PEERS INTO TONY'S SENATE

Charles Mosley says Mr Blair's reforms of

the upper house will make it far more illogical than it ever was

IN THE wake of Labour's conference, it is more urgent than ever to examine how a Labour victory at the next general election would affect the legislature, specifically its upper house. Tony Benn once called the House of Lords the Madame Tussauds of British politics. He knew it was this, he said, because he had escaped from it. Tony Blair's plans to replace the historic upper- house mix of life peers and hereditary peers with elected members as well as nominees would make it even more like Madame Tussauds, where waxworks of people who are no longer fashionable are expelled from time to time to make room for those who are.

Not that being like Madame Tussauds is necessarily a bad thing. Year after year it comes near the top of the list of the most popular attractions in Britain. Can Parlia- ment say as much for itself? Anything is to be welcomed that binds either chamber at Westminster, as opposed to the Chamber of Horrors, more closely to the affections and interests of the man in the street. But stuffing the Lords with would-be MPs is not the way. It has been calculated that Tony Blair will have to create some 200 peers to ensure that his reforms pass the House of Lords in the first place. The in-built Conservative majority there is huge, and in late June the Tory peers dropped the Salisbury convention, names after the fourth marquess who was Tory leader in the Lords after Labour's 1945 landslide, forbidding them to vote down a newly elected government's manifesto commitments, on the grounds that such radical meddling as Labour's proposed constitutional reform breaks the ground rules. It is therefore probable that after a Labour victory the upper chamber will have to be crammed even fuller than it is already with politicians who couldn't make it to the Commons in the ordinary way.

The recently ennobled former Labour MP for Welwyn and Hatfield, Helene Hay- man, lost her seat in 1979. She may be delightful. So no doubt is Sir Gordon Bor- rie, also recently ennobled after the British people turned him down as a Labour MP — not once, but twice. (The Tories are just as bad, with John Major recycling Lynda Chalker from the scrapheap of British poli- tics after the voters of Wallasey tossed her there in 1992.) The awkward fact remains that when last consulted on the point, the British electorate, in all its cussedness, decided it didn't want them to do the nation's law-making for it, Tony Blair therefore laid himself open to a riposte when last February he attacked the right to make laws of a hereditary peer whose ancestor 300 years ago might have been a monarch's mistress. Creating peers of people like Borrie, Hayman and, in the past, poor Patrick Gordon-Walker, is as much a slap in the face for democracy as any amount of legislating by descendants of king's bastards or bedfellows, possibly more so. At least in the period before the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when Charles II created the dukedoms of Grafton and St Albans for his by-blows, there was no con- fusion about where sovereignty fundamen- tally lay — with the sovereign. Nowadays, the prime minister or leader of the opposi- tion pretend it lies with the people one moment, but goes and nominates the peo- ple's rejects the next.

Historically speaking, a House of Lords made up not of hereditaries but of lifers is less radical than it sounds. Scholars now agree that the original summonses to Lords of Parliament in the late 13th and early 14th centuries were not intended to found a hereditary legislative caste. Later peerage law doctrine retrospectively imposed the idea on the Middle Ages, rather as the Houses of Parliament's archi- tecture harks back to an idealised Gothic. But doctrines, like architecture, change with fashion. After 600 years, during which the hereditary principle was the mode, the pendulum has swung back again. Tony Benn, the Houdini who in 1963 broke free from the British constitution's coroneted Colditz, has had the last laugh.

Among the questions that arise is nomenclature. Could Labour's upper chamber call itself 'the House of Lords' once most peers had been expelled? (Depriving a hereditary peer of his right to sit and vote does not mean stripping him of his title.) The House of Lords hitherto has never comprised every peer; Irish and Scottish creations being traditionally restricted to quotas till well into this centu- ry and Irish ones now excluded altogether. But peers such as these, of which Palmer- ston is the best-known example, have been in the minority. Once they are a majority, the House of Lords, deprived of their presence, ought to change its name or face prosecution under the Trade Descriptions Act.

What about 'Senate'? That's what they call the upper house in Canada and Aus- tralia. And the United Kingdom has already known several senates within its borders: the Senators of the College of Justice in Edinburgh (senior Scottish judges). This is particularly germane since Labour has said that distinguished law lords will remain in the upper house.

There are also university senates. Many more appointees to the new upper house would probably be academics than is even the case now. One hereditary peer, with a quarter of a century's regular attendance and several years in government behind him, claims that academics tend to speak and vote with one eye on how their actions are received among their fellow fellows at high table. Dons are notorious backbiters. The famous courtesy of Lords debates could vanish.

But the chief United Kingdom senate has been a major pillar of the constitution, that of Northern Ireland till direct rule was imposed in 1972. The Irish Republic's senate, 100 miles down the road, still flourishes. It is both elected and appoint- ed, so it may well appeal to Tony Blair as a model. The Taoiseach nominates 11 mem- bers, six are elected by university graduates and the other 43 by a restricted group of politicians and local council members from panels of vocational groups, a quasi-corpo- ratist system invented by De Valera.

