The Wardman Wire

The House of Lords has been getting a bit of a battering in the press recently, after the “cash for laws” scandal erupted, over four Labour life peers who appearing willing to take money in order to put forward amendments to Bills before the House. And since then, allegations have continued to come.

What’s the problem?

Corruption. Sleaze. Whatever you want to call it, it’s wrong – even if it could be argued to be within the rules. But as Garbo has said “if they were acting within the rules, then it is the rules that are wrong.”

From that, it has also come to light that members of the House of Lords, are virtually untouchable and cannot be removed from the legislature or even punished for breaking the few rules that exist. This has prompted a rarely-seen thing – virtual agreement from all three parties.

This has really put the fact that the Lords are unelected in the spotlight, and this is the question this post will be addressing.

House of Lords reform

When Labour came to power in 1997, one of their manifesto promises was to reform the Lords. They promptly abolished all bar 92 hereditary peers, which they said had “no democratic legitimacy”, thus making the Lords consist of pretty much only life peers.

Yet, despite a Commons vote to have an elected Lords, no further reform has yet happened, after a decade of the current ‘temporary’ system.

The problem has been that as been raised by this first step of reform is that it has removed from the Lords a great number of experienced people, who stood to gain little from law changes and were relatively hard for political parties to whip, and replaced them with politically partisan peers.

Democratising the Lords

The Lords is not a democratic chamber, and never has been. But it should become one. However, this needs to be done in a way that maintains the primacy of the House of Commons and the role of the House of Lords as a generally non-partisan check.

The only way I can think of to do achieve this is for the House of Lords to be elected using Proportional Representation. Now, I’m not a fan of PR for use in the main chamber because it removes the link between elected representative and constituents – but for a second chamber like the Lords, it is perfect, as electing the Lords by PR ensures that no party ever has a majority in both houses and thus no law can pass the Lords without at least a degree of bipartisan agreement.

How would democratisation solve the problem?

In and of itself, democratisation wouldn’t solve the problem oif sleaze in the Lords. After all, it has existed [and probably still exists] in the Commons, and that is democratic.

But if they are elected, they are accountable to us. Not directly, since the parties would inevitably select those who are in the list – but they are full-time politicians and as such can have a far greater amount of pressure put on them to be transparent with regards to their financial relationships.

Wrapping Up

Election is no solution to sleaze, but it at least provides us with a recourse against perpetrators – we can vote them out. Democracy isn’t a cure-all, but it is the best solution we have.

At least if the House of Lords become elected, we actually have a democractic system for the 21st century. Hopefully the “cash for laws” scandal will bring Lords reform back to the fore of political discussion.