Sticking points

IN NEARLY TWENTY years of banging on about the potential benefits of a People’s Chamber, I have grown used to two big objections to the idea. The first is that random selection would produce representatives who weren’t up to the job. The second is that, simply, it ain’t going to happen.

My usual response to the first is that we already have a system that produces representatives who aren’t up to the job: not all of them, by any means, but as many as you’d expect in a comparably sized random population sample. You can test this assertion by examining the records of individual peers; or by considering what has happened to the nation’s fortunes and ‘intangible treasures’ since the war to save democracy in 1939–45; or simply by considering the chaos and despair that currently permeate British parliamentary politics.

For a long time, however, I found the second objection persuasive. No matter how neat the idea, there really couldn’t – could there? – be the slightest chance of its becoming reality.

Now I’m not so sure.

One of the great paradoxes of modern British politics is that, in an age of rising populism, there is no corresponding popular enthusiasm for Lords reform. Why not? In today’s collective, people-friendly discourse, we despise the privileged, reserving special contempt for the titled. We scorn fusty traditions. We have a horror of unfairness. Many of us resent the status quo in all its manifestations. Yet we tolerate the House of Lords.

It’s not that we can’t see its faults. They’re obvious to all of us. Democratically, as currently constituted, the chamber is a joke. Not only did none of us vote for it; it’s no more representative than the Garrick Club. Slice the nation as you please – into rich and poor, old and young, south and north, white and non-white, male and female, educated and uneducated, anywheres and somewheres – and you’ll invariably get the same result: it’s the privileged, non-excluded half that gets the lion’s share of representation in the Lords.

The idea that such a chamber should speak and legislate for the nation is laughable. Yet raise the question of reform and you’ll be met with an instant and near-universal glazing over of eyes.

There is one powerful reason for this: the alternatives on offer are usually only marginally better. Dozens of options for Lords reform have achieved some kind of political traction over the past century or so. Two models for selecting members have dominated: election and appointment. The proportions have varied: wholly appointed, wholly elected, or some mixture of the two. But the proportions aren’t the problem. It’s the methods that are flawed.

Appointed members – whether appointed by the government or by a commission created by the government – can never be more than an extension of the government, with no visible democratic mandate of their own. Elected members, by contrast, have too strong a mandate. Unless tightly controlled – as they would be, under some ‘party list’ systems that have been proposed – such members would have the potential to challenge the supremacy of the Commons. With such control, they would, again, be mere proxies of government.

Elected upper chambers can work – as we see in the US, for example. They often work badly. (Again, consider the US.) And, because they require electioneering, they don’t curb the dominance of the party machines and the career politicians; or the influence of wealthy lobbyists and donors; or the need to pander to voters’ ill-informed mood swings.

It remains true that an elected, appointed or bit-of-both chamber would, on balance, be an improvement on the current system. So would the mildly reformed chamber towards which the cross-party committee led by Lord Burns has recently been working, in which the number of peers would be slowly reduced to a maximum of about 600; new peerages would be time-limited; and political parties would be given quotas so that their representation in the Lords matched their representation in the Commons.

But any such reformed chamber would still be flawed, and it’s hard to imagine a complex compromise catching the public’s imagination if the ultimate outcome, even if delivered, is not one in which, theoretically, we could all unambiguously rejoice.

Just think of the resounding public indifference that greeted the 2011 referendum on whether or not to switch to the ‘alternative vote’ voting system. The reform would have corrected the manifest and unpopular disadvantages of the current first-past-the-post system – as would several other complicated possible systems that weren’t on the ballot sheet. The public just didn’t have the appetite to get their heads round it. Is it likely that they’d be any more enthusiastic about a proposal for a hybrid upper chamber that was 60 per cent appointed, 40 per cent elected, with top-ups from party lists? That’s the trouble with the people: it’s hard to engage their interest, even when it affects them directly.

I think it could. Yet even that would not be enough. Such a reform could take place only with the consent and the will of the current Establishment: the very people whose grip on power would be loosened by a People’s Chamber. And that, obviously, is unlikely to be forthcoming. There are many altruistic peers, but not enough, I think, for the upper chamber to vote en masse to dissolve itself. That leaves the option of the chamber being forcibly dissolved by the Commons; but that, too, seems wildly improbable. Every government wants an upper chamber that is more pliant, not less; less independent, not more. What Prime Minister would oversee legislation – which would need to be backed by a referendum – in order to dilute the power of the executive?

Yet it isn’t entirely unthinkable. The Liberal Democrats, for a start, are explicitly committed to reforming the House of Lords to give it ‘a proper democratic mandate’ – although the party’s current reliance on its appointed peers for most of its presence in Parliament may have taken some of the urgency from that pledge. Labour, too, is committed to the idea of reforming the Lords, and to the wider goal of, in Jeremy Corbyn’s words, ‘the democratisation of public life from the ground up’. Both parties support the idea of a constitutional convention to discuss everything from the voting system to Lords reform.

