Political commentary
The peers in practice
Patrick Cosgrave
The Lords, it seems, are not appreciated even by those one would expect to find in the ranks of their stoutest defenders. A distinguished soldier of impeccably conservative leanings once described their Lordships' House as no more than "a boxing club for retired TUC officials." Only the other day I was having lunch at the home of a distinguished Tory backbencher, a man normally thought of as being on the right wing of the party. One of the guests, a peer, arrived late. "Behold," said our host to the table at large, "a sight you will never see again in your lives — a member of the Houses of Lords after an all-night sitting." The joke was taken in good part, but behind it lay an instinctive feeling that being a lord means enjoying a distinctly soft option.
Certainly, and at the very least, the Lords are so regularly subject to misrepresentation that it is worth spelling out not only what they do, but who they are. Mr Michael Foot, for example, has been having a whale of a time recently trotting out all sorts of well-worn Labour myths about worthless and unelected backwoodsmen working hard to frustrate the democratic will of the House of Commons. Indeed, Mr Foot has been enjoying himself so much that one almost feels the fun he is having is sufficient compensation for the temporary frustration of his closed shop legislation. Some critics, opponents of that legislation and supporters of the principle of having a second and revising chamber — like Mr Ronald Butt — have come to feel that, however right the Lords are on a given issue, it is impossible, in the 'seventies, to defend "the other place" as at present constituted, and seem to favour some sort of senatorial structure.
I find that even among those of Tory inclination there is a general feeling that the House of Lords consists of a very large number of hereditary buffers with a seasoning of life peers themselves divided among clapped-out ex-ministers and a handful of genuinely distinguished men and women who have made reputations for themselves in public service. Such is a fair description, indeed, of those holding titles of nobility, but not of what is called "the working House." There are more than a thousand peers, but only about three hundred of them attend sufficiently regularly to be judged part of "the working House." Half again of these do most of the detailed work of the House — patient, intelligent and usually technical and uncontroversial revision of increasingly ill-drafted legislation sent up from the Commons. Since the institution of a system of leave of absence, moreover, there are far fewer of those mythical backwoodsmen popularly supposed to be ready to descend on London from their estates to vote down enlightened proposals emanating from Labour governments. To be sure, and especially among older peers, there are many regular attenders who rarely speak; but the same could be said for the House of Commons.
Nor is it at all reasonable to visualise the House of Lords as an institution with a huge inbuilt Tory majority. When warning Mrs Thatcher of the danger she was running in using her majority in the upper House to Protect newspaper editors from the possible depradations of the National Union of Journalists Mr Foot spoke in what must have been wilful ignorance of the fact that the Conservatives, under Lord Carrington, would quite simply never have acted as they did had the lead not been taken by cross-benchers. Indeed, the whole House of Lords revolt would probably never have taken place had it not been for the energy and dedication of Lord Goodman. And it is surely absurd for a Labour minister to denounce the Prime Minister's solicitor, ennobled by a Labour government, a man who by resolving an industrial dispute just before the 1964 general election materially helped to establish Mr Wilson's credibility as a national leader, as a Conservative catspaw for encouraging his fellow-peers to make use of the very limited delaying powers conferred on them (in 1949) by a Labour government.
But what Lord Carrington and the Tory peers might or might not want to do, what they might consider to be wise or unwise is, if not irrelevant, at least not a matter of major arithmetical consideration when one considers the composition of the working House (in which, by the way, the hardest workers seem to be the Labour hereditary peers). Certainly, more peers take the Conservative than the Labour Whip: among the regular attenders Lord Carrington can count on a majority of about thirty over Labour. But one must also consider the fact that the Liberals can count on the support of at least nineteen regular attenders; and there are more than fifty working cross-bench peers. When a major issue arises it is almost invariably this last group which takes the lead, partly because Lord Carrington, being a wise and moderate man, realises that the Tories alone, even if they had the numbers, probably could not carry public conviction in attempting to fulfil the essential purpose of the delaying power — to give the Commons an opportunity to think again about measures which, in their Lordships' opinion, do not enjoy general support among the electorate.
Indeed, if there are any backwoodsmen — using the word to mean those holding opinions generally considered to be reactionary — they might be forgiven for supposing the House of Lords to be an unacceptably trendy institution. Again and again on matters like the reform of the law on homosexuality and legislation on equal rights for both sexes the Lords have taken a lead over a House of Commons unwilling to tackle matters controversial. And the curious thing here is that hereditary peers are usually found to be more reformist-minded than life peers. In the 1968 White Paper on the House of Lords, moreover it was revealed that of working peers 153 were life peers or-peers of first creation, while 138 were hereditary. It is difficult to be exact about figures in dealing with a House where whipping is much more indulgent than in the Commons, but these proportions certainly have not changed verY much in the last seven years. Since the allowance given to lords regularly attending is unlikely to be a major factor in the working record of more than a handful of impecunious noblemen and women the public is therefore getting particularly good value for the small cost of the Lords, especially from the herditarY peers. Further, even the despised class of ex-ministers frequently does extremely well. Of many examples I will take only one. Lord Brooke of Cumnor (the former Conservative Home Secretary Mr Henry Brooke) on being driven from both high office and the House of Commons by a campaign of unprecedented scurrilousness went to the Lords in 1966 and promptly, embittered in many respects though he must have been, devoted himself to further years of ill-rewarded public work. Indeed, both the Conseriative Party and the House of Lords gained enormously not only from Lord Brooke, but from the working partnership he immediately formed with his wife, Baroness Brooke of Ystradfellte, who was raised to the peerage in 1964. They made a formidable team, and in no other legislature that I can think of would one ,expect to find such devotion and talent in return for so small an outlay.
But, one still finds oneself saying, but. . . Is the Lords nonetheless, and in spite of all these facts, an anachronism? Some on the Labour left are unicameral in their instincts, simply wanting to abolish the revising chamber altogether. Common sense would indicate that that is impossible: the House of Commons is already grossly over burdened, and a revising chamber is essential if the whole business .6f legislation is not to collapse. Reforming the Lords, even to the extent of eliminating the hereditary element, is a policy with more colour of reason about it. But even here there are considerable difficulties. Almost any imaginable system which would be acceptable to the government of the day would be likely — as vvas the case with Mr Wilson's proposed reforms in 1968 — dangerously to increase the Prime Minister's already excessive patronage. A paid second chamber, moreover, would be bound hn be merely an inferior and faded carbon copy of the House of Commons, and since its members would have to come from some representative groups or other they would lack that individual independence of mind which is one of the best features of the present House of Lords. That House as at present constituted does a remarkable job and finds itself the centre of controversy only when it performs the salutary task of opposing the government of the day on something which ministers feel strongly about. We would be far better advised to leave things exactly as they are, and congratulate ourselves on getting so useful an institution on the chean.
Previous page
