Collective Conscious

Plans to ‘democ­ra­tize’ Britain’s House of Lords have been float­ing around for years now, and now their time has come. The cav­a­lier atti­tude of the new gov­ern­ment toward an over­haul of the upper cham­ber reveals a lack of fore­thought for the processes of British gov­ern­ment in gen­eral. While the move is cer­tain to be seen as as demo­c­ra­tic suc­cess on the heels of the 2007 Com­mons vote, it will only under­mine the effi­cacy of the Par­lia­ment as a whole.

A sec­ond leg­isla­tive cham­ber is no light under­tak­ing. Imbu­ing it with the demo­c­ra­tic stamp of pro­por­tional rep­re­sen­ta­tion will cer­tainly give the House of Lords the ‘legit­i­macy’ it presently lacks. The dif­fi­culty is what to do once it has got that legit­i­macy. Will the Com­mons still be will­ing to exer­cise its power to over­rule the Lords in case of dis­agree­ment? Today, this is hardly a ques­tion, as the Com­mons is seen as the sole legit­i­mate leg­isla­tive body in Britain. A pro­por­tional upper house, how­ever, might read­ily claim equal power with the Com­mons in prac­tice if not by law.

With the stage set for a power strug­gle between the cham­bers, it’s worth won­der­ing whether there’s actu­ally such a chance of it hap­pen­ing. The main rea­son to worry will be the dif­fer­ences in the mode of elec­tion to the houses. If the Com­mons con­tin­ues to be pop­u­lated by a regional bal­lot, there is no guar­an­tee of its com­po­si­tion match­ing that of a fully pro­por­tional Lords.  And if the terms of ser­vice are longer in the Lords — the cur­rent pro­posal could keep them around for as long as 15 years — there is a real pos­si­bil­ity not only of minor dis­agree­ments but of divided gov­ern­ment outright.

What to do in that case? Will the upper cham­ber expand with each gen­eral elec­tion to main­tain its pro­por­tion­al­ity? Surely this is a fool­ish method of han­dling the sit­u­a­tion — more likely it will only be reset occa­sion­ally. So how will the UK han­dle a gov­ern­ment which only com­mands the con­fi­dence of its lower house? Leg­is­la­tion at best would be reduced to a crawl as dis­agree­ments are sorted out and the Com­mons exer­cises its over­ride (if it retains that power), and at worst would leave the Gov­ern­ment crip­pled — “as use­less as a marzi­pan dildo,” to bor­row the words of Mal­colm Tucker. Let’s not do that to Britain!

(Photo: ktyler­conk)