By all reasonable measures it should be a popular position. Unfortunately, once Murdoch’s papers properly dig in people will come to believe it is an antidemocratic plot to let the immigrants in.
By the next elections, the banally evil - yet superficially functional - Sunak government will have had time to wipe people’s memories of how bad the Tories are. And so they’ll be re-elected.
It’s not that Labour alienates voters; not really. Not in how their positions and policies relate to what people actually want. It’s that Murdoch’s press says they do until it seems like the truth.
Reform of the House of Lords is on an eternal ‘to do’ list for political parties. It will require a huge amount of Parliamentary time to effect changes and the Lords won’t go without a fight. It is a brave Prime Minister that decides to put that at the top of their political program.
I suspect that Starmer is just throwing a in a bone if contention for the political class to chase and pack of newshounds to chew on for the next couple of years.
He will no doubt be advised by Blair about what can be done and how to avoid a time consuming quagmire. There are probably a few changes that are ‘easy wins’ where there is a broad consensus that change is required.
Changing the Lords to an elected chamber woukd require a solution to the question of which chamber has greater electoral authority. The UK does not have a federated constitution of regions or states with a political identity from which to easily create a second chamber. It is a small country in area and and the MPs of House of Commons represent their local constituencies. That is well established. So what will an elected House of Lords represent? Divide up the total votes and allocate the proportions between the parties they represent……then leave it to the parties to find suitable nominees…? You will fill the Lords with party hacks rather than competent people who can scrutinise laws. That would not be progress.
The expert committees in the Lords do a very worthwhile job and there is a large number that are politically independent. It is best not to throw out the baby with the bath water.
However, Johnson is going through the process of awarding life peerages to his supporters and soon Truss will do the same. There are no doubt some undeserving rascals amongst them.
There will be a clamour to stop appointments to the Lords continuing as way the executive reward their supporters with patronage. There are, however, some very good people who done great public service who merit continuing that work in a revising chamber. These people are not generally part of the political class that make a lot of noise in election campaigns.
I foresee many acres of newsprint devoted to this subject.
It will take a bit of the pressure off Starmer to reveal more policies before he is ready for the next election. He is wise not to reveal his hand too early and laying this particular card seems a good play at this stage. He surely is not going to waste huge amounts of parliamentary time on this issue. He will probably announce some kind of commission to look into it and come up with recommendations. What is the role and authority of a second chamber is a question every democratic country needs to answer. I expect few have had to deal with the kind of constitutional baggage the UK has accumulated over the centuries. It will make any transition a very complicated business indeed.
Of course the UK voters have a very vague and hazy idea about it all. It is not going to be the top issue on the agenda at the next election. That is certain.
I see no real benefit in a second elected chamber.
We already have one, what is the point of mirroring that? If it is supposed to be a additonal means of scrutiny then it needs to be something other than a partisan chamber.
I like the idea of having certain positions of high responsibility in society come with a duty to serve as members of that second house, regardless of the political affiliation of the people in those positions.
If we need a vote at all then get a full public consultation and vote on what those positions should be.
Mind you, I have no detailed knowledge of British politics, so I have no clear idea how this would be received. (Although I suspect that it would replace the current problems with a whole new set of problems.) With that proviso–
The replacement chamber could use the historic countries of the UK as analogues for U.S. states. So there would be 4 separate contingents – from England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. If the current ability to simply slow down legislation, rather than actually stop it, was retained, then you could do a U.S. Senate-style equal representation, and possibly make it easier for the various regions to make their concerns heard on a national scale.
I would be interested to know whether such a set-up would make Scotland more likely or less likely to declare independence, but I have no clue on that one.
The UK already has devolved governments in the form of the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Assembly. They have elections and a set of devolved powers including some tax raising. But voters in those nations also vote in UK Parliament elections where most of the executive powers reside.
Starmer may devolve more powers to those administrations and that could reserve seats in a revising chamber, replacing the current clerics and hereditary peers.
But devolution has its own set of problems. The Northern Ireland Assembly is not operational. There is also the question of the fourth country, England, which is far more populous than the other nations and has no parliament of its own.
There was some talk about creating regional assemblies for England, but that idea ran out of steam pretty quickly when political leaders in parts of Yorkshire immediately started arguing with each other. This would have to fit in with the power of existing local governments, which already has lots of issues and has lost powers to central government.
The UK tends to go through cycles of centralisation and decentralisation.
There is an old saying that if the answer to these constitutional questions is ‘we need more politicians’ then you know you have gone down the wrong path.
One of the obvious problems with the current House of Lords is that there are simply too many of them. It has grown too large as successive PMs have added their cronies rather than politely waiting until a few Lords have gone to meet their maker.
