lordify people at random, and pass an annual bill to defrock them. Simple.
#2 by Jeff on February 27, 2012 - 5:35 pm
Excellent, agreement is always pleasing.
That said, I can’t envisage many people being able to take 7 years (or 14 years!) off whatever work they do to be a Lord, hence my 6 months to a year suggestion which is more manageable.
That said, if it was longer term, and maybe this is what you are getting at, people could put themselves forwards to be on the longlist that the 800 ‘Lords’ are selected from at random. I wouldn’t be against that at all.
Incidentally, I should have mentioned another option, my own personal Plan B – abolishing the House of Lords entirely.
#3 by Iain Menzies on February 27, 2012 - 5:48 pm
On the name, changing it every year seems abit….odd. If there is an issue with the name then lets just call it the House of Peers?
On Lord Sugar, there is an issue with people being put in the Lords so as to do a specific job and then being thre till they die, that in and of itself is not a reason for wholesale reform of the Lords IMHO. Rather it shows the limitations of life peers, I cant see why you cant have term limits on those who are brought in to do a specific job, and once they have done that job you can reconsider if they are going to add something by remaining in the lords.
On the jury idea…..you may be right that it would be hard to argue against, tho i tend to think that the majority of the country would take the view of ‘isnt that what we pay you (politicians) to do?’. And unless you make it mandatory then i suspect that alot of good people will refuse, on the basis of they have jobs that pay more. Not that you mentioned what you would pay these people.
6 month limits could be an issue, what if a bill takes longer than that to get through parliament?
I think a staff that ‘simplifies’ legislation is seriously dodgy. What that amounts to, unless you force it on the commons as well, is the commons passing a bill, and then the upper house considering a different bill.
How would the selection actually work? I assume it would not be straight off the electoral register, unless you actually want the Mail to run headlines about how the Lords is going to be full of murderers and kiddy fiddlers. So you have to have some restrictions.
As things stand, being in the lords does not require attendance. Your proposal rather implies that attendance would be required. So what about housing, and living costs. Where do you put the people that are selected that don’t live in London?
Really if this happened you would end up, i think, with a body that costs more, and is no more democratic in real terms than the status quo.
so yeah…i see one or two more flaws than you do 😉
#4 by Jeff on February 27, 2012 - 6:10 pm
In my mind, I either see that companies would continue to pay staff their salary even if they were off at the House of Peers. Failing that, the taxpayer would pay the salary of the staff who were pulled away from their job. It wouldn’t be like jury duty where you can be out of pocket as a result of having to serve.
I would have no problem with the electoral register. I don’t tend to let what the Daily Mail thinks spoil my day 😉
As for accommodation, it would work similarly to how it works for the House of Lords and I suspect people would only be required 2-3 days a week in London; which now I think about it would allow some sort of part-time working if need be.
As for costing more, I don’t see why a House of 400 people, or 200 even, couldn’t do just as good a job as 800, so there’s savings to be made. I’d counter that the aim of the game isn’t to save money though, and it is arguably that philosophy that kind of got us into this hereditary peer, landed gentry mess in the first place.
#5 by Iain Menzies on February 27, 2012 - 6:31 pm
On pay: there ain’t no way what you suggest is in anyway fair…to anyone. If what you suggests was to happen, then you would be in a situation where a company or even a charity was paying out potentially tens of thousands of pounds for someone that wasn’t there, and having to fork out for someone essentially on maternity leave. Now at best this puts a burden on employers, at worst (and i think more likely) this undermines your system. If you can opt out of doing this service, just on grounds that you dont want to, then you would find that employers will expect you to do so. especially if that employer is paying serious money for you. So to some extent you narrow the potential ‘peers’. If you go for state funding on the model you just suggested, your effectively saying that you dont have to pay two people the same for doing the same job. As for making it part time, and allowing part time work while your doing it, thats fine if your own job is in london and you can flex time to fit, or you can get the work, but if you are only covering accomodation when the house is sitting and then expecting people to travel from Shetland for a 3 day week in london, then i think you might find you have made it near impossible for people to take part time work while they do it. And thats before you ask if the best use of the time of legislators when they aren’t debating is stacking shelves in tesco rather than reading bills.
I would be amazed if 200 people, who havent got the experience of government structures, nor time to learn them, could do as good a job as what we currently have, I dont think 800 could either mind you. But if you maintain expenses at the current level, and flex up even to a similar number as currently are in the Lords, but make attendance a requirement, then it WILL cost more.
And you should worry about the Daily Mail on this one. If for no other reason that it wouldn’t just be the Mail, you can expect that the Times, the Sun (and on sunday) the Telegraph the Express and very possible a good chunk of the left wing tabloid press would decide that this is undemocratic and expensive. You then have 6 or 7 million papers being sold per day that don’t like it, and will say that they don’t like it, and that it doesn’t serve their readers as well as they should expect it to serve them. At which point you are seriously undermining support for it, and if it doest have public support then it can’t work.
And i say that having only read (regularly) two of the papers that I listed (but i aint saying which).
#6 by Indy on February 27, 2012 - 6:14 pm
I don’t particularly care about the issue as I hope it will be something that will no longer be of any relevance to Scotland in a couple of years.
However for what it is worth I think the House of Lords should be 100 per cent elected and I think it should be representative of the UK geographically, as the House of Commons is. You could make it a rule that political parties could not put forward candidates. In that case the elections would have to be wholly publicly funded – election address and so on paid for by the state.
