Given I’ve spoken before about the importance of a broad cross-party coalition to back Lords reform, it’s only right that I compliment two Labour bloggers who have spoken up on the topic in the last few days.
Luke Akehurst over on Progressonline wrote,
Labour’s constitutional conservatives are gearing up for another rearguard action … Unlike the AV question, when the party outside parliament was as divided as the PLP, the wider Labour party has a clear and settled view on this one. The National Policy Forum, representing all the key party stakeholders, voted at the ‘Warwick II’ meeting in July 2008 for a wholly elected House of Lords.
As that is the view of the party, I hope it will be the case our frontbenchers make in parliament and that the whips will be making every effort to get every Labour MP and Peer to vote for it, and to stop Tory backwoodsmen delaying the legislation, when it eventually gets debated …
Clegg has got it right (the first time I think I’ve ever written that!) in saying the upper house needs a different voting system to the Commons, otherwise it will just duplicate it and not play a role in addressing the representational deficit caused by first past the post.
Meanwhile, on LabourList Jessica Assato wrote,
There’s a reason why Labour has always opposed the House of Lords and it comes down to a simple formula that unelected elites should not be allowed to frustrate the will of the people. It doesn’t matter that the inbuilt Conservative majority in the Lords was diminished with the appointment of decent lefty scientists, trade unionists, art establishment-ists, and industrialists under the Blair years. Even if the place was stuffed with Joanna Lumley’s and Rowan Williams’s, Labour people shouldn’t care a jot, because it’s the unelected bit that’s the problem…
It’s hard to bear it, but Labour needs to get behind Clegg’s reforms, even if that means using the Parliament Act. There’s nothing worse than a party in opposition playing politics with an important democratic issue such as this. It may feel good at the time, but the public will see it for what it is.
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8 Comments
Thanks, good links Mark. Though I’m not sure – given his aggressive opposition to ordinating gay bishops – Rowan Williams is a paragon of virtue…
Yes, good call by both of them. I suspect they will be candles blowing in the wind of Labour opportunism though.
Luke Akehurst
Clegg has got it right (the first time I think I’ve ever written that!) in saying the upper house needs a different voting system to the Commons,
Yes, that is why the Lord should be elected by a party list system, as the Commons should be elected by STV. The danger with going for STV in the Lords – as Clegg has done – is that it will be an additional nail in the coffin of the case for STV in the Commons. A great benefit of using a list system – which I certainly would not advocate for most other elections – for the Lords, is that as the lists could consist of the existing peers who take the party whip, the result would be a Lords looking not like the current one, and this shuts up those who are arguing against an elected Lords. The party list system IS done by appointment, it’s up to the parties how they appoint, I hope ours would be in a more internally democratic way than the whim of the leader, with the electorate just deciding the balance, and that’s what’s done now anyway in effect, with Cameron like previous PMs insisting on appointing enough new Lords to get a Lords balance in accord with the Parliamentary balance as given in the election. If the appointment principle is important, as the opponents of a fully elected Lords argue, then the parties should make sure to put high up in their lists the sort of people which the fans of an appointed Lords say should be appointed.
Henry
Though I’m not sure – given his aggressive opposition to ordinating gay bishops – Rowan Williams is a paragon of virtue…
This is rather unfair on Williams. I suspect he himself is not personally opposed to gay bishops, but his opposition reflects what is happening in the wider Anglican community. That’s what you get when you have a Church organised on democratic lines – the people may speak and they may not speak in the way you like. The aggressive opposition to homosexuality amongst some of the Anglican Churches, particularly the African ones, is not nice, and I would say it is not Christian, but it is there as a huge factor. The people whipping it up are utter hypocrites, because they don’t make a big fuss about polygamous clergy, a big factor in the African Churches, despite polygamy amongst the clergy being explicitly ruled out in the New Testament. They are very selective in their reading and interpretation of scripture.
The African Anglican Churches, like the RC Church in almost all developing nations, are themselves under HUGE pressure from evangelical and pentecostal Churches, which must also be considered as a factor and something of an excuse for some of what they say. The dream of liberal protestantism was that if the people were free to make their own interpretation of scripture they would do so in a liberal way. It has in fact worked out precisely the opposite. As with Islam, if there is no authority to tell the “fundamentalists” they are wrong, the process seems to be that the fundamentalists compete with each other to out-fundamentalist themselves. No authority actually means people are scared to take any interpretation but the most literal, there is not that support of an organised structure to enable exploration of more allegorical interpretations.
Williams knows that a more liberal line on things like gay bishops here may make a few western liberals happy, but will have the consequence of pushing many more gullible people to the fundy sects who will make a big thing out of how it indicates that Anglicans aren’t “real Christians”. The fundy sects have large amounts of money and organisation to do this – paid for by big business fat cats, because it’s US dollars behind it, and what the US fat cats who pay for it like is that the fundies tend to be pro-capitalist. Again – very selective on scripture – they know those few texts which can be interpreted as anti-gay, they ignore those huge numbers of texts which condemn the wealthy and those who put making money as the prime aim in life.
I know I was being a little unfair – I was paraphrasing. But were I to write a longer article on it, I would understand the points you make about the realpolitik of pentecostal churches in Africa, but argue that we have been testing your theory for so long and have had precious little effect; thus I would, were I writing a longer article, suggest it is time for Rowan Williams to bite the bullet and go for it or accept defeat.
Further more, I would, were I to write a londer essay, probably disagree with your rhetorical language which seems, to me, to be too dismisive of ‘a few western liberals’. I am not a Christian, but my choir will lose a good Bass if the CofE doesn’t make its mind up sooner (I give it two more vacant Sees) rather than later. Perhaps a discussion for another time though 🙂
Matthew:
I agree with your assessment of the likely outcome of implementing STV for the Peers, but disagree that Party List is in any way a good idea – it simply leads to far too much central power in the hands of the Party (maybe not so much in the internally democratic Lib Dems, but in the authoritarian Labour & Tory lists).
Personally my absolute ideal would have been STV for the Commons and Ranked Pair Constituencies for the Peers, but any democratic implementation of an upper house is an improvement.
My only issue with using a closed list for Lords elections would be that, for example, if a Conservative government was about, the Labour premier would choose Lords who would specifically oppose government policy at all times. Etc. Other than that, I see the advantages.
After the AV fiasco I find it hard to believe that anybody can still think about the Commons being elected by STV, or by anything other than FPTP, within his lifetime – it isn’t going to happen, and that assumption should be the starting point for thinking how to reform the Lords.