The poet Yeats and Sarah Duchess of York's great-grandfather Lord Powerscourt were members. It can be a springboard for professional politicians. Jack Lynch appointed the current Progressive Democrats' leader, Mary Harney, a sena- tor, launching her national career; now, however, pursued in the lower house where the real power lies. Expect something of the same sort in Britain, with young Turks from all parties seeking what may be com- paratively easy entry to the upper house to gain legislative experience and public recognition but sometimes switching to the lower one later, a recipe for confusion if ever there was one.

Australia's senators are wholly elected, but by a complex system of proportional representation which means that they lack the power of Australian House of Repre- sentative members. Canadian senators, nominally appointed by the governor-gen- eral but in fact by the prime minister (and from a one-party slate, his own, at that), cut no ice.

England has had a 'reformed' House of Lords once before, anyway. Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate House of Lords, between 40 and 70 members strong, was commonly called 'the other house'. Cromwell instituted it, declaring that a Commons with no countervailing chamber would be 'the horridest arbitrariness that ever was exercised in the world'. He appointed all the members, who were to sit for life only. He did not abolish hereditary titles and some peers sat in the Commons. Others were nominated to 'the other house'.

How much prestige would members of Labour's upper house have? Too much and they will put MPs' noses out of joint. Too little and they will be ciphers. How much would they be paid? Once largely elected, they can justifiably demand the same as MPs now get, an attractive pack- age increased earlier this year (to £43,000 p.a. plus £46,364 office costs allowance) by MPs themselves, acting as counsel, judge and jury in their own cause. The Lords currently costs £24,000,000 a year, just over £20,000 a year for each member. Only a handful of minister peers at present have secretarial back-up, so if the Lords at their current strength were to enjoy comparabil- ity with the Commons, both as to salary and allowances, the bill would shoot up to over £100,000,000 a year.

The loss of an automatic seat in the leg- islature, plus the newly enhanced salary for MPs, should make the Commons an attractive career for politically active hereditaries once expelled from the Lords. Earl Ferrers, the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, says that at 66 he is too old to contem- plate it now, though there was a time when he wished he had done it. Lord Henley, Minister of State at the Depart- ment of Education, who has won election to his local council in the past, only says that he would consider it. Lord Strath- clyde, the Government Chief Whip in the Lords, is similarly non-committal, though he fought Merseyside as a prospective MEP in 1984 (he lost). But the next gen- `Looks like we've got a jumper.' eration of hereditary peers may have more fire in their bellies once instant membership of the legislature is gone.

A Labour government could not quickly scrap a major constitutional innovation without looking foolish. So once the 'Sen- ate' is in place, what is to stop it throwing out Commons legislation, as the Lords did in 1909-10 before their wings were clipped by the Parliament Act of 1911? There can be no fear of abolition or flooding with fresh nominee members to inhibit it. Once largely elected, it would have a better mandate to mangle legislation than the current House of Lords does.

Look at America, where the House of Representatives and Senate have equal rights under the constitution, but where nearly every serious politician who makes it to the House wants to move up to the Senate. The Commons here could become eroded with jealousy, as happened in regard to Cromwell's 'other house'; a large Commons faction even refusing to recog- nise it till the very end of the Protectorate.

Labour's proposed reform does not entail destroying hereditary titles. Baronets, for instance, have not been threatened. The legal mechanism for depriving a peer of his title is so arcane as to be useless, which is why, back in the early Eighties, the disgraced Lord Kagan was stripped only of his knighthood. Attacking hereditary titles as such would Burke's Peerage and Baronetage. definitely involve the monarchy — some- thing Labour is reluctant to do yet.

Snobbery, being of the human heart, is even harder to abolish. No social climber thinks any the less of the Earl of Lanesbor- ough because he cannot sit in the House of Lords (he is an Irish peer). Likewise the Earl of Mexborough, father of the unhappy Lady Alethea Savile who took her own life two years ago — excoriating the Princess of Wales's hold over James Gilbey.

The day I was down at the House of Lords interviewing peers for this article, someone tried to effect an entry, claiming to be a peer. Apparently this happens roughly every two months, say for argu- ment's sake 4,200 times in the House of Lords's history. It seems that ordinary Joes just ache to be nobs. The huge Lords majority vote against restrictions on tele- vised sport occurred the day before Tony Blair's speech back in February. It undoubtedly expressed the people's will. If a referendum were held on such a major constitutional change as deprivation of two-thirds of the membership of one of the two legislative chambers, the people might just plump for the status quo — especially if the hereditaries were canny enough to hire the newly ennobled Maurice Saatchi to put their case.

The author is editor of the 1997 edition of