It's time we learned to love the Lords
It's the only bit of the system that works. And that isn't a coincidence.
Watching Labour reduce itself into ever smaller circles of timidity is obviously extremely irritating, but it does have one significant advantage. It means they drop silly policies as well as good ones.
The £28bn policy was generally very good. Dropping it is foolish. But the House of Lords reform policy was very bad and dropping it is extremely welcome. According to multiple reports this week, that's exactly what's happened. The party has ditched its plan to abolish the Lords and replace it with an elected Chamber. "We're not going to go around saying the House of Lords is crap, let's get rid of it," a Labour source told Politico this week.
The short response to that is: thank Christ. The comments Labour figures made about the Lords in recent months were contradictory, inane, illiterate and really quite ominously stupid. It's reassuring to see them being addressed.
It also provides us with an opportunity to think more deeply about the Lords. What is it for? Why does it work so well? And what does that tell us about democracy? This gets us into really perilous moral territory. It's not for the faint of heart. But just because something is uncomfortable, doesn’t mean we should stop asking questions about it.
Progressives act towards the Lords in a very weird way. It's like they've fallen in love with someone they don't fancy. They're enamoured with what they do and say, but they're physically repelled by them. People say: 'Who would have thought we'd need the unelected Lords for decent scrutiny'. Or: 'Isn't it sad that we have to rely on the unelected Lords to stand up to government?' They've been saying this for decades: over student fees, civil liberties, executive overreach, austerity, Brexit, Rwanda. Every time the Lords does its job, people say the same shit.
Even this view understates quite how effective the Lords is. It doesn't just stand up to government. It improves law. In the Commons, amendments fail. Sometimes there's enough of a rebellion to get the government to make concessions, but basically it's a rubber-stamping operation whose true character is concealed by the soundtrack of mutual hatred. In the Lords, the hatred is gone, but so is the rubber-stamping. Thousands of amendments - usually small, practical and useful - are made every session. It's here that laws are improved, rather than simply shouted about.
The same applies to their committee system. As I've written before, statutory instruments are a basic threat to the continued function of parliamentary democracy. The main body that keeps a check on what's happening is the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, in the Lords. In all manner of ways, peers demonstrate a degree of seriousness which is lacking anywhere else.
At some point you have to face up to something. Maybe it isn't funny that the Lords performs this way. Maybe it isn't weird. Maybe… the Lords is good, actually? And then you have to ask yourself the really terrifying question, the one that makes all your basic ideological assumptions come dangerously unstuck: Are they performing this well despite being undemocratic, or because they're undemocratic?
Scary shit, I know. People hate it. Believe me. I have sat in debates and big public meetings saying this and people can get really very cross about it.
The Lords works better than the Commons for several reasons. The most important is not related to democracy. It's simply that the government has no majority. In the Commons, it's usually handed a big fat majority by the first-past-the-post voting system and can therefore do whatever it wants. There's lots of noise, lots of grand expressions of principle and highly-charged tribal fighting, but it never changes anything.
In the Lords, that majority does not exist. Tory peers are the largest group, but they can be outvoted by the other parties voting with the crossbenchers. This stops the government doing what it likes. It means amendments can pass and bills can be voted down. And because that's the case, the quality of what goes on there is massively improved. Governments have to try to convince people of their case, rather than railroad through them. And oppositions are incentivised to put forward pragmatic amendments that might find consensus, rather than just shouting at ministers that they're a shower of bastards.
Another core reason why the Lords works well is that it has expertise. And this is where things become more perilous.
MPs are selected by partisans in the local party to be partisans on the national stage, with no other intellectual requirements necessary or indeed evident. But a large minority of peers are crossbenchers. This means they belong to no party and have been picked by the House of Lords Appointments Commission because of an impressive career before politics - in science, law, the arts, business, volunteering. These guys are the pinnacle of parliamentary activity. When they come out to play, they do serious damage to government. Why? Because they actually know what the fuck they're talking about. And that is a vanishingly rare quality in Westminster. It's like finding a beautiful endangered species of bird in the belfry.
Let's say you made the Lords fully democratic tomorrow. What would happen? That expertise would disappear. Instead, we'd get more Labour and Tory automatons, doing what they're told by the party whip, understanding nothing at all about the subjects they adjudicate on, and generally replicating the worst elements of the Commons. Democratic reform of the Lords would not be a first step towards general constitutional change. It would be the act of double-fucking ourselves: taking all the most broken elements of one Chamber and applying them to another.
At this point, people get angry. They tend - and I say this from experience - to go from rational argument to a kind of secular evangelical diatribe about the beauty and importance of democracy. And yes, quite right: democracy is a good thing. I'd say overall we should keep it. But it would be nice if we thought a little more deeply about the function of democracy, the different types of democratic mechanisms available to us, and the areas where we all agree - even if we do not state it outright - that democracy should be restricted.
