Why Reform Britain's House of Lords?
Chatterbox, a citizen of the United States who has a somewhat limited
understanding of how they do things in the United Kingdom, is baffled by the
commentary coming out of Britain concerning the future of the House of Lords. As was widely publicized, the
Labor government earlier this month evicted 666 very Monty Python-ish
hereditary peers ("Binkies") from the upper chamber, temporarily leaving 92 and
otherwise putting the House of Lords in the hands of about 500 politically
appointed life peers ("day boys"), whose title and membership dies with them. A
lively discussion has now begun about how to complete the reform of the House
of Lords, which for most of this century has had the power only to delay
legislation. The scenarios under consideration tend to emphasize making
membership entirely or partially elective, which would make the House of Lords
more democratic, and then giving the upper chamber greater power than it
currently enjoys. If nothing is done, the House of Lords will persist as a
patronage tool for whichever party happens to control the House of Commons.
What Chatterbox doesn't understand is why Britons don't kill the House of
Lords outright. From this side of the Atlantic, the U.K. has long appeared to
be ruled by an essentially unicameral parliament. Making it unequivocally
unicameral would seem to be a small and eminently sensible step--one that Labor
embraced throughout the 1970s and 1980s. (Click here to read the House of Lords' own compendium of major
20 th -century proposals to reform or abolish the chamber.) Instead,
the talk is drifting in the direction of turning the House of Lords into an
anglified U.S. Senate. Wouldn't this give the U.K. a government far less
streamlined than what it enjoys today? Chatterbox can't imagine why any country
that didn't already have a Senate could possibly want one. (Click here to read an excellent recent column by the
Washington Post 's Mary McGrory about Sen. Robert Byrd's nearly
successful attempt to use his power to filibuster to promote the decapitation
by mining companies of mountains in West Virginia. See also Thomas Geoghegan's
The Secret Lives of Citizens [click here to buy the book], which makes an excellent case for
abolishing the U.S. Senate.)
Seeking guidance, Chatterbox queried Christopher Hitchens, the Vanity
Fair and Nation columnist, who is British by birth and an admirably
uncompromising small-r republican. In an e-mail, Hitchens likened the ejection
of the Binkies to building a bridge "from the middle of the river."
First ought to come the point of principle: do you want a hereditary head
of state or inherited seats in legislatures? Then and only then does one have a
constitutional discussion about which alternative to adopt. Brilliant as they
are at avoiding anything that smacks of principle, the Blairites now have a
second chamber with almost a hundred "chosen" hereditary peers, and the
remainder a bunch of party appointees. Nobody could conceivably have designed
such an outcome if they were writing a Constitution. And so of course this
pre-empts (as it may be meant to) the persistent argument over whether Britain
ought to have a written document with an appended Bill of Rights. It also
avoids the ticklish subject of the Windsors, who are now the only family in the
country with political power by right of birth.
Concerning unicameralism, though, Hitchens seemed unenthusiastic. He said it
was "fine by me, but most big decisions in modern history have been taken
without reference to Parliament and so I suppose that one chamber is as easy to
bypass as two."
Chatterbox next queried Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker , who not
long ago wrote a compelling "Talk of the Town" piece endorsing Gov. Jesse
Ventura's plan to turn Minnesota's legislature unicameral. (At present, the
only unicameral state legislature in the U.S. is Nebraska's.) Chatterbox
will give Hertzberg the last word:
There was a lot of sentiment for abolition back in Lloyd George's day,
the last time Lords reform really had traction. Lloyd George himself wanted to
get rid of the thing, but he had to settle for the Parliament Act of 1911,
which scaled the Lords' power down from being able to kill legislation outright
to being able to delay it for two years (reduced to one year in, I think,
1940). [1949, actually.]
Several things have happened since then. For one, the relatively
toothless post-1911 House of Lords lulled people into thinking it was a good
idea to have a delaying or amending chamber as a safeguard against overhasty
legislation. For another, a certain amount of bicameral delusion has seeped
over from America. The trend in British constitutionalism at the moment is away
from absolute parliamentary (i.e., House of Commons) sovereignty and toward
divided sovereignty of various kinds--parliaments for Scotland and Wales,
stronger local governments with elected mayors, the European parliament.
Abolishing the second union-wide chamber outright would go against what a lot
of people assume to be the spirit of the times.
Personally, I'd like to see them abolish the Lords and I bet Tony Blair
would, too. The idea of an elected second chamber sounds all nicey-nice and
democratic, but the more democratic legitimacy a second chamber has, the
stronger the possibility of gridlock. An appointed second chamber would have
less legitimacy, therefore less power, therefore less likelihood of gumming up
the works.
