Earlier this week, a Guardian editorial called for a pre-election pact between the parties on the size and proportions of the House of Lords.
The piece complained about the cost of the peers and the size of their House.
The Commons itself is very large. But the size of the Lords is the real problem. There is no other bicameral legislature anywhere in the world in which the upper house is larger than the lower house. The case for change is overwhelming – morally, democratically and on every other ground.
Liberal Democrat peer Paul Tyler wasted no time in reminding the Guardian of a thing or two – namely that if Labour hadn’t behaved like toddlers, we would be on the way to our first Lords elections in just a few weeks’ time:
Your editorial comment (Too many peerages. First cap the total, then change the system, 10 February) reignites the case for reform of the House of Lords. On 10 July 2012 the House of Commons gave an unprecedented 338 majority to the second reading of the coalition government’s Lords reform bill, squarely based on Jack Straw’s 2008 white paper. Conservative MPs voted 193 to 89 in support, Labour 202 to 26, and Liberal Democrats were unanimous.
Only then did the Labour leadership refuse to support a programme motion – anyprogramme motion, no matter how many days’ debate it allowed – choosing instead to play party games to embarrass the government.
Had Labour stuck to its principles, we would by now be within weeks of the first elections to the Lords, with the resultant end of political appointments and a consequent reduction in the size of the house. Will the UCL Constitution Unit recommend the reintroduction of the bill immediately after the general election?
* Newshound: bringing you the best Lib Dem commentary in print, on air or online.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Back on the campaign trail
1963: London's summer of the Hoverbus
Have resignations led to a rethink?
Steve J Smith
nigel hunter
Chloe
Abrial Jerram
41 Comments
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. The three main establishment parties all play games with politics and behave like toddlers at times. You guys stopped the constituency boundaries being redrawn and labour will in all likelihood go on to win the election in no small part thanks to that. The pot calling the kettle black.
This is rather glossing over the fact that the proposed reforms were utterly awful – be it the lack of democratic accountability in single 15 year terms or the tiny proportion of peers we would be electing in Mya and the awful system used to elect them. Typical Clegg really, doesn’t put forward the Lib Dem policy but some daft scheme of his own in the name of ‘compromise’ but which fails to get support to make the compromise worthwhile.
Lord’s reform failed because Clegg, as a partisan of the right, wanted to cut Labour out of the debate and present it as a wholly Coalition achievement.. If he had a bit more tactical nous, a less trusting attitude to the Tory party, and if he wasn’t so blinded by his hostility to the ‘left’ we would have Lord’s reform now. Why has this party put up with his serial incompetence?
The proposals might not have been to everybody’s tastes (certainly not the Lib Dems) but they were “squarely based on Jack Straw’s 2008 white paper”. They were a compromise that all parties said they could live with – then when it looked like they might actually happen, Labour torpedoed them.
Would it be better for Clegg as the Government minister responsible to put forward a previously-agreed compromise and have it voted down by Labour for selfish reasons, or put forward Lib Dem policy and have it voted down by Labour and Tories for perfectly good reasons?
I feel the need to remind self-righteous (still?!) Lib Dems that they are equally to blame. They backed Commons boundary changes. They then realised they had fatally undermined themselves. They then started loudly arguing in the run up to the Lords reform vote that if it fell they would block the boundary changes from taking effect.
That made the work of reformers inside Labour impossible as Labour MPs suddenly cottoned on that if the voted down Lords reform they wouldn’t only humiliate Clegg but would get the hated boundary changes blocked as well. Which is of course exactly what happened.
Lord Tyler can bleat about this as much as he likes, but the fact remains that the Lib Dems got the politics completely wrong on this.
If you refuse to learn from your mistakes you are fatally doomed to repeat them. That’s why every time I see a Lib Dem repeat this line, I despair that the opportunity for further political reforms will be lost if the Lib Dems find themselves in coalition again.
There has long been much more than a suspicion that the two larger parties do not want anything to do with electoral reform (other than cutting out the aristos) for either houses. The essential fact is that Labour had three terms to introduce democracy to the Lords, but did not.
Those here defending Labour’s antics merely demonstrate how far they are willing to go to defend the indefensible and only diminishes the integrity of comments that they place on other issues.
Dave Page and caracatus are, in different ways; both right. I could concede that a compromise (based on previous debates under Labour) was necessary: Labour’s eventual behaviour shows that anything less conservative would have been seized upon by their side to oppose any change. None of this means that the Party should be stuck with a proposal that was neither very Liberal nor particularly Democratic.
I would really like to see radically Liberal Democratic proposals in the manifesto.