When Corbyn wrote in September 2017 that ‘to earn the trust of the people of our country, we must show that we mean it when we say we hand power back to the people’, you could almost imagine that he had a People’s Chamber in mind. ‘Politics isn’t some technical specialism for an elite,’ he continued. ‘Politics is about us all coming together to decide our futures.’ Whether such words would ever translate into action is a different matter. It is hard to imagine a party with so many unreconstructed Marxists in its senior ranks showing much enthusiasm, in government, for a reform that would loosen the party’s central control. The ruthless restriction of debate at the 2017 Labour conference suggests that the party still welcomes some kinds of popular participation more than others. In practice, a reform that put part of Parliament beyond party control might take an inordinately long time to reach the top of a Corbyn government’s to-do list.

With the Conservatives, however, the opposite applies. A People’s Chamber would be an uncomfortable fit ideologically. Politically, though, it could be a lifesaver at a time when the party is in urgent need of rescue. Though in power at the time of writing, the Conservative Party is teetering on the rim of history’s dustbin. In 2017, most voters under fifty – and a huge majority of voters under thirty – would have preferred a fire-breathing left-wing Labour government to a Tory government led by the relatively middle-of-the-road Theresa May. Fairly or unfairly, the party finds itself associated with privilege, with backward-looking fogeyism, with selfish pensioners, inherited wealth, fat-cat bankers, bonkers Brexit obsessives, and cold-hearted bosses who want to ride roughshod over the interests of the little people. Thanks to Brexit, it isn’t even associated with economic competence any more. Such judgements may be harsh, and the Tories may have all sorts of persuasive counter-arguments to offer. Demographically, however, they’re stuffed.

Intelligent Tories realise this, and history suggests that their party has a tenacious instinct for reading the writing on the wall – and, if necessary, performing whatever ideological somersaults seem necessary to ensure its survival. The most famous example (although the gamble failed in the short term) was in 1867, when Benjamin Disraeli ‘stole the Liberals’ clothes’ to introduce the Second Reform Bill. Something comparably spectacular may well be required today – and radical House of Lords reform could provide the perfect pretext: a popular, eye-catching initiative that would rebrand the party as a champion of the rights and dignity of ordinary people. But it needs to move quickly. If it leaves it to other parties to claim ownership of the idea, the issue will become simply another class-dipped stick with which to beat them: ‘Those nasty Tories want to keep power in the hands of their posh, unelected, ermine-clad chums. We want to give that power to you, the people…’

If the Tories claim the proposal for themselves, on the other hand, their toxic reputation as the nasty, people-hating party of the privileged could be neutralised at a stroke, and popular hunger for change could be used (as before) to re-energise the party rather than sweep it away. Rival parties could hardly object – yet the Conservatives could claim the electoral rewards. And if the rival parties wish to neutralise that threat, they must beat the Tories to it…

All this is speculation. In reality, it remains hard to imagine any major party machine diverting its resources from the pursuit of factional advantage for long enough to set in motion a reform that will benefit only the parliamentary system as a whole. At the moment, remember, MPs can’t even agree on how to stop their building collapsing on them. Nonetheless, the mere fact that it is possible to imagine the cause as a vote-winner suggests that it is not an entirely absurd thought.

Ultimately, and appropriately, the people themselves will decide. They often do. Many of our most precious democratic treasures were forged not by ministerial initiative but by sheer weight of popular demand. We would never have had freedom of the press without the intransigence of the London mob who supported John Wilkes in the 1760s and 1770s. We would never have had universal adult suffrage without the initial impetus of the mass Chartist gatherings of the 1830s and 1840s. It’s arguable, in fact, that no democratic reform can be meaningful unless it’s crowdsourced.

I am not suggesting that people should take to the streets to demand the right to sit in Westminster’s upper chamber; nor does it seem remotely likely that they would ever do so. Yet a popular clamour of some kind is not beyond the bounds of imagination – and if enough people were enthused, and joined in, who knows what our collective efforts might achieve?

It isn’t a difficult proposition to sell: ‘Give the people a stake in Parliament’; ‘People, not peers’. You can write the slogans yourself. If you think it makes sense, please do so – and share them. You might also consider getting involved in the wider pro-sortition movement. (Look out for the UK’s first G1000 assembly, which the Sortition Foundation aims to launch in 2018.) One day, there may be enough momentum to launch an irresistible e-petition.

Perhaps I am getting carried away. I am certainly betraying my lack of sophistication, by imagining – as we members of the public so often do – that a highly complex problem can have a simple solution. Yet it must be worth trying to do something, no matter how slim the chance of success.

The alternative is to do nothing, and to carry on as we are.