Political Commentary
LORD SALISBURY'S mysterious statement this week about the Government's intention to `go ahead' with the task of reform- ing the House of Lords contained all the subtlety and equivoca- tion which have, since the days of Burghley, kept the Cecils where they still are—in the antechambers of power. It is an instruction to those whose experience of the skills of govern- ment goes back less than four centuries to trace the deftness of his reply to Lord Samuel on Tuesday. It committed the Government to nothing, yet implied that it was busying itself with the problem day in and day out. He proffered tokens of the Government's interest to both Lord Samuel and Lord Jowitt, but left them none the wiser whether they were being asked to grasp a nettle or an olive branch. At the very moment when he revealed—a beautifully dexterous performance this, as he discarded several pages of notes—that he had with him some details of a scheme of reform which he had worked out, he announced that he had decided not to disclose them after all, in view of the fact that the Labour Party's point of view, as stated by Lord Jowitt, was not as entirely hostile as might have been feafed. There followed the broad hint that the Liberal and Labour Parties might again be invited to an all-party confer- ence, with the final menace that, if this failed, the Government would 'in due course' go ahead' with its plans for reform.
Lord Samuel tried to get some idea what Lord Salishury meant by 'in due course,' but the Lord President merely replied, with the homely wit which has always kept the Cecils this side of deification, 'I believe there was a great Liberal dictum, "Wait and see." 'It needs very little calculation to realise that the Government will have no time in this Parliament to embark on a major piece of controversial legislation such as the reform of the House of Lords would entail. Nor can those members of the Government less directly interested than Lord Salisbury wish to throw into the election campaign an issue wholly irrelevant to the rest of the Government's platform and one whose repercussions on the electorate it is impossible to fore- see. Why, then, did Lord Salisbury, in a statement which was phrased in extremely personal terms, go as far as he could, without committing the Government, towards reviving an issue which the majority of people in the country are prepared to let lie dormant? The answer, I believe, is that Lord Salisbury is morelhan anxious to restore some of its lost authority and influence to the House of Lords, and that he is determined that it another Conservative Government is returned it will be with a mandate, however vague, to carry through this plan. He wants to be quite sure that after the next election he can claim that the issue of the Lords was laid before the electors.
One recalls a speech which he made to a dinner of back- bench Conservative peers in the -spring of 1952, in which he urged them to accept the fact that as long as the House of Lords was based primarily on the hereditary principle it could never carry the weight which a second chamber ought to. This, of course, is what is behind every Conservative proposal for a reform of the composition of the House of Lords; and this also is why, whatever Lord Jowitt said on Tuesday, the Labour Party will never assent to such a reform. I do not know on what day Tribune goes to press, but I am prepared to wager that either in this or next week's issue there will be a Bevanite call to the Labour Party to frustrate Lord Salisbury's plan, and it is a call which will rally the Labour Party; let there be no doubt about that. I myself firmly believe that Conservatives must think deeply before they follow Lord Salisbury's lead. At present the Labour Party believes that the House of Lords performs a useful function, and it has no wish to disturb it. The kind of scheme which Lord Salisbury has up his sleeve would inevitably revive the old Labour demand for the aboli- tion of the second chamber, and the electors might well, if the issue was posed to them as it wat in 1910-11, support the Labour point of view. The result of this could only be the kind Of defeat which the Conservatives and Lords then suffered
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