There needs to be Lords reform but radical rebalancing has neither wide support among the public nor the political will it needs to succeed. Accordingly, the sensible approach is to propose modest, incremental improvements. Sensible movement on this front is much more likely to gain ground than a odd elected setup.
AndrewR 15th Feb ’15 – 12:32pm
Lord’s reform failed because Clegg, as a partisan of the right, wanted to cut Labour out of the debate and present it as a wholly Coalition achievement.. If he had a bit more tactical nous, a less trusting attitude to the Tory party, and if he wasn’t so blinded by his hostility to the ‘left’ we would have Lord’s reform now. Why has this party put up with his serial incompetence?
In three short sentences AndrewR sums up why Clegg must go. He is of the right, he is instinctively at home with Tories and he is just not competent.
He would have been a liability as a junior minister in say the Home Office but as leader of the party he has been a disaster.
James Graham 15th Feb ’15 – 1:10pm
“………. the fact remains that the Lib Dems got the politics completely wrong …”
Yes and Clegg continues to get the politics completely wrong. Even as recently as last week at DPMQs he was ranting about Trade Unions as if they were ‘the enemy within’. Does he not realise that there are six million trade unionists out there? Many trade unionists vote and used to vote Liberal Democrat. What must they think when they hear Clegg gonig off on one of these Ruling Class, prejudiced, ignorant rants?
BTW – James Graham, yesterday I came across one of your excellent blogs from August 2008. Important lessons for the party in 2015 if it is ever going to learn any lessons from the past —
I especially liked —
“..,Speaking as the individual who was, post-Donnachadh McCarthy, regarded as the chief troublemaker on the FE (a position I never sought but found I had inherited by accident), my recollection was that the party bigwigs were quite happy with the lack of clear delineation between the management and governance functions of the party. This was not because they enjoyed the FE interfering with management (which was always slapped down ruthlessly) but because it allowed them to interfere with the governance side. The unilateral dropping of business plans is one example. The constant refusal to budget for projects which had been agreed by Conference and the FE was another. The people who got singled out and marked as troublemakers on the committee were the people who tended to read their papers. Scrutiny was a dirty word,….”
http://www.theliberati.net/quaequamblog/tag/liberal-democrats/page/13/
Martin
There has long been much more than a suspicion that the two larger parties do not want anything to do with electoral reform (other than cutting out the aristos) for either houses.
Not this canard again. Labour, 1997-2010, introduced devolution to Scotland, Wales, NI and London and proportional voting systems for these assemblies/parliaments, elected mayors, tried, and failed, to introduce regional assemblies in England and they instigated Lords reform, which has subsequently stalled.
By any fair measure, that represents the most sustained period of reform, even considering the failures, to the British electoral system since extending the franchise to women.
The Lib Dems have a botched AV referendum and a juvenile attempt at playing party politics over boundary changes and the Lords to their credit.
I object to the comparison of innocent toddlers with the swamp of cynicism & hate that is The Labour Party.
Some of us have watched the Labour Party at Westminster on constitutional issues during the past five years. They are a divided and generally conservative rabble. Their strategy (or rather tactics) have amounted to short-term disruption of any serious attempts to achieve democratic changes.
I am not arguing that such reforms have been managed well by the LD leadership. I am just pointing out that they have been systematically wrecked by the Labour Party.
Tony
@g ‘ Labour, 1997-2010, introduced…proportional voting systems for the assemblies/parliaments’ for Scotland and Wales.
Weren’t the Lib Dems grasping Labour’s testicles painfully tightly to encourage them to do the right thing on this?
Some Lib Dems seem not to have noticed that Labour are the opposition and as such are numerically incapable of “torpedoing” any bill the government wishes to pass.
The real reason why Lords reform failed is that the Lib Dems ham-fistedly allowed the coalition agreement to be written in such a way that Tory MPs were not obliged to actually vote for HoL reform at all. All the agreement promised was “a committee to bring forward proposals”. Once this was done, Tory backbenchers realised they’d already met their obligations and the reforms were doomed. All Tyler is doing here is trying to blame Labour for the Lib Dems’ own incompetence.
Stuart is quite correct.
The dog’s breakfast that Clegg presented to Parliament was just ridiculous. I seem to recall that the time-scale for the “reform” to be completed was so extensive that my grandchildren would be lucky to live long enough to see it.
Clegg promised the greatest constitutional reform since 1832. What we got was absolutely nothing.
Clegg took personal responsibility, he called himself the Minister for constitutional reform. I am told that the words “Department of Constitutional Reform” were painted over the doors to his “department”.
It is not the fault of the Labour Party that Clegg was an incompetent who could not deliver one of the grand reforms he had boasted about.
