In a recent article, Time for change with 848 Lords-a-leaping, For Argyll looked at the state of play in the United Kingdom’s second chamber. It is bizarre – a typical British accumulation of fudges and special interest partial changes – and, boy, it is out of scale?
All that can be said of it is that it does provide the unarguably necessary second chamber to check the House of Commons, regarded as the primary chamber because it is elected. It also has to be said that a butterfly net would be as good a provider of a random spectrum of the good, the bad and the ugly.
We have to do better.
The second chamber is becoming the focus of attention of politicians, as part of the fabric of the 2015 General Election campaign, with everything from scrappy ideas to full procedural propositions starting to emerge. Some of these are interesting and challenge thought on what is the best achievable route to a defensible second chamber.
All of this thinking, however, is premised on the constitutional status quo. That this is largely unconscious is revealing. As a nation we are hard put to it to imagine anything beyond what we are used to, limiting our ability to change. This temperamental preference for the familiar has a serious strength, though, in acting against the sort of ‘spur of the moment’ changes that destabilise and disorientate – and which so easily result from competitive party politics.
No one thinking about the second chamber just now appears to realise that this usurps the primary challenge faced by the UK today – constitutional reform to reshape and re-purpose the post-devolution union.
What is happening instead is British ad hockery and plenty of it.
More powers are being thrown at Scotland to keep the Nats at bay, with no thought of the asymmetric tensions this will create in the internal dynamics of an unrevised union.
There are proposals to throw powers at cities – with no consideration of the constitutional impact of such a situation and the limitations it may impose on our options for the constitutional change so many seem to to prefer to leave until action is forced upon them. This is always action taken from a position of weakness. It bedevils reason why anyone should ever choose to put themselves – and their country - in such a position.
But that’s where we are – instead of talking about federation, we are simply fiddling piecemeal at what we’ve got.
The departure from the usual pattern of back-against-the-wall change is that this time, if we do not talk about federation, it will not be forced upon us – because the union will simply break apart. That is the price of British vacillation.
The Secondary Mandate
In the mend and make-do scenario, the most developed of the procedural propositions for a second house is the use of a secondary mandate.
This is a way of electing two houses in one go, so the short attention span of the people is not overly challenged by the need to think differently or the need to vote in two elections. One Thought Two Votes.
It would see the election of a second house through a form of proportional representation, based on the overall proportion of votes gained by the various parties in a general election for the House of Commons – with its members taken from the same essentially undemocratic ‘closed list’ of candidates held by each political party as we see in the europarl elections. The proportionality would also be based on party votes gained in all UK seats falling within the regions used for voting for europarl.
The size of the second chamber proposed in this scheme is calibrated on keeping it as small as possible while big enough to make it possible for minority parties to be represented. The magic figure is 300.
The proposition claims the advantage of ensuring no upper house majority for any political party, creating a second chamber with no inbuilt bias to the government of the day and offering greater assurance of objective scrutiny.
It proposes that members serve in the upper house for two governments only, carrying forward expertise by having half [150] standing down and being replaced at each election. There is a fair bit of faffing around in the proposed procedure to get this part of the operation kick-started, avoiding one set of 150 serving for only one parliamentary term.
The suggestion is that 150 Life Peers from the current Lords would form half of the new 300-strong upper chamber for the first term; and be the first to step down and be replaced at the end of that term.
Interestingly, the most muscular item in the proposition is a ten year purdah for members of the upper chamber before any wishing to stand for the Commons may do so.
The downsides
This is effectively passive voting, based on the assumption of a disengaged electorate, best troubled to make decisions as little as possible
One vote is effectively two votes but only one of them requires a conscious choice by the voter. You don’t even have to draw a second ‘X’.
This is essentially disrespectful and certainly defeatist.
The europarl elections traditionally have low turnouts in the UK. Part of that is because Brussels is across the channel and, in its territorial and cultural multiplicity, is proportionately alien. The other part of it is that the voters do not elect their constituency MEPs. These parliamentarians are not accountable to the voters at the next election – only to the party that puts them high enough on its closed list to be fairly sure of being given a place under the PR system. MEPs are not so much elected as placed.
