Hoon's Harmonious Houses

Now that their majority in the Commons has been cut down to size, New Labour have belatedly rediscovered electoral reform. An article by Bomber Hoon in the Independent on Sunday notes that "The make-up of the Lords is irrational", and that "the primacy of the Commons", where a government can gain an absolute majority on forty per cent of the vote, "is of paramount importance."

Still, the insanity of the Lords has brought benefits. "It has prevented serious conflict between the two Houses", serious disagreement having no place in a New Labour democracy. The powers of the Lords are also strictly circumscribed, and until recently the Lords have voluntarily limited their powers via the Salisbury Convention, which means that manifesto commitments are neither rejected nor changed beyond recognition. "Recently, however," fulminates the righteous Hoon, "Liberal Democrat peers have decided, for reasons of their own, that they can abandon such conventions at will." This is certainly shocking behaviour. The last thing one expects of a voluntary commitment is that it should be abandoned at will for reasons of one's own.

Thanks to this dereliction of voluntariness by the Liberal Democrats, "we are in uncharted constitutional waters". As seems to happen rather often these days, the rules of the game have changed. Hereditary peers are out of date: "there are few today who support the hereditary principle as a way of deciding who should make our laws". Appointed peers are better, as they can be appointed by the right people: "other party leaders and the House of Lords Appointments Commission," an independent public body whose independence is "sponsored" by the Prime Minister. At the moment, the Lords is a mix of hereditary and appointed peers in which, as Hoon perspicaciously observes, "without the hereditary peers we would have an all-appointed chamber".

This is obviously not a satisfactory arrangement, but it is at least better than the suggested alternative, which would involve having elected members in the Second Chamber. In a modern democracy, this would obviously be the worst choice of all. A "hybrid House" with a mix of appointed and elected members could lead to Westminster members behaving like members of the Scottish parliament, "where some are elected from constituencies and some come from a party list," and who, in a development of apocalyptic gravity, "complain about the difficulty of reconciling their different status." As for the possibility of an all-elected upper chamber, the less said the better: "We only have to look to other nations, such as Italy," though not the United States, "to see there are real dangers in having two rival elected chambers at permanent loggerheads."

What, then, is the solution? "The debate on powers could be resolved by making established conventions, such as the Salisbury Convention, legally binding to ensure the primacy of the Commons". This would certainly ensure that Tony's legacy of faith schools, ID cards and house arrest for speaking out of turn will be subject to no further delays; how it would resolve "the debate on powers" is another matter. Still, if nothing else, "one thing is quite clear from the perspective of Members of the House of Commons. We must clarify and circumscribe the powers of the Second Chamber before deciding its composition". The Commons is quite capable of deciding for itself what checks and balances should be applied to the Commons, thank you very much.