All the criticisms of the Labour Party in this thread are true but they are irrelevant to this failure.
The failure is the failure of Clegg.
When people say that after the Coalition is over “History will be kind to Clegg ” they ignore the fact that Historians will look at Clegg’s record of mismanagement and failure on constitutional reform and he will be a laughing stock.
Leekliberal
@g ‘ Labour, 1997-2010, introduced…proportional voting systems for the assemblies/parliaments’ for Scotland and Wales.
Weren’t the Lib Dems grasping Labour’s testicles painfully tightly to encourage them to do the right thing on this?
No, devolution had been a Labour policy for a long time, and they had a massive majority. They did this all by themselves.
Leekliberal
Interesting to see that the Lib Dems could force Labour to do something that you imply they did want to do even when Labour had a huge majority in the Commons at the time, but cannot be held at all responsible for Coalition policies (including this pathetic attempt at Lord’s reform) even when they have votes that the Tories need?
As mentioned earlier – Labour are in no way a majority in the HoC or the Lords so how is it their fault that this bill failed
The big issue I have seen with all attempts at constitutional reform is that it has been done in a partisan way – one of Labour’s main gripes has been that there has been attempt no cross-party for the reforms and remember that the AV referendum and the cut to MPs/boundary changes were in the same bill – something that was like holding a red rag to a bull at that time
As others have said, Lords Reform was part of an internal Coalition deal. Labour couldn’t have helped pass it without the changes to the Commons passing too.
It’s not the job of the Opposition to help the Coalition each pass stuff it likes.
Hang on, it’s Labour’s fault that Cameron keeps adding loads of new peers?
stuart moran
” … including this pathetic attempt at Lord’s reform … “
Saying that implies you think that may be a reason why Labour scuttled this, even though the Lords reform bill was squarely based on Jack Straw’s 2008 white paper.
Could you therefore explain why you regard it as “pathetic”?
I seem to remember a Tory anti-reform “rebellion” which the Member for Witney affected to be unable to control. Surely that is part of the story?
If you read the 2008 white paper it is pathetic.
The White Paper reviewed the outcomes of “four voting systems options [which] were modelled for elections to the second chamber”. The Government believed that further consideration should be given to the following systems:
First Past the Post
Alternative Vote
Single Transferable Vote; and
An open or semi-open list system.
How helpful was that in resolving any issue ?
Jack Straw wanted a 50% elected Lords, democracy being only so good. Lets face it, the real issue is a democratic House of Lords electing 500 members in multi-member constituencies in all out elections held once every 4 or 5 years would show up the commons to be the unrepresentative farce that it is. That is the problem and why MPs favour long terms (to remove accountability and democratic legitimacy) to have vast regional constituencies and party list voting (to make the members remote) and to keep appointments of donors and ex MPs that the voters even under a party list can’t be trusted to elect.
Yet again, those hostile to the party use Lib Dem Voice as a mouthpiece for their contorted theories about (1) How the Lib Dems are somehow to blame for the other parties blocking constitutional reform (2) How Labour is a paragon of virtue on this issue and doesn’t just introduce piecemeal changes to favour its own partisan interests,
You lot really are a tiresome bunch, you really are.
@ ‘g’ Weren’t the Lib Dems grasping Labour’s testicles painfully tightly to encourage them to do the right thing on this?
‘No, devolution had been a Labour policy for a long time, and they had a massive majority. They did this all by themselves’
If Labour had finally seen the light on PR in local government how come in 13 years of majority control they failed to do so for England and Wales?
g: “Not this canard again”
If it quacks like a duck, if it sounds like a duck, then we can assume the canard is a duck. So far as Westminster is concerned the behaviour of Labour has consistently been to stall and obfuscate on democratic reforms.
RC; This issue is a useful touchstone as it exposes the hostile contortionists’ ridiculous posturing.
The Labour apologists are out in force today. Paul Tyler is absolutely right about Labour – they promised Lords reform and PR in every election from 1997 to 2005 and failed to deliver either. They always hid behind excuses such as endless research to produce a veneer of being pro-reform while doing nothing. They couldn’t be honest with the electorate that fundamentally they are an anti-reform small-c conservative party. Why? Because the status quo suits them very fine.
In 2010 they had AV in their own manifesto – they were in fact the only party going into the 2010 supporting AV. Then what do they do come the AV referendum? Most Labour MPs campaigned against and the party leader’s only notable contribution was to refuse to stand alongside Nick Clegg, part of their personal demonisation strategy against him, but ultimately aimed at discrediting both AV and Lords reform as Lib Dem only policies.
