Living in the past

Tweet There seems no logical reason why a monarch whose only role in the government of the country is to do as she is told by ministers should be privy to the confidential documents and papers otherwise seen only by ministers.  And there’s even less reason for her children or grandchildren to have access to the same material.  The monarch doesn’t even need to know what is in the acts which she signs into existence, let alone the detail of the discussions which led to them.

Similarly, there is no logical reason why a mixed bunch of appointees, hereditary aristocrats, and senior clerics from one particular sect of one particular religious tendency should have any formal input into the laws which govern our behaviour.  Yet this, like the access of the monarch and her offspring to confidential material, is part of the fabric of the constitution of the UK.

The only reason why either practice survives is unwillingness on the part of successive governments to depart from history and tradition.  In all other aspects of activity, governments – of both parties – repeat the mantra that we must reform to be more ‘efficient’.  Removal of outdated practices is seen as inherently ‘good’ in almost every field – except when it comes to dealing with the remaining privileges of inheritance and rank.

If we were designing a constitutional structure from scratch, it’s hard to believe that many would even suggest either a hereditary head of state or the curiosity which is the House of Lords, let alone assign any powers or rights to either of them.  It’s even harder to believe that such suggestions would be taken seriously.

Tinkering on the fringes by restricting the powers of the Lords ever to disagree with the Commons, or debating which documents the monarch should or should not see, is missing the point.  I wouldn’t go as far as the French revolutionaries’ approach of “off with the heads”, but peaceful democratic abolition of both institutions is long overdue.

By accident, not design

Tweet In the wake of the UK Government’s defeat in the House of Lords last week, there has been plenty of comment as to whether the behaviour of the lords is or is not in line with what the lords are ‘meant’ to do.  The implication is that the second chamber has a clearly defined role and purpose as a revising chamber.  That is, of course, complete nonsense; its current role was never ‘designed’ by anyone.

The original intention was that the chamber was there to represent a particular class interest, and to have at least equal power with the chamber representing the rest of society.  Indeed, at the outset, it was the more powerful of the two houses – it isn’t referred to as the ‘upper’ house for nothing.  Over a period, that power has been whittled away, piece by piece, as the elected chamber asserted its authority, and placed ever more restrictions on what the unelected lords could do.

It now has a role as a revising chamber not because anyone ever sat down and thought about whether we really need a second chamber or what its role should be, but simply because revising and delaying are the only powers which haven’t yet been stripped from it.  I’m far from convinced that any rational process for designing a parliamentary system would ever produce anything remotely resembling the House of Lords, nor assign to it the curious vestige of powers which it exercises.

The problem with all proposals for reform is that they never start from first principles; the innate conservatism of the UK state means that they all start from what is and try to propose different combinations of roles, responsibilities and methods of selection.  The very existence of the second chamber is rarely challenged.

It should be.  The most rational way of dealing with the House of Lords is to strip it of all its remaining powers.  Plenty of countries manage with unicameral parliaments, and there’s absolutely no reason why the UK couldn’t do the same. 

Nods, winks, and peers of the realm

Tweet I find it hard to believe that Elfyn Llwyd’s call last week for Plaid to have more peers was preceded by a great deal of consultation with his party’s leader, Leanne Wood.  Given her long-standing opposition to the nomination of peers, Elfyn’s call looks a little incongruous to say the least.  Still, not even Elfyn’s best friends or biggest fans would say that always being “on message” was one of his fortes. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on your perspective, I suppose.  For party managers, being “off message” is always likely to be a problem, but for most others it probably depends on whether you agree with what he’s saying or not.

Personally, I agree with Elfyn and think Leanne is wrong on this one.  A party like Plaid has to choose between engaging with the institutions of the state and keeping them at arm’s length.  There are sound arguments for abstentionism, which was long a popular position amongst Irish nationalists.  However, there is little history of abstentionism in Wales, and it seems to me that if you’re going to engage with some institutions of the state you may as well engage with all of them and exercise as much influence as you possibly can.

On the substance of the critique of the existence and nature of the House of Lords itself  however, it would be hard to find any difference between Leanne and myself.  The fear is that appointing members serves to legitimise the institution, but a party which claims only to enter the House of Commons in order to secure Wales’ withdrawal from it can surely apply exactly the same argument to any other institution.  

Whatever, the real question which I wish to address here is the mysterious way in which the institutions of the British establishment work when it comes to the appointment of peers of the realm.

When Plaid chose three nominees for peerages (Dafydd Wigley, Eurfyl ap Gwilym, and Janet Davies), their details were passed through the murky “usual channels” to number 10 - and the then prime minister studiously ignored them.  That was, for a while, the end of the story.  I – and I think many others – believed that we had made our nominations, and that Brown was simply blocking them.

It turned out that we hadn’t actually “nominated” anyone at all; the PM was not ignoring our nominations because there were no nominations to ignore.  This only became clear after the election of Cameron as Prime Minister. 

Shortly after Cameron came to power, Ieuan Wyn Jones had an opportunity to lobby him for the appointment of Dafydd Wigley to the House of Lords.  (Although of course Dafydd had by then withdrawn his name, and was no longer one of Plaid’s nominees – but that’s another story).  Nods were nodded, winks were winked, it was made clear that the party would be allowed to submit one nomination, and in June 2010 I found myself presented with a nomination paper to complete and sign (political nominations have to be completed by party chairs - a revelation to me).

I really hadn’t realised that there was a formal channel available for submitting nominations to an allegedly independent panel.  Perhaps I should have known that – it would be a fair criticism of me that I hadn’t even made the effort to identify whether there was a formal process – but I’ll admit that I didn’t.

