It was Groundhog Day at Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions this week. The main theme was House of Lords reform. MPs raised, more or less, the same questions that were raised just after Nick Clegg’s original announcement.
If this session is any indication, the main opposition to the proposals will come from Conservative MPs, even though they are more or less committed, by the Coalition Agreement and an expected party whip, to eventually support the reforms. I totted up the MPs asking questions. Two Conservative made neutral points. Asking what seemed to be hostile questions were seven Conservatives, four Labour MPs and one SDLP member. Asking supportive questions were one LibDem, one Labour and two Conservative MPs.
It is worth highlighting the bizarre lengths that some MPs will go to, to find a way of opposing the House of Lord reform proposals. Here are two MPs who win this week’s “Logical Limbo dancing” awards:
Limbo One: Graham Stringer (Lab): “The Deputy Prime Minister has repeated ad nauseam that the commitment to reform the House of Lords was in all three parties’ manifestos… Does that not mean that the electorate did not have the choice to vote for somebody who did not want to reform the House of Lords? Is there not therefore a strong case for a referendum on this issue, which is much more important than AV?”
To that, Nick Clegg had a smart reply: “A seriously surreal doctrine is emerging. Because the hon. Gentleman was unable to persuade his colleagues to exclude the issue from the manifesto, he wants to circumvent the manifesto on which he stood at the last general election by way of a referendum.”
Limbo Two: Jacob Rees-Mogg (Con): “I wonder whether the Deputy Prime Minister has noticed that if proportional representation is used for a reformed House of Lords, the Liberal Democrats will almost always hold the balance of power in the other place. Does he intend to make being Deputy Prime Minister a job for life?”
Which brought another quick reply from the DPM: “As the hon. Gentleman knows, in a House of Lords without any elections of any description whatever, no party has an overall majority in any event, so a balance of power in a reformed House of Lords is no different from the status quo.”
Oh yes. There was one other repeating topic throughout the session. “There will be no privatisation of the NHS.” So there.
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2 Comments
I think Clegg’s proposals would give us a better Second Chamber than we have now, and I’d be moderately content if they went through.
However I think it’s a pity that those responsible for considering the possible solutions to this longstanding problem have stuck with rather conventional ideas rather than being prepared to think outside the box.
The central problem with our Parliament is the inherent “winner takes all” nature of the FPTP system used to elect the members of the first and dominant chamber, which often leads to a lack of effective opposition in that chamber and allows a single party government to behave as an “elected dictatorship”.
The blindingly obvious solution is to carry on having elections based on the (planned) 600 parliamentary constituencies, but supplement FPTP for members of the first chamber with SPTP for members of a second chamber with the same powers as the present Lords, taking the edge off the “winner takes all” nature of FPTP and ensuring that a single party government will never be able to command a majority in both chambers.
Meaning that the government would have to start winning arguments rather than just winning whipped votes, or in cases where no compromise could be reached with the opposition it would have to accept a delay of about 13 months before it could by-pass the Second Chamber under the Parliament Acts.
If a Second Chamber constituted in that way had been in place after the 1997 election, we would have been spared much of the defective legislation that the last Labour government pushed through during its 13 years, quite often simply to remedy problems created by its earlier defective legislation.
Here are some of the other advantages of this FPTP-SPTP system:
No additional elections – members of both chambers are elected simultaneously through constituency elections of the kind with which we’re all familiar, each elector still having just one vote to cast, and with the candidate who comes first taking the seat in the first chamber, the Commons, as now, while the candidate who comes second takes the seat in the reformed wholly elected Second Chamber.
Taken across both chambers, something very much closer to proportionality between the number of parliamentary representatives affiliated to a party and the total number of votes received by that party’s candidates.
No question about which chamber has primacy.
No parliamentary representatives floating free from any geographical constituency and unaccountable to a constituency electorate.
In each geographical constituency there would be two parliamentary representatives – the MP in the Commons, and an opposing member of the Second Chamber, the constituency SMP, who would be in constant public competition on policy matters but who could collaborate on and share the burden of constituency “social work”.
Even in a “safe” seat there would be a new added interest in the election, because for the first time it would matter who came second.
On average about three quarters of those who bothered to vote would be rewarded by seeing their preferred candidate take a seat in Parliament, in one chamber or the other.
Is there footage of this session available to watch anywhere?