Those pointing out the boundary reforms as a reason for Labour’s refusal to back Lords reform are in a way right – this was always about the self-interest of the Labour party and never about what was right.
Seriously guys, I know you hate Labour, I know you want to disregard critics, but it’s stretching an argument beyond breaking point to argue that Labour, 1997-2010, didn’t dramatically transform the UK democratic process. Yes their Lords reforms were modest, but surely everything else they did counts for something? It’s certainly a great deal more than the Coalition have managed, despite have a Deputy Prime Minister who sees constitutional reform as his job yet hasn’t achieved one single change.
That’s not Labour’s fault. That’s an inability to build consensus and seek cross party agreements, not only with Labour, but with your own coalition partners who have constantly and consistently voted against every reform in the last 30 years.
@Julian Tisi “The Labour apologists are out in force today.”
As are the Coalition apologists. This government has passed plenty of legislation that Labour opposed but Clegg’s failure to secure any electoral reform is being blamed solely on Labour.
Labour might be rubbish and act out of self-interest or for party political advantage but, disappointingly, in government the Lib Dems have not shown themselves to be any better so we see the rise of UKIP, Greens and SNP.
Historians will look at Clegg’s record of mismanagement and failure on constitutional reform and he will be a laughing stock.
RC
It is not just opponents of the party that can see the facts as they were and as they are.
Indeed one can only reasonably assume that constitutional reform is not a major part of Clegg’s 2015 general election positioning because even he is ashamed of his personal incompetence and is trying to bury it.
In 2010 when he became DPM he promised us — “the greatest reform since 1832”.
In 2015 he talks about mental health.
“the party leader’s only notable contribution was to refuse to stand alongside Nick Clegg, part of their personal demonisation strategy against him, but ultimately aimed at discrediting both AV and Lords reform as Lib Dem only policies.”
This made me smile. Miliband campaigned for AV and avoided standing by Clegg because Clegg was and remains utterly toxic to most voters. The LibDems had just betrayed a considerable number of student voters (and possibly their parents too). Why on earth share a stage with the leader of a party willing to renege on a sworn promise, already embarking on supporting policies that it had allegedly found so awful when still in opposition?
The LibDems used scuppering boundary changes, IIRC, as ‘revenge’ on the Tories for scuppering the Lords reforms – if all the Tories had voted for, along with the LibDems, Labour could have done nothing to stop it. When the boundary changes had been deep sixed, that was that. A fine outcome for both parties in my humble opinion.
Just a reminder of the facts – Milliband made one statement in favor of AV & then kept quiet for the rest of the campaign; a Labour for AV campaign was set up but did nothing. Both Labour & The Unions poured money & people into the campaign against AV even though it was Labour policy.
I have to repeat my usual advice – go & read some Labour blogs & in particular the comments. Many Labour activists hate us & frequently each other as well – “Blairite 5th columnists” come in for some stick.
@paul barker “Just a reminder of the facts – Milliband made one statement in favor of AV & then kept quiet for the rest of the campaign …”
Sorry. You can’t start with the word “facts” and then write nonsense.
Notably, on Milliband not sharing a platform with Clegg:
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1383301/AV-referendum-Ed-Miliband-says-dont-reject-Yes-vote-Nick-Clegg.html)
It’s hard not to sympathise with that view. Clegg was the poster child for the No2AV campaign and probably had a higher profile in their campaign and literature than he did in his own.
@ ‘g’ Seriously guys, I know you hate Labour…’
Sadly this is now true in my case , It wasn’t always so . For long I had a sneaking regard for Labour who I felt had their hearts in the right place , with all their many faults. But after almost five years of receiving bucket-loads of hypocritical bile from them, just because we had no option in perilous times but to go into coalition with their and our political enemies to sort our the shambles they left behind, the chances of the centre -left working together have been seriously damaged.
The House of Lords exists to provide UK party politicians with a comfortable career in semi-retirement. All parties claim to want reform, all parties naturally fail to deliver it due to the unwillingness of turkeys to vote for Christmas, all parties then blame their opponents, all parties are a pain in the neck.
To attempt to be genuinely iconoclastic: Isn’t there a case for a “retirement home”?
We have always believed in paying judges handsomely, on the argument that wealthy judges can be trusted not to bother with taking bribes. Should we do likewise with politicians?
The worst thing a retired politician can do – and often does do – is to go off and earn money working for the company whose interests he or she took care to look after while in Parliament or government. Apologists for this revolving door explain that the poor old corrupt ex-MP just has to make themselves some sort of living, so, therefore it’s got to be all right to collect your reward from the company you represented as an MP (you didn’t, of course, really represent the people in your constituency, they came a long way second!)
