News from the New Party

Keep politics out of the House of Lords

Last week the Cabinet discussed, once again, a way forward for completion of its half-baked reform of the House of Lords, which has become notoriously emblematic of the current government's slapdash approach to constitutional reform. The failure of the government to agree an approach even among themselves has already led once to a debacle on the floor of the House of Commons, with all possibilities rejected. The government has found a novel way to avoid a similar outcome this time around.

MPs are being asked to vote on seven proposals:

• A totally elected House of Lords;
• 80% elected, 20% appointed;
• 60% elected, 40% appointed;
• 50% elected, 50% appointed;
• 40% elected, 60% appointed;
• 20% elected, 80% appointed; and
• A totally appointed House of Lords.

Lest there be no groundswell of support for any one of these seven, MPs are to be asked to rank the propositions in order of preference, which pretty much guarantees that the end result will be a partially elected House of Lords.

This farcical procedure carefully dodges the key point of addressing the question of what the House of Lords is supposed to be for. The argument generally is that an appointed legislative chamber is unsustainable in a democratic age; while against this it is claimed that an elected chamber would be, in effect, a competitor to the House of Commons, and further that the strength of an appointed chamber is in the specialist expertise of the individuals to be found there. Furthermore, the appointees are relatively sheltered from the effects of party patronage, since once they are appointed, they are there for life. The attempt to resolve this point of principle has been abandoned in favour of a ludicrously contrived vote, rather like an assembly of doctors being invited to vote on how pregnant a particular woman might be.

The New Party does not support the argument that the Second Chamber of our legislature would be legitimised by any element of democratic election, because we do not believe that the function of the Second Chamber is such that it requires democratic legitimacy, in the same way that the House of Commons undoubtedly does. The House of Lords is, and should remain, a chamber for the revision and scrutiny of legislation passed by the House of Commons, the aim of which should be to enhance the quality of legislation passed for the good of the country as a whole. This is, effectively, a technical rather than a political role, which is why the New Party believes not only that the House of Lords should be appointed, but also that it should be non-political. Just as the Speaker of the House of Commons renounces all party-political affiliation and activity on appointment to the post, so should all members of the House of Lords be required to refrain from membership of, and activity on behalf of any political party. We believe that party political patronage as applied to the Upper House impedes that House in the exercise of its function. It is time for politics to be kept out of the House of Lords.