I really don’t buy the idea that the House of Lords provides the only way for outside expertise to be brought in to advise government. If governments don’t consult expert opinion about their prposals they are idiots. But there is a difference between advising government and being in government. Those who exercise power on behalf of the people must be put there by the people. I think that is perhaps one of these rare issues where I really do think it is black and white, right and wrong, no middle ground.
#7 by Barbarian on February 27, 2012 - 6:46 pm
Fully agree. A second chamber is necessary, in order to curb the more enthusiastic governments and to check that the policies being pushed through are fit for purpose.
#8 by Doug Daniel on February 27, 2012 - 7:47 pm
A few points:
1. Why does it have to be 800? We have 600+ MPs in order to make sure MPs have a manageable size of electorate, but there is absolutely no reason for the upper house to be constructed along such lines. It’s actually pretty preposterous anyway that the House of Lords is bigger than the democratically elected chamber. I see no reason for an upper chamber to exceed even 100 members. In fact, if elected through PR, 100 would be a perfect amount – 1% = 1 seat.
2. I’m a politics junkie, with two degrees and a very good grasp of the English language, yet even I struggle to understand the kind of language used in bills. Call me an intellectual snob, but I would be absolutely appalled at the idea of possibly uneducated people – who quite possibly struggle to string two sentences together – being tasked with going through the kind of legalese mumbo-jumbo used to write legislative bills in order to hold the government to account.
3. We talk about needing an upper chamber to stop government pushing legislation through, but on the other side of the coin, is this not just stopping the government from carrying out the mandate given to it by the electorate? We know the NHS deforms are wrong, but hey, if England didn’t want Tory reforms, it shouldn’t have voted for a Tory government. You get what you vote for…
4. You’ve beaten me to it by saying abolition is your “Plan B”, but I would put this as Plan A.
This is the problem with Lords reform, it is predicated on the basis that we need an upper house. As usual when it comes to UK political structures, we have a habit of thinking that the only ways of doing things are how we do it, and how the USA does it. As both have an upper and lower chamber, we assume that this means countries require a bicameral parliament in order to govern effectively. But, as usual, a quick glance over at the Nordic region reveals that Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland all manage perfectly well with unicameral parliaments, and in doing so, have created arguably the best examples of parliamentary democracy in the world.
The problem there, of course, is that these countries have proportional election systems, and therein lies the real reason the UK (and most – if not all – bicameral legislatures) needs an upper house: to make up for the democratic deficit in the lower house. Until that is sorted, there is no ideal reform for the House of Lords, because it shouldn’t even NEED to exist.
This is why it bugs me when people suggest that an independent Scotland will need an equivalent of the Lords – we don’t, we just need to make Holyrood even more proportional, and to increase the number of MSPs, to somewhere between 170 and 200.
Personally, I think the least worst option (because we all know Westminster will never adopt PR, allowing for abolition of the Lords) would be some sort of system similar to the university rector system. I can think of some great people who have become rectors who would make excellent “Lords”- folk like Iain MacWhirter, Craig Murray, Robin Harper, Pat Kane… Of course, for every Craig Murray, there is a Ross Grant, but then the same kind of thing could be said about the House of Commons.
The House of Lords will never be elected though – it would present a threat to the MPs, who would start worrying about the Lords getting ideas above their station and trying to usurp the Commons.
#9 by Allan on February 27, 2012 - 8:36 pm
“We know the NHS deforms are wrong, but hey, if England didn’t want Tory reforms, it shouldn’t have voted for a Tory government. You get what you vote for…”
Ah but first past the post was never really about who you vote for but who you are voting against – the past 25 years of Scottish politics have been about voting Labour to keep the Tories out, even when the Tories were indistinguishable from Labour.
#10 by Allan on February 27, 2012 - 8:34 pm
I think the more I think about it, the more it makes sense (the citizens “Lords” idea). Curbing the power of the burgeoning political class and bypassing patronage and cronyism (i often wondered if Hague was an avid reader of Oor Willie or the Broons as that was the only place i’d heard that word before) in one fell swoop.
BTW Mark Thomas is not a ninny, have you seen some of his stuff when Channel 4 was any good.
#11 by Barney Thomson on February 27, 2012 - 11:12 pm
It is over 100 years since the abolition of the House of Lords was first proposed by the minority Labour Party in 1910 (I love irony). The proposal was opposed by the Liberals and Tories but the Liberals succeeded in limiting the HoL’s influence the following year.
Anyway, if options A and B are not realised, we can still change the name –
“Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that”
The House of Coofs. Like it!
#12 by Alexander Belic on February 28, 2012 - 4:01 pm
“those who did serve in the House of Lords would be paid the same salary, wage or welfare as they would ordinarily.”
So if you were jobless when you were called up you’d be forced to live on £65 a week (assuming you were over 25) for the next year?
I don’t think the idea of a House of Jurors is necessarily a bad one (though I’d think maybe it would be worth looking at various jobs carrying a seat in the Lords ex-officio either instead or in addition to the jurors) but I think that would be a real problem.
You’d also have problems with anyone who isn’t on an hourly rate. You’d have no way of knowing how much your car salesman would have made in commission in that year, or how much the waitress and taxi-driver would have made in tips. As well as SMEs where if someone goes away for a year the whole business could colllapse.
#13 by Jeff on February 28, 2012 - 5:09 pm
Good points, but I don’t see any of that as an insurmountable problem.