This is distanced politics – and the Secondary Mandate has all of the same disengagement.
The second issue is the excuse for the ‘closed list’ system in this context. This is a curious wish to preserve the ‘primacy’ of the elected House of Commons by removing the link between the voter and the candidate for the upper house.
This has to be nonsense. ‘Primacy’ does not have to be conferred by preventing the people from voting properly for one set of representatives. Primacy is conferred by the constitution.
There are two issues here. The negative of the closed list is the lack of a link between representives elected to the upper house and the voters whose other decisions send them there. But an eight to ten year term could be managed to address that lack of relationship and make the regional representatives known and engaged.
The value of that trade off is the proportionality and effective de-politicised or balanced nature of the upper house that would result from this Secondary Mandate proposition.
And why should that upper house, more closely representative of the views of the nation, not have primacy on the occasion where there might be irresoluble differences between the lower and the upper house? The partisan house, governed by force majeure, would have to – on the rare occasions necessary, give way to the more balanced position better attuned to the nation as a whole. This system could, between the two different houses, be a very productive marriage of majority decisiveness and proportional reflection.
The primary function of an upper house is to scrutinise and refine, exercising what are known as ‘the checks and balances’. In this instance especially, where the upper house cannot have a political majority, it is reasonable to assume that its majority conclusions would be balanced and would relate to views on the issue rather than on preserving or denying political supremacy.
Why should this not be the correct ‘last word’ where one is needed?
Since the Secondary Mandate has attracted interest from the Labour Party, we asked Mary Galbraith, Labour candidate for Argyll and Bute in the forthcoming UK General Election, what she personally thinks of it.
She says: ’300 is a good number – half the size of commons – so no competition about where primacy lies. I’d cycle 100 in and 100 out at each election. So on a five year cycle you’d have a maximum 15 year stint in there – which feels right. The current proposal suggests 150 out at each election but I think that loses a lot of valuable experience on the core functions of scrutiny and revision.
‘The whole piece is hard to fault, and I remember hearing Roy Hattersley say that he was originally against this (he had other proposals for Lords reform), but he happened to be sitting beside Billy Bragg on a train once, and by the end of the journey Billy had convinced him!’
But…
… if the United Kingdom were to be proactive and engage in fashioning the constitutional reform to produce a federation?
With self governing powers transferred to the states, we would need a different lower and a different upper house, both much smaller and with different responsibilities – for the powers agreed to be reserved.
Two things are interesting here from the American constitutional experience.
The Federal Government has progressively been required, for practical reasons, including a growing perceived value in certain uniformities – to take back quite a lot of powers from the States.
Then, the Federal Government of America, whose population is almost five times that of the UK, has a lower house [the House of Representatives], with 435 directly elected members; and an upper house [the Senate], with 100 elected members.
The relative tiddler of the United Kingdom, with three of its four states variously devolved and with its largest state by far, England, undevolved, has a House of Commons with 650 elected representatives and a House of Lords with an entirely unelected 848 members.
Both of these houses have over-representation, following devolution – but the House of Lords is an indefensible montrosity.
The 300-strong Lords that would result from the current Secondary Mandate proposal would be in every way a breath of fresh air – fully elected, proportionally representative of the country – if the UK stayed with the ad hoc mish-mash constitutional stew we now have.
If we were – as we need – to take the federal path, we would be thinking very differently about the natures, responsibilities and sizes of the chambers of the bicameral federal government we would need.
The question is, will we buy a fudge and go in for expensive reform of the House of Lords – which would be no more than an interim arrangement – unless we retired exhausted after that and abandoned further change altogether, as we would temperamentally be wont to do?
Or will we brace ourselves, take a deep breath and go for the excitement and challenge of remaking ourselves and our nation to fit what we are becoming and might go on to do better?
And yes, that is a leading question.
