The death of satire, part 645: among the Tory peers dragged into the House of Lords on Monday night to support the Conservatives’ cuts to tax credits was Andrew Lloyd Webber.
There were claims that a desperate government had flown him in from New York, but the good lord himself said that he was in town to attend the opening night of Cats at the London Palladium, and therefore able to nip over to Westminster to cast his first vote since 2013.
According to his official statement, he did so because he “feels that it is important for democracy that the House of Lords should not override decisions taken by the elected House of Commons”.
He was joined on the government side by fellow millionaires such as Karren Brady, the JCB tycoon Antony Bamford, and the newly ennobled lingerie magnate Michelle Mone.
To quote from Evita, what a circus, and what a show: a brazen instance of property kicking poverty, which in livelier times than ours might have seen the ghastly and guilty parties chased through the city by the mob.
But who saved the day? On the Labour motion that demanded compensation for low-paid people over at least three years, the motley group of peers who beat the government included the 9th Earl of Clancarty, sometimes called Nicholas Le Poer Trench; Viscount Chandos of Aldershot, aka Thomas Orlando Lyttleton; and that embodiment of the Blair years’ munificence, Lord Levy — along with a solitary bishop.
As is usually the case when the Lords positions itself on the progressive side of an argument, it was one of those momentary progressive victories that only serve to underline what a mess Labour and the left are in: after all, when your key line of defence is clad in ermine, you surely have problems.
There is no getting around it: even if the Lords is a better place than it was 20 years ago — and in 1997, let us not forget, there were nearly 500 Tory peers, as against 200 representing Labour — it remains a ludicrous affront to the most basic ideas of democracy and accountability. Indeed, the fact that the Lords has a higher idea of itself than it did when it was full of hereditary peers and has therefore become more assertive has only highlighted its absurdity all the more. This applies particularly to its contemptibly cronyish aspects: since 2010, for example, while the number of political appointments has ballooned, the House of Lords appointment commission, there to nominate peers who are independent experts, has been invited to propose only eight. Between 2005 and 2010, the figure was 31.
Since the Blair government managed to drastically reduce the number of hereditary peers, there have been a few proposals for reform, all of which have come to nothing. Jack Straw suggested a “Senate of the United Kingdom” that would be between 80 per cent and 100 per cent elected, with members who served terms of at least 12 years; that hapless constitutional innovator Nick Clegg later came up with plans for an upper house split between a small number of appointed “independent experts” and members elected at 15-year intervals, with places still reserved for bishops.
Half-hearted proposals
Whatever the chicanery that led to their demise, these were awful ideas that were never going to fly. Now, as Tory voices bay for the stuffing of the Lords with even more Conservative appointments, the hereditary peer Lord Strathclyde (whose close friends know him as Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith) has been appointed by Downing Street to look at the balance of power between the Commons and Lords, particularly when it comes to the former’s “primacy on financial matters and secondary legislation”.
In the wake of their recent moves on so-called English votes for English laws, this heightens the sense of Conservatives arrogant enough to mess about with the constitution on the basis of party interest and fits of pique. Meanwhile, convincing proposals for changing the upper house remain thin on the ground: at the last election, the Labour manifesto may have suggested replacing the Lords with a “senate of the nations and regions”, but its inclusion looked half-hearted: among most MPs, Lords reform remains one of those issues apparently too onerous to contemplate.
There are two ways out of this. One begins with the idea that comprehensive reinvention of the Lords is a likely non-starter, and proposes appreciable though limited changes: limiting prime ministerial patronage and keeping appointments in line with parties’ shares of the vote; cutting down the Lords’ absurd number of members, which currently stands at 826; ending elections for new hereditary peers and allowing them to slowly die off. All these are worthy of support: indeed, if non-Tory politicians have anything about them, they ought to respond to the Conservatives’ current furies in exactly those terms.
But even if such limited reforms were to be introduced, how long can such an irredeemably rotten body remain? Instinctively, I am suspicious of grand schemes for the reinvention of institutions. But just about every key element of the UK’s constitutional arrangements now seems to be foundering, and is unlikely to be revived.
The British electoral system disenfranchises millions and sustains a two-party system that no one believes in any more; a union of nations built on wildly uneven representation is pulling itself apart. The case for a watershed conversation about how Britain is governed — possibly including politicians, but ideally keeping them at arm’s length — looks overwhelming, and the Lords ought to be among the first things up for discussion.
Across Europe and beyond, there are upper houses that do their job well, rarely threaten the primacy of main legislatures, and often serve to give voice to people and places that would otherwise be overlooked.
In Britain, Andrew Lloyd Webber and the 9th Earl of Clancarty have a say in whether or not people can afford to eat. Even if the votes of such people sometimes fall the right way, the answer to that absurdity from anyone who values democracy ought to be obvious: enough.