I assume they would do it the same way that Blair reformed the House of Lords and established the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly—through legislation. Parliament is supreme, remember. They can legislate anything. The rules regarding who the monarch is are set by parliamentary legislation. The House of Lords would have to assent to its own abolition, I would expect, but they did vote in favor of Blair’s reform bill back then.
They can. Parliament is Supreme. But it would require a law to be passed, so they better have a large majority. The law would also be subject to revision……by the House of Lords.
The legislation would also be quite complex because it would undoubtedly affect many other laws, as you might expect with anything with such profound constitutional implications.
There is also the question of what you replace the House of Lords with, which again will require legislation that would require detailed scrutiny.
Anything to do with the Constitution is fraught with complications. Tony Blair visibly aged when he struggled with the Northern Ireland Question and Devolution of powers to elected administrations. He also reformed the House of Lords and that required a lot of political time and effort.
Starmer knows this very well and while there is a consensus that reform of the House of Lords is overdue, I do not expect this to be a flagship policy. There are an awful lot of other structural issues to attend to that have more voter-appeal.
Nonetheless some changes can be made. A cull of the numbers and maybe removing the privilege of the PM to appoint life-peers would be welcome reforms.
Abolishing the House of Lords sounds like the kind of hyperbole that would appeal to the left wing of his party. The Conservatives are very weak on this issue because of some of the dodgy characters they have appointed. There is a lot of mileage in playing this tactic.
Johnson even appointed the son of a Russian oligarch to the House of Lords and dismissed warnings from the security services as ‘Russophobia’. He was an important benefactor to the Conservatives and Johnson was very fond of attending his famous parties in Italy. Lebedev senior is close to Putin and supported the annexation of Crimea.
Johnson’s appointments are still on going and soon we will have Truss’s list. These will certainly fan the flames for reform of the life-peerage system, if not the other anachronistic traditions by which someone can become a member of the House of Lords.
That’s exactly why we did what we did as well. Look up the Connecticut Compromise.
The electoral college is a weird holdover from the late eighteenth century to elect the president by way other than a popular vote. At the time, there was a LOT of concern about the popular will and its excesses, and this was a way to get a clear winner/ensure a majority, rather than have issues with potential popular vote winners having less than a majority (imagine more than two parties; a candidate getting 35% of the vote could win, and be far more extreme).
That exact (or even nearly exact) combination of words does not appear in a quick search, but it is a good summary of various criticisms of American democracy.
My reaction to this is FFS why not pick something that actually fucking matters? Or, godforbid, might win you the next election.
The UK right now is a fucking burning shit-filled wheelie bin of protected privileged, and the wheels are coming off. Yeah the house of lords is bullshit and should be abolished, but you’ve put up for it for 1000+years and abolishing it will do bugger all to help your average British person.
If you are going to go out on a limb and do something radical. How about nationalizing the utilities? Universial income? Fucking anything that might actually change something for the better.
In my view, the obvious way to offset the vagaries of representative democracy is with stochastic revision.
Instead of making Lords an elective body, institute the Great Panel, comprised of a selection of members drawn at random from the jury pool (if the UK has such a mechanism) from regional groupings of districts. A panel of, say, a score, would be assembled from impartial members of the Great Panel (similar to voire dire type culling to elimiate prejudical panelists) who would review legislation, hearing arguments from the various MPs and anyone else they want to consult, and revise the legislation into a form that Commons would then pass or reject.
The Great Panel would have around a hundred members who would serve as needed for a period of four months before being dissolved and reconstituted. No legislation could be amended on the floor of the House wihout then being referred to a panel for review/revision.
Reform of the House of Lords is a policy that comes up regularly. There have been commissions and reports and votes. There has been some incremental improvements that have been hard won. But the issue is a quagmire and there little in the way of a consensus about how many members should be elected rather than appointed.
Starmer will no doubt add his own contribution. Though I doubt whether it will be as radical as he suggests. Given that the public have witnessed Parliament arguing with itself endlessly over Brexit for the past few years, another long argument about how they should re-arrange the seats in the Lords might be too much to bear.
He is running this issue up the flag pole to see who salutes it, in the certain knowledge that it is a policy that Conservatives would not contemplate.
Labour have a problem revealing policies at this stage, with a couple of years before they would be tested in a General Election. The Conservatives are not adverse to copying any policy that shows signs of being popular with voters and claim it as their own.
It won’t be until quite close to the next election before we find out what will go in each parties manifesto. They tend to keep their powder dry, ready for an intense few weeks of campaigning, before the public decides on which set of policies they prefer.
The rest of the time, they make positioning statements and leave it up to political pundits and journalists to decipher codes and speculate. This was easier in the old days when there was a clearer ideological divide between left and right. Unless there is a radical shift in sentiment, general elections are won from the centre.
Starmer has a lot of policy options, but he needs to get his party aligned and looking like a party of government. Whether there will be any money to spend after the Conservatives have finished wrecking the economy. That remains to be seen.