Power For People, Not Parties

Craig DalzellDone badly, the only thing worse than an unelected House of Lords might well be an elected one.Don’t worry, this isn’t a defence of the current system whereby the laws of the UK are made, in part, by people who got the job by dint of patronage to the right party, correct worship of the right deity, or descent from the right person but the proposals to reform the Lords that passed in the House of Commons this week threaten to take the closest mechanism we have of holding absolute power to account and making it even more beholden TO that power.The full abolition of the House of Lords has been a founding principle of the Labour party but they have rather infamously failed to deliver on that promise whenever they’ve had the power to do so. The current reform merely completes the task started by Tony Blair at the close of the last century when he managed to abolish some but not all of the hereditary peers.What will remain are the peers appointed by the parties – and thus almost certainly beholden to them even if they aren’t party affiliated – as well (thanks to Parliament actively voting down an amendment) as the role of the 26 Church of England bishops, ensuring that the UK remains one of only a handful of nations in the world where religious representatives (noting that such representation doesn’t cover all faiths practiced in the UK, all countries in the UK, or even all branches of one particular faith in the UK) play a role in actively shaping law and allowing me to correctly say that antidisestablishmentarianism remains the official policy of Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour UK Government.There is, of course, a deep contradiction in the Government’s policy towards the Lords. Labour MPs took time in the debate to state that it was a fundamental principle of democracy with Rachel Reeves saying "In the 21st Century it cannot be right for there to be places in our legislature reserved for those born into certain families,".This is, of course, true but current UK Government policy does not extend that principle to the one family who would remain above all others in not just the Government but above all of us in the state too – the Royals. It simply impossible to take a principled stance against hereditary power in the Lords without also laying down legislation to remove the monarchy from power and reconstitute the UK as a Republic (perhaps as a Federal Republic which would be closer to the promises the Labour Party made to Scotland as an enticement to voting against independence in 2014). There therefore must be something other than a principled stance towards democracy going on.Meanwhile, the SNP’s Pete Wishart lodged an ultimately unsuccessful amendment to remove the appointment system to the Lords in its entirety and replace it with an elected body, though as far as I can see little has been laid down in terms of detail of how that would work either in terms of voting system (other than that it would be proportional) or in structure of the Chamber itself to prevent the overwhelming size of England dominating against the interests of the other nations.So if either of these options is clearly a step closer to a democratic solution, how could it be worse? The answer lies in the nature of political parties in a whipped system.Many of the current Lords are members of or are affiliated with one of the political parties (all Parties in the Commons, once they reach a certain size, become entitled to ennoble people and install them in the Lords and many do – a notable exception being the SNP who, by policy, decline the invitation). Many “cross-bench” unaffiliated Lords also got in essentially as a reward for party donations or other favours (Wishart’s amendment would have also banned large party donors from the House). This creates ties of patronage that allow parties to feel secure that their legislation will pass unobstructed so long as they have enough loyalists in the House (this is also one of the reasons that the House of Lords is one of the largest Parliamentary chambers in the world – it’s easier to install a person for life than to remove them, so it has become common practice to ‘stuff the chamber’ with loyalists to balance against the last government’s attempt to do the same). There have been exceptions to this (the Lords blocking rushed and inadequate Brexit legislation, for instance, where the Lords did step away from party loyalties to actually scrutinise legislation) but they have been relatively few and all parties of Government have complained about them when it goes against them.In an elected chamber also dominated by party interests, the same would apply only more strongly. Imagine instead of an appointed Chamber we have an elected Senate. The members are elected essentially on the same basis as MPs – candidates are selected by their parties, stand for election and win. Imagine we have the same whipping system in the Senate as in the Commons.We’d end up in a situation where the level of scrutiny applied to the Government is entirely dependent on whether the party of Government also controls or doesn’t control the Senate. Ask America how that’s working out for them where recent decades have seen legislation get completely blocked by a hostile Congress/Senate/both or pass unimpeded through them – resulting in power consolidate increasingly into the person of the President and their executive motions. This is not a system I would like to see replicated here – whether I agree with the person at the top at the time or not.There is a solution, one that Common Weal has advocated for as an Upper Chamber to the unicameral Scottish Parliament but which could easily be replicated in Westminster too if they had the will and the democratic principles to embrace it. A House of Citizens.Under this model, all registered voters in the country (Note: I’d like to see the UK electoral franchise extended to AT LEAST the level enjoyed by Scottish and Welsh residents, not just restricted to UK, Irish and (some) Commonwealth citizens) would be entered into a random draw similar to Jury Duty. A long list of residents would be balanced by sortition in a similar way as the Scottish Climate Assembly was to ensure demographic representation and the final Chamber installed. The random selection would ensure that delegates would not be appointed by or beholden to political parties thus could not be whipped by them (indeed, even if the sortition method included a weighting for political party affiliation, only about 1% of adult UK residents are actually members of any political party so only about 1% of the House would contain party members). In our model, each delegate would serve for a two year term (at a salary similar to an MP’s) with one quarter of the Chamber rotating out every six months.We could set the Assembly up now and run it for a couple of years in parallel with the Lords with it being granted only advisory powers as a means of piloting and building trust that the system works (as well as comparing and contrasting the decisions made by ordinary people with those who are legally and constitutionally our “betters”) before it fully replaces the Lords as the Upper Chamber and gains more formal powers. In our second paper on the topic, we laid out various options for how much power we may want to grant the House of Citizens ranging from a fairly limited scrutiny body (similar to the Lords, where the Commons can almost always override advice they don’t like), through a body that could scrutinise politicians as well as legislation (where the House could conduct reviews into, for example, dodgy Covid procurements or corrupt donations to MPs), up to a full legislative body where they hold the power of veto over legislation and could even in certain circumstances initiate legislation to pass down to the Commons (perhaps legislation that covers constitutional issues or otherwise affects the structure of the Federal Republic). All of the options for the powers of the Upper Chamber have their precedents in other democratic nations which is a reminder that the “Mother of Parliaments” has been superseded not just by other more modern democracies but in many cases by her own children.The important point for this current article those would be to break the stranglehold that political parties have over our democracy and to open the way to politicians making decisions freely not just in “matters of conscience” but in all things. Once we’ve demonstrated that it’s not right for democracy to be controlled by those with the right parents, or the right faith, then the question is easy to aim at every politician who has put party first before their own principles after being told to do so by their party whip.While it remains an absolute affront to democracy that an institution like the House of Lords still exists, its replacement must be built out of a principle of democracy and not used by the political parties to consolidate their own power over our legislation – this goes whether we allow the parties to appoint their own Lords or to choose their own candidates for us to vote for. A 21st century state requires a 21st century democracy. One that puts we, the people, at the top of it instead of keeping us here, at the very bottom.Image Credit: Roger Harris, CC-BY