Anyway, after a brief hiatus while the NEC agreed to reinstate Dafydd Wigley as a party nominee - a precondition to my signing any nomination - the form was duly completed and submitted and, hey presto, three months later Dafydd’s peerage was duly confirmed after the said “independent panel” had given it their careful consideration.  In essence, despite the lengthy period which appeared to be passing from a public perspective, the actual period between formal nomination and appointment was a very short one.

It neatly illustrates the difference between the written-down formal process - which is the submission of a form, consideration by an independent panel, and appointment or rejection; and the actual process – which depends on a series of nods and winks from the right people before you even get to the starting block. 

Perhaps we should have challenged that more strongly at the time.  With the benefit of hindsight – and hindsight is always a wonderful thing – I think we should have accepted the nod and the wink, but pushed the boundaries by making three nominations at that point rather than just the one.  That would really have forced the establishment to either accept or else formally reject our nominations, rather than two of them remaining in a strange and continuing sort of limbo.

However we did not do that, and unless the other two nominations have been formally submitted since I stood down as Plaid’s chair in July 2010 (completing Wigley’s nomination was one of my final acts), I suspect that the party has only ever nominated one candidate.  So whilst I agree with the substance of what Elfyn says, in that Plaid should be more strongly represented in the second chamber, I’m not convinced that Plaid itself could not do more to achieve that if it really wanted to.  But that probably takes us right back to the question of whether Elfyn was speaking for his leader or not…

How on earth do the others manage?

Tweet It’s the Swedes that I feel sorry for.  And the Danes, and the Norwegians, and the Portuguese, and the … well about half the peoples of the world, to be honest.  After all, they don’t have the ‘failsafe’ mechanism which the House of Lords provides the UK, and which Wales is sadly lacking, according to our former Secretary of State. 

I’m not sure that I’d describe their lordships as a failsafe, and I doubt that anyone else has ever called them that before, but that’s perhaps an aside.  The point which Gillan was making is that the UK Government has an unelected second chamber to obstruct and delay improve on the work of elected representatives and the Assembly doesn’t, which means that there are apparently no checks and balances.

But having a second chamber to revise what the first chamber does at the behest of the government and its whips is not the natural order of things to the extent that she and those who think like her would suggest.  Around half of the world’s legislatures manage perfectly well with a single chamber, and if the House of Lords didn’t exist, it’s hard to believe that anyone in their right minds would actually sit down and invent it.

And having legislation whipped through by the majority party at the behest of the government without proper scrutiny and debate isn’t something unique to the Assembly – indeed, to the extent that it is a problem in Cardiff it’s because the system was designed and implemented by another parliament which operates in precisely that way, aided and abetted by AMs who see aping Westminster as being what a proper parliament is all about.

But my real objection to what she’s saying is that putting a second set of processes and procedures – to say nothing of a second set of politicians – in place to deal with the failings of the first lot is avoiding tackling the real issue – i.e., why the first set isn’t working properly in the first place.  The Tories are usually quite big on pointing to the private sector as an exemplar for most things; but any private organisation which put a whole second set of people in place to correct the problems caused by the first lot rather than resolving the core problem wouldn’t be in business for long.

The problem that she and those who think like her face, however, is that if they admit that the problems can be fixed in one place, it might just lead people to think that they could be fixed elsewhere.  So duplicate what Westminster does, and hope that no-one notices how anachronistic the system is, and how well the rest of the world manages without it.  Abolition of the Lords, anyone?

Whose power is it anyway?

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It looks as though tuition fees will remain in the news for a while yet.  The Lib Dems, in particular, seem to be determined to keep digging.  Their members in the House of Lords apparently consider that the promise made during the general election was a pledge given by a series of individual candidates, and not a party commitment, so that they are free to vote as they choose.  Another argument for the democratisation of that institution.

Their MPs, of course, managed to split three ways in the vote, the back benchers in particular.  Ministers simply fell in with the long-standing convention that they were duty bound to either support the government or resign.

It’s an interesting convention, and one which seems to have been adopted, pretty much without question, by the devolved institutions in Wales and Scotland.  I think it deserves a bit more challenge than that, and I don’t see why we should tamely adopt conventions just because they've been around a long time and happen to suit those who want to govern us.

The effect of the convention is that a member of a governing party who was elected on a particular set of personal pledges to his or her constituents, and general party commitments to the electorate as a whole, is in fact expected to vote not in accordance with either of those sets of pledges but in accordance with the decisions of the leader of his or her party – even when those decisions are contrary to either or both of those sets of promises.

From that perspective, it’s a rather odd notion of democracy; it seems that ‘government’ trumps both ‘party’ and ‘electors’.  (Opposition members, of course, accuse government members of a lack of principle for doing exactly what they themselves did when in government and will do again if ever re-elected to government.)

I wonder if the roots of the convention don’t lie somewhere in the murky origins of the unwritten constitution of these islands.  It’s rarely put in quite these terms, but the constitutional position is that total power is given to the monarch by God (hence it’s the Archbishop who actually does the crowning), and the monarch exercises that power through HM Government.

But the sky wouldn’t fall in if we reversed that entirely and started from an assumption that power belongs to the people and is merely loaned to our elected members and governments to exercise on our behalf.  The natural expectation would then be that individual members owed their first loyalty not to their government and leadership, but to the people who elected them and the principles and policies on which they were elected.  

It would be a lot less comfortable for governments, but I can't say that I'd lose a lot of sleep over that.  It would mean that they'd have to win the arguments, not just use their muscle; and it might help ordinary electors to feel that they had some influence.