Liberals actually have quite a weird relationship with democracy. We don't like talking about this very much anymore. It's kind of an embarrassing family secret. But the link between them is more fraught than people assume.
Liberalism is about individual liberty. That means that democracy is essential: you must be free to choose your own government. But it also means that democracy must be limited. Under liberalism, there really is no right for society to restrict individual liberty, even if there’s popular support for it.
This is why I always felt so uncomfortable with those referendums in Ireland. Everyone was euphoric that the progressives won key votes on gay marriage or abortion. But the problem was: the public had no right to vote on those issues in the first place. They don't get to decide what people can and cannot do. The liberties of women and gay people should not be subject to the whims of society.
Approaching democracy from this perspective means you bring a different approach to the topic. It's not an irreducible good. It's not a beautiful shining light that needs no further elaboration. It is complex and contextual. It is admirable, but it is also dangerous.
If you think this is controversial, then I have a populist bridge to sell you. That ultimately is the destination that a completely superficial and uncritical assessment of democracy leads you: The people are right, everything they do is right, the presidents they elect must have no restrictions placed upon them, the courts who interfere are an affront to the people's will. The things liberals value, on the other hand, are a reflection of a much more cautious approach to democracy - an independent judiciary, human rights which may not be countermanded regardless of popular support, pragmatism over sovereignty at an international level to ensure mutual advantage. We are as concerned with limitations on democracy as we are its fulfilment.
What does this mean for the Commons and the Lords? It means that you ask yourself what each bit of democracy is for. In many cases, that will involve more democracy. In some, it will involve less. In others, it will involve a different kind.
Electoral reform, for instance, provides the opportunity for a more effective form of democracy. Let's say one party gets 30%, another 32% and a third gets 35%. First-past-the-post simply gives the last party all the power and ignores the other two. In practice, this serves to ignore two-thirds of voters in British elections, which seems like a pretty basic failure of basic democratic requirements to me. But just as importantly, it gives us bad government. It means one party can do what it likes without the Commons having any power to scrutinise it, let alone improve the bills it puts forward. It's a key reason we pass such bad law.
Proportional representation would give all three parties representation in proportion to their support. This means that some of them must share power, usually with a slim majority. It tends to produce a political culture of consensus-building and cooperation rather than five-year tyrannies interrupted by elections. It encourages amendments and improvement, rather than Biblical clashes of tribal animosity.
When it comes to the Lords, it means thinking about the role of expertise. The Lords is a revision Chamber. It doesn't propose legislation and it does not, in practice, kill it. It's there to improve it. And the best way to do that is to get the people with the most experience and the most knowledge to apply their minds to it. To say: this won't work because in practice it'll mean that. This is flawed because it has that legal ramification. This is liable to be judicially challenged on the basis of that.
The most sensible reform you could implement to the Lords is not to do with elections. It's to do with the crossbenchers. They're what we want to preserve. We should implement a system where they constitute half of the Chamber, so they have the decisive vote in each instance. We should embrace what the Lords has become, pretty much by accident - a Chamber of expertise.
This is a vision of parliamentary democracy which was there at the founding and yet has been somewhat lost in the modern period, as the word democracy became a euphemism for 'good', without any critical appraisal of what it is for. It's one in which we maximise the democratic input in the selection of representatives and the election of governments. But then we apply expertise and scrutiny to the proposals they put forward.
We try to find the right balance between unleashing democracy and restraining it. We look at when to increase the throttle and when to hit the brakes. It's what we do with the judiciary. It’s what we do with the civil service. It's what we do with human rights. And it's what we should do with the legislative process.
I'm not just in love with the House of Lords. I fancy it too. It's fit and it doesn't even know it. It's about time other people noticed as well.
Well spoken Ian. Obviously there has been so much focus on prime ministerial appointment to the Lords, which are difficult to defend and tend to bring the Lords into disrepute. However, as you say there is a level of experience and expertise which it would be tragic to discard. As a Liberal Democrat I can also say that the Lords is the only chamber where our party is represented roughly in accord with its voucher. however much the other parties may cavil about that. It is actually the common, under the first past the post system, which is unrepresentative. If Starmer were to abolish the Lords and create a new elected chamber, he would have a dilemma. Either he would have it elected by FTPT, to howls of protest from his own party, or he would use PR, in which case people would rightly ask why if it’s good enough for the Lords it is not good enough for the Commons.
I’ve never really agreed with those who say we should do away with the Lords, and you have put good reasons why, we need all the checks and balances we can get in this day and age. As for the recent recruits awarded by ghosts of prime ministers past, let’s hope that they learn from the expertise of the other peers.