Storm in a chamber pot
POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be a peer was very heaven. After years of abuse and indignity, the House of Lords was going to assert itself again, emerging for all the world to see as the champion of people's rights against an overriding executive.
In the event, of course, the spirit of St Crispin's Day_all but deserted them. A paltry majority of nine was all that testified to their firm resolve that the proud house of Lardner Burke should suffer wrong no more. A cross- bench life-peer I found brooding in New Palace Yard afterwards assured me that it had been Lord Alport's eloquence which moved him to vote with the Government, and although ai rude noise seemed the obvious response, I i'efrained. Lord Alport's speech was un- doubtedly most eloquent, but a cynic might have observed that the spirit of Agincourt could have withstood it; on Monday, the peers were prepared to brave the displeasure of The Times, Mr Jenkins and all the three corners of the world in arms. One only saw any lack of resolve on Tuesday, when the Daily Telegraph's Gallup Poll revealed that twice as many Englishmen thought that the Government was being too soft on Mr Smith as thought the opposite. Sud- denly, everybody became sentimental about the little old House of Lords.
At long last the Conservative party is getting into an Opposition frame of mind. No longer the party of government, intermittently out- raged to discover that it has been deprived of power by events outside its control, it is now settling down to cool, deliberate obstruction- ism and internal debate. For political corre- spondents at least, this is extremely good news. The spectacle of so many generals, captains and subalterns without an army was becoming too poignant, and with nearly three years of Labour government still to run we couldn't have borne the pain.
This new Opposition mentality finds its most marked expression in the Conservative leader- ship's attitude to the House of Lords. From regarding it as part of quaint old conservative England with all its enchanting anachronisms, they now see it as the common man's defence against executive oppression. Although in their thirteen years of office they never seemed par- ticularly impressed with the need for a respect- able, effective Second Chamber to revise and even delay legislation which the Commons had skimped, they are now bi-cameralist to a man. To this end, they are not so much prepared to sacrifice the hereditary principle as anxious to see it sacrificed, at any rate so far as voting rights are concerned. Only thus can the com- mon man be adequately protected. During the debate, in a histrionic moment, Lord Shackle- ton cried: 'How can we explain a vote in the House of Lords to the rest of the world?' The hereditary element scratched its non-elective head in wild surmise.
Discussions on Lords reform, initiated with the greatest possible discretion by Mr Cross- man last year, had reached the state of some- thing dangerously close to total agreement. Goodness knows why Mr Crossman didn't foresee this danger. Put ten educated Englishmen in the same room and they are bound to agree. Hereditary peers (other than first creations) would be granted life peerages on a two-tier system, whereby a few could vote while the rest could only attend and speak. Life peers and first creations would all be able to vote provided they were sufficiently regular attenders, in which case they would also qualify for pay and expenses. My own solution, whereby new peers would be offered the choice of speaking or voting, but never both, was not even mooted. In effect. the hereditary element would be all but abolished, and without the spectre of a permanent Tory majority in the backwoods, the House of Lords could settle down to being a serious, respectable Upper House. No doubt it would still have been slightly old fashioned in its views, as any semi-geriatric institution is bound to be, but one must remember that today's old- fashioned views are the brave new ideas of the 1930s which have provided such unfailing inspiration for the Labour party ever since.
But the subtlest area of agreement concerned the Lords' delaying powers. This scheme was so abstruse that the Labour members of the Com- mittee reckoned that they could sell it to their rank and file as representing a significant reduc- tion, while the Tories reckoned that they could show any reduction to be insignificant when compared with the increased likelihood that these powers would be used. The truth of the matter, after consulting second-readings and parliamentary timetables, and no doubt the phases of the moon, probably involved a reduc- tion of at most three months.
This does not represent what either the Tories or the Labour party mean by Lords reform. Indeed, although both believe in it passionately, their meanings are diametrically opposed. On balance, it seems to me that the Tories won the negotiations—probably because Labour over- estimated their affection for the hereditary principle and the permanent Tory majority it theoretically ensured. But the impetus for Lords reform in the Labour party is certainly not a bicameralist one. (Lord Shackleton is an exception to this, just as Lord Longford was before him; the Lord Chancellor's views, I be- lieve, coincide rather more with those of Guy Fawkes.) Once the Labour back-benchers were
presented with the sort of agreement which was likely to be reached, the Government would have found itself with yet another revolt on its hands; and since the whole idea of Lords re- form was to provide a few inexpensive egalitar- ian thrills to the party faithful, they would have been much better advised, in party political terms, to have scrapped the whole idea. To this extent, Lord Carrington's action in deciding to oppose the Rhodesia Order has played into their hands. The next move Is now up to the Government. Mr Jenkins's motives for threatening the Lords over the mekend might almost have been to ensure that the Government was defeated. Even so there is a certain amount to be said for the Government's deciding to go it alone against the Lords. Once the Upper House had thrown out a new Par- liament Bill the temptation to obstruct every piece of legislation for the brief twelve months remaining might be more than it could resist. This would mean that the Government would have lost twelve months of purposive measures, but since nearly every purposive measure to date has proved electorally disastrous, it might be no bad thing; and at the end of twelve months they could face the electorate with a woeful tale of purposiveness frustrated by a non-elective, hereditary, etc etc. It might just have saved their bacon, as it saved the Liberal party's bacon in 1910—and certainly stood a better chance of doing so than any purposive measures currently envisaged.
One weak link in this chain is to suppose that the Lords, even under sentence of death, would dare pursue an unpopular course for long. Another weak link is to suppose that the Government shares the electorate's bleak view of its own purposiveness. But the weakest of all lies in ignoring the fact that there is one very good reason for Mr Wilson to do nothing in this matter, at any rate for the moment.
When Mr Jenkins produced his threats, he did not qualify them by saying that dire con- sequences would flow from a substantial government defeat in the Lords. In point of fact the Government can now accept, if it wants, the Tory argument that the House of Lords was doing no more than registering its point of view. If the Government does nothing, Mr Jenkins is going to look rather silly. And there are those in the Cabinet, or so I have been told, who would not mind at all to see Mr Jenkins discomfited.
Of course Mr Jenkins could force action if he wanted, just as he always can, but the Lords are in a somewhat stronger position than any- one seems prepared to acknowledge. Even if the Government could create enough Labour peers to swamp the putative Tory majority without holding a general election—on the last occasion this was suggested the King insisted on not one but two general elections before he would give his consent--a significant part of the Labour movement would interpret this as injecting fresh blood into the Lords, an institution they are anxious to see die on its feet. And a new, unagreed Parliament Bill would have at least some of the inconvenient consequences I have mentioned. So long as they do not allow themselves to be mesmerised by the carrot of Lords reform, and so long as any general election would return the Con- servatives with a thumping majority, the Lords have little to fear.
The next rounds will be fought over the Transport Bill and perhaps the Prices and In- comes Bill. Here the Tories are on much sounder constitutional ground and so long as Lord Carrington does not lose his nerve, there should be happy days ahead. The Government will do its best to intimidate them, and on Tuesday's showing this will not be difficult. But in the long term it is hard to see Tuesday's little fiasco as revealing anything more than the Lords in their traditional unregenerative role of doing nothing in particular and doing it very well.
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