What we should do is ban that outright, but provide a much less harmful form of state-sponsored retirement instead. Enter the House of Lords. All ex-MPs should automatically be appointed.
Reforms would still be needed. Instead of a chamber of 800-odd members earning generous expenses for just turning up, Lords should be made to work if they want to earn a living. There should be no automatic pay, but plenty of opportunities to earn it through research and select committee activities which would develop and provide expert support to the Commons, alongside the traditional revising functions. So, the retired MP should be able to earn a full-time salary if he/she is prepared to work for it, a lesser salary if he/she winds gracefully down as old age advances.
Acid test:
Is this better than what happens now? Yes!
Would conventional Lords reform get rid of the revolving door? No!
So which is the reform that actually tackles a real problem? My idea, not conventional reform!
@Simon Shaw (and many others in a similar vein) :-
“Saying that implies you think that may be a reason why Labour scuttled this”
You do realise Labour are not a part of the government – don’t you?
If Lloyd George was alive he would not be campaigning for reform of the Lords but the abolition o fa costly anachronism.
On the other major constitutional issue the devolution settlement LG would be an advocate of home rule for each of the countries of the UK.With Home rule ,matters such as defense,foreign would require asmall UK parliament.The House of Lords would not be required and could be abolished.
This would give us a clear simple policy to replace the current policy confusion.
this
Stuart 16th Feb ’15 – 5:15pm
“…You do realise Labour are not a part of the government – don’t you?”
Could you ask this question again in the middle of May?
John Tilley – the HoL Bill may or may not have been a “dog-s breakfast” but it was much in line with LD policy over many years. It was also a lot better than what we have without it.
It is a fact that the Labour Party combined with hostile Conservatives to prevent the Bill’s passage through the Commons. So it never got to the Lords where we would no doubt have seen the same combination of blockers getting to work!
Tony
Apart from being a revising chamber which could be done by something like a committee of the Privy Council or of the House of Commons what is the House of Lords for ? I do not think we need to pay oodles of money to stop retired politicians using their knowledge and expertise in outside occupations when they retire as they often have useful things to say so let someone else pay them.
Originally it was there to advise the ruler what the barons, abbots, bishops and other great landowners thought of his plans for taxes etc. The Commons was there to do the same for the lesser landowners, gentry etc.
We are supposed to be a democracy and the ruling elite have plenty of opportunities in the press, this site and the BBC etc to tell us mere mortals what to think about things and they certainly do not stint themselves in doing so.
The only case for a Second Chamber would arise if the UK was a federal state like the US, Germany, Russia etc
Since Asquith and Lloyd George failed to create an elected Upper House Liberals and to a much lesser extent Labour have been obsessed with this whilst failing to notice that we no longer have a truly bicameral parliament with each house having equal powers as in the US or Italy for example ( and Italy is trying to abolish it as the Senate just creates delays with no obvious benefit). We have a basically unicameral parliament with an expensive revising body which sometimes produces good ideas but often does not. The only power it still has is the right to veto any attempt by the House of Commons to extend its own duration. The best thing we could do is to leave things as they are except for the sort of reforms advocated by Lord Steele which would drastically reduce the numbers and cost and allow for retirements. What sort of turnout would there be for elections to the House of Lords with its present or any realistic level of powers ? About the same as the farce of electing the Police and Crime Commissioners which has brought democracy into disrepute ?
I know this will disappoint the political anoraks on this site but it is really pointless to elect a revising chamber when we already have a satisfactory one. In the event of a federal chamber being required the revising functions could be passed to the Privy Council which would more nearly suit the purpose of that body which is to advise the ruler on general matters as it already consists of people experienced in public life and may possibly be less party political.
Ooh – I have just seen Tony Greaves effectively defend the party leadership and the minister responsible for constitutional reform over the failure of lords reform.
FWIW, I agree, not that it matters whether I do or not, and depressed as I often have been by the rightwards drift in the party, and the grandstanding and failure of that period of the government.
Tactics and the bill might have been flawed, but it was not in itself a fundamentally bad piece of reform deserving of outright rejection and it would have been an improvement. It is good that Paul Tyler still feels there is life in the issue yet. I hope there is.
Nvelope, whilst I might -JUST and grudgingly- accept a unicameral parliament under any of several forms of PR or partial PR, in a system that risks landslide parliaments like Blair’s and Thatcher’s, a unicameral parliament is an elected dictatorship without a revising chamber to check it. It certainly can be smaller, it can even under some circumstances be indirectly elected (again I’d only concede that grudgingly) but it needs to be there to balance the other chamber and it needs not to be wholly appointed.