partially democratized. Is that a good idea. The proposal is to reduce from over 700 peers to 600, and including 120 elected members and 120 non-political appointees chosen by an independent commission (is there such a thing?). “Most of the rest” would be nominated by political parties based on their strength in the House of Commons.
I don’t know what is meant by “most of the rest.” Is there some of “the rest” that is going to be peers by some unknown method.
Politicians opposing this state that this feeble effort at demoncratizing the House of Lords is not going to advance the cause of democratic legitimacy very far.
The OP asks for views on a proposed reform to the British House of Lords on which the OP’s report of proposed changes is foggy. May we have a more detailed and coherent description of the change from one who is not among the “us” in “The British constitution confuseth us”?
There have been past attempts to make the membership of the Lords conform more closely to representative democracy. In theory, Irish peers elect some from among their number, although since the formation of the Irish Republic, this has fallen into abeyance. Scottish peers who are not peers of Great Britain or the United Kingdom do likewise. In addition, the Queen names life peers on nomination of the Prime Minister in office. Proposals to make this sort of membership applicable to the whole House have been made and, to the last I knew, defeated.
There is some virtue in leaving a seat to the heir of line of a family which has contributed leadership to Britain in the past. A case in point from living memory is the Marquess of Salisbury, who helped shape British governments in the 1950’s (including arguably having selected two prime ministers) after having been an early and steadfast supporter of Churchill during his years in political exile. He was grandson of the Lord Salisbury who was prime minister in the 1890s and heir of line of the Lord Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil who were leading ministers to the first Queen Elizabeth back around 1580-1600.
I live in Charleston, SC. I merely reiterated what is in the newspaper today, which appears clear to me. The House of Lord has been a matter of noble descent or heirs of one who was a leader, and a proposal has been made to make it more democratic, but not completely, as I described it. Opponents say that this is too feeble. Perhaps those living across the pond can chime in on their opinions. Polycarp says that Scotland now does, but Scotland doesn’t have any representatives in the House of Lords anymore, or so I thought. Attempts were made in the past, but these were only attempts. This is a new attempt.
They should just mirror the house of commons as in 100% elected officials rather than the 20% and other 20% chunks not being of parties chosen by the main parties in the house. Stripping it of power really but the lords has been a thorn in the Commons side for a while and Tony doesn’t like it when his bills and acts are veto’d
I think this refers to the members of the pre 1707 Scottish House of Lords (or whatever it was called) and their heirs.
Apart from them, there are still Scottish peers there in the same capacity as English ones. BTW Scotland still has a full complement of MPs in the House of Commons. This may come up for review soon, but it is important as the Scottish parliament has no say in foreign, defence and social security affairs, and little say in tax affairs. This is a matter for a different debate though.
Regarding the OP, the Lords haven’t had a veto on bills for nearly a century; they can only delay. The veto that’s being talked about is on secondary legislation; ministerial orders, statutary instruments etc (correct me if I’m wrong). I feel that the whole argument is cloudy; we’re not sure what the Lords are for, we don’t know how to organise them or what powers they should have, but we don’t really want to get rid of them.
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What is this alleged virtue? Was the Marquis of Salisbury undoubtedly the best person for the job? What on earth does the identity of an ancestor in the 16th century have to do with one’s abilities now? Or one’s grandad for that matter?
You know, Lords are an awful thing to make a House out of. They have practically no structural strength, and they emit a foul odor after a while if you forget to feed them.
Better to make a House of Bricks, or a House of Concrete, or even just a plain old House of Timbers.
You’re joking, right? Leadership is a hereditary trait? A country is better off picking leaders according to their great-great-etc-grandfathers rather than an open election?? Just because the US Presidency has turned into a hereditary office doesn’t mean the UK has to do the same.
Does the House of Lords have any legislative powers to speak of? I had heard that the most they could do was delay something from becoming law.
I do seem to recall that at least a committee of “law lords” made rulings in the Pinochet case.
