The House of Lords is indefensible in its current form of appointment patronage and bloated size. Yet the failure of the Commons to check the way the executive governs or to ensure that Bills presented don’t become law until that make sense has made the current Lords, flawed as it is, essential to British democracy. Yes, that’s deeply paradoxical: an appointed chamber standing up for democracy against ‘the elected House’.
We’ve just seen with the Rwanda Bill the Commons voting repeatedly to allow the government to declare that Rwanda ‘is a safe county’ without reference to evidence or changing circumstances. Cross-benchers in the Lords, led by retired judges and distinguished lawyers, insisted that it is an offense against the rule of law to legislate that what we say is true whatever the evidence suggests. On Monday the Lords, reluctantly, backed down, after sustained cross-party cooperation in resisting in which Liberal Democrats had played an active part. 30-40 Conservative peers had refused, in the more loosely-whipped Lords, to vote against amendments to what they accepted was an unworkable Bill. But after the longest series of ‘ping pong’ exchanges that Parliament has seen for many years both crossbenchers and Labour accepted that the government had to prevail, and Liberal Democrats could do no more..
Parliamentary democracy is supposed to be about representative institutions (and courts) carefully limiting the power of the executive. But the Commons provide almost no effective checks on executive power, as opposed to the theatre of staged confrontation that is Prime Minister’s Questions and major debates. The size of the government payroll has steadily increased over recent decades. Junior ministers have spread, moving from one post to another before they’ve finished learning their brief, to a point where most Lords ministers are now unpaid – since there’s a statutory limit on paid ministerial posts. Parliamentary private secretaries were limited to senior Cabinet minister 50 years ago; they’ve proliferated, attracting ambitious MPs who hope that loyalty will bring promotion. Trade envoys, deputy chairmen of the party, ‘tsars’ with allocated tasks, all subject to dismissal if they disobey the whip. The Labour opposition maintains a shadow team almost as large, which means that in total almost a third of the Commons behave like front-benchers rather than concentrating on holding the government to account.
Worse than this, the government whips have adopted the practice of blocking MPs who are expert but potentially independent-minded from appointment to Bill committees. The result is that government bills sail through the Commons at speed, often unamended and as often with significant sections unexamined due to ‘guillotines’ on time allocated.
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