As far as what Americans think of monarchs and aristorcracy, I can only speak for myself, it seems to me to be completely daft. I know the United Kingdom makes beaucoup bucks of the pagentry from tourism, but just because someone’s ancestors was a successful warlord 1000 years ago doesn’t mean their descendants are entitled to perpetual power, however trivial. Seems to me to be legalized mafiosi with trappings of power. But its your country, and if it works for you folks and you keep the tyranny to a minimum (which seems to the the case) I’ll not get too excited.
It used to be the case under the two Union Acts (Scotland in 1706; Ireland in 1800?) that the Scots and Irish peers elected “representative peers” from amongst their own numbers to sit in the House of Lords. However, I believe that under the Peerage Act of 1963, all of the peers from Scotland and Ireland were automatically members of the House of Lords, and elections were no longer held.
I believe that there can still be peers in Northern Ireland, either holding an old Irish title, or as a peer of the United Kingdom (i.e. a title created since the union of Ireland with England and Scotland).
I have some empathy with Polycarp’s view. If your family has been involved in governance for over 400 years, you might well be more likely to consider issues in the long term best interests, rather than which spin looks best in tomorrow’s tabloids.
“Great-great grandad was a Senator” may well be a better credential for high office than “Daddy has lots of money”.
Whose “long term best interests”? “You might well…”; on the other hand you might well not. The point is that the best person for the job could well be prevented from getting it just becuase someone else had an ancestor in the 17th century who helped the king cover up some gambling embarassment. Britain has many politicians who have come from working or middle class backgrounds; they are where they are because of knowledge, skill and experience, not becuase of a rich daddy or a powerful great great grandad.
** DP White**The Law Lords are actually Britain’s Supreme Court. It’s a confusing situation which many people in the UK don’t understand either. The House of Lords is technically both a legislative body and a judicial body. However, the only people who can sit on cases before the House of Lords are judges who have been appointed as “Law Lords”. These judges technically have the same voting rights as other lords in legislative debates, but I’m not sure whether they use them. When sitting as a court, the Law Lords are a normal appeal court, hearing cases from lower courts in the UK (except Scottish criminal cases; they stay in Edinburgh).
Interestingly, the Law Lords also sit as the Privy Council (another term that has more than one meaning). They hear appeals from certain legal systems throughout the Commonwealth. They hear death sentence appeals from the Caribbean, for example.
As far as I know, none of the judicial roles or powers will be affected by changes to the House of Lords.
The Law Lords are a different body from the House of Lords, although they are a part of the House of Lords and can sit and vote in it(although they are lords too but by enoblement rather than accident of birth). A similar position exists with the Lords Spiritual, who are senior Anglican bishops.
The Law Lords are the senior judges of the country and as such are the highest court in the land (Not just of the UK either, many Commonwealth countries stll use them as their highest court).
The House of Lords passes more laws than the Commons. THe laws that it passes are generally non-controversial procedural legislation. They can veto any Bill (except the Finance Bill aka The Budget) and send it back to the Commons. However they can only do this a limited number of times before the Commons bypasses them.
House of Lords reform is a tricky one. On the one hand, the reformers argue that hereditary membership is, firstly, a genetic lottery - pop out the right womb and you have the power to delay the passage of Bills through parliament, and to make the government change its legislation - and secondly, that it introduces a hell of a lot of bias. As was said by someone or other “The hereditary peers independently review the evidence. Then they independently consider the evidence. Then they independently decide what would benefit the country. Then they independently vote Conservative.” Coming from one class, they have one perspective. Hereditary peers were at the forefront, for example of the Lords campaign to block revision of the age of consent for homosexual sex to 16 (same as heterosexual). And, in fairness, behind a campaign to block government legislation which would have stripped the disabled of their benefits. So sometimes they do well, sometimes badly.
On the other hand, supporters ask, “What’s the alternative?” Second chambers should be above petty politics, independent of governmental control and long-sighted. However, current reforms seem unlikely to create such a beast. According to the BBC, current plans would mean 60% of the Lords were government appointees. The majority of elected members would be in line with the government, probably, which gives 70% of the House to the government of the day. Which means, effectively, that the House of Lords is a rubber-stamp body. Not what it’s there for. (A thousand years of history! Glorious tradition flushed away by power-hungry opportunists!).
I think we should select from the whole country by competitive examination, and have citizens sit for, say, 1 year sabbatical. But that won’t happen.
There was recently a move to introduce a number of so-called “People’s Peers” into the House of Lords - the idea being that they were to be more representative of the “common man”.
As it turned out they were predictably upper middle-class, middle-of-the-road ex-diplomats or directors etc - the oft-heard complaint was that there were “no hairdressers” in the Lords.
Although I disagree with the notion of a hereditary peerage, one problem I see with allowing “the common man” into the legislative chamber is that very often “the common man” is not the sharpest knife in the intellectual drawer.
By which I mean that the qualities required for being e.g. a good hairdresser are not necessarily those which make for competant political legislators. And without wishing to demean hairdressers in any way, I am not sure that I wouldn’t rather have someone who has e.g. a law degree, or 20 years’ diplomatic experience in change of examining parliamentary legislation.
Government “for the people and by the people” is all very well providing “the people” actually know what they are talking about.
Unfortunately, those who do know what they are talking about tend to come from a certain (i.e. middle / upper-class) social background and have a certain (i.e. Oxbridge) education.
To my mind, the House of Commons is where we have “the people’s representatives”, but the Upper House should be filled with those who have proved themselves to be intellectually capable of dealing with complex legal and social matters. The trick is making sure this is not open to abuse, as it often the case now.
Is there a written provision limiting the number of times the Lords can veto any one bill and, if so, what is it?
“Of the people and by the people” has worked very well here in the US (or so we like to think). However, not any Tom, Dick or Harry is on the ballots. Politics decide the candidates. The House of Lords has no political connection, which is good, but it always votes conservative, which is bad.
In the House of Commons, do the citizens vote for candidates picked by the various parties, and what are the various parties now?
Yes there is a law; The Parliament Act 1911. This ended the veto on “money bills” and limited the amount of times that a Bill could be sent back. This has been reduced since so that now the Lords can only veto a bill once. They have to accept it on the second reading (well technically they could veto it again but this would cause a constitutional crisis and appropriate measures would be taken to get around it).
I wouldn’t say there’re a different body - they’re a sub-committee of the House of Lords, exercising the judicial capacity of the House on behalf of the whole House.
The Lords Spiritual are full members of the House in its legislative capacity.
I think you mean that they do the “grunt work” on non-controversial bills. The House of Commons still has to pass a bill from the Lords for it to become law.
Although appointment as a life peer is the normal way to become a law lord, the criteria for sitting on the sub-committee includes having “held high judicial office.” Prior to the reforms limiting the rights of hereditary peers to sit in the House of Lords, it was theoretically possible for a judge to inherit the title and qualify that way. (For example, a younger son of a peer could have gone into law, done well, got on the bench, and then inherited the title when his older brother died without issue). Don’t know if that’s ever happened; didn’t Asquith’s son sit with the law lords?
I believe that the Law Lords do not participate in the activities of the House sitting as a legislative body. They only carry out their judicial functions.
With respect to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, it is a separate body from the House of Lords. The Law Lords are also sworn of the Privy Council when they are appointed so that they can sit on the Judicial Committee. That means that the membership is much the same, but that is not always the case. At one time it was customary to appoint some of the prominent judges from the Commonwealth countries to the Privy Council. Justice Duff of the Supreme Court of Canada was sworn of the Privy Council and I’ve seen some judgments which he wrote on behalf of the Judicial Committee. I seem to recall seeing names of judges from Australia and India in Privy Council cases as well.
The custom has fallen out of disuse for Commonwealth countries which have abolished appeals to the Privy Council; dunno if judges from the Caribeean countries still get appointed.
The Privy Council is still the last court of appeal for several West Indian countries, especially regarding the death penalty.
So you have the odd situation of London based judges signing the death warrants for felons on the other side of the Atlantic. Something they have been forbidden to do at home since 1969. And yes, they do authorise the death penalty and yes, people are hanged.
I had always thought that time was the essence here and not the number of occasions a ‘veto’ can be employed.
The Parliament Act of 1911, augmented in 1949, provides for a maximum delay in passing a Finance Bill of one month and a delay of no longer than one year in passing a non Finance Bill.