Still time for second thoughts
The House of Lords has at least succeeded in surviving into the lunar age. What is remarkable (at least in the light of pre- vious Labour threats) is that the peers' prospects for further survival seem, as this issue of the SPECTATOR goes to press, to have been in no way impaired by their humiliating defeat of the Government in the gerrymander Bill's committee stage this week.
Mr Wilson had, it is true, chosen the occasion of last weekend's Durham miners' gala to give one of his character- istic 'watch it' warnings to the Lords: 'You may say the Government must not tolerate this kind of arrogant action on behalf of privilege, and you will be right'. But the ostensible cause of this implied threat was the ritual position the peers had taken up over an obscure amend- ment to the Housing Bill, a position from which everyone (even Mr Wilson) knew very well they would retreat as soon as the Bill reached them on its second time round. Certainly there were no threats to be heard from the Government side during the gerrymander Bill debate itself. Indeed, the leader of the House, Lord Shackleton, went out of his way to point out that 'there have not been any threats of reprisals', and, when asked by the Liberal leader, Lord Byers, 'Do we gather that there will be no reprisals whatsoever on this issue?', he shyly avoided giving any answer to so embarrassing a question.
For the question is an embarrassing one. It was the left who rebelled against their own party leaders because they found Mr Crossman's proposals for Lords reform (Mr Wilson's 'reprisal' against the peers' last show of strength) too unam- bitious: how much more impatient they will be with Mr Wilson if he now does nothing at all. Yet however tempted the Prime Minister may be to placate the left, however attracted by the thought of trans- muting a sordid gerrymander row into a dramatic fight against privilege, his col- leagues are surely right in attempting to restrain him from yet another rash initia- tive.
Mr David Butler, writing in the Sunday Times last weekend, concluded that 'Mr Wilson must rejoice at their (the Lords') making their own position an issue. In 1909 Mr Lloyd George snared the am- servative peers into an impossible posi- tion. In 1969 Mr Callaghan may have snared them into an impolitic one.' In fact, as the Cabinet well knows. Mr But- ler's parallel is false in every possible res- pect. In 1909 the Lords had thrown out a Budget, an unheard of and unconsti- tutional act. In 1969 it is the Government that is attempting to act constitutionally, and the Lords are merely exercising their constitutional delaying powers. In 1909 the then Liberal government was in a position to appeal to the country and win an election: in 1969, with the latest Tele- graph Gallup Poll showing a 231 per cent Tory lead, the present Labour govern- ment would be slaughtered.
But perhaps the most important differ- ence of all is that in 1909 what occurred was a revolt of the Tory ultras and back- woodsmen, whereas last week's vote showed the whole weight of informed and concerned opinion united against the Labour backwoodsmen and placemen. It is instructive to abstract from the vote the official Labour peers on the one side and the Conservative peers on the other, leaving only the fifty-nine Liberals, cross- benchers and bishops who were present. Fifty-six of them voted against the Government, and only three for it. Never has a more crushing verdict been deliver- ed by the Upper House. The Govern- ment's case was torn to shreds by the most eminent and authoritative non-party men in the land: it was only appropriate that among those cross-benchers voting against the Government was Lord Crow- ther, the man whom Mr Wilson himself picked to be chairman of the Royal Com- mission on the Constitution.
If the Government is wise, it will permit parliament to rise for the summer recess before allowing the sorry passage of the gerrymander Bill to go very much further. It can do this without in any way increasing the peers' delaying powers, if it is determined to go ahead with the Bill at the fag-end of the pre- sent session in October. But meanwhile there is much to be said for a pause to allow tempers to cool and second thoughts to take root. Mr Wilson may, of course, hope that the passage of time may cause the cross-bench peers to relax their opposition: if so he is almost certainly mistaken. These men are not fickle to their beliefs, nor did they act on impulse. He may hope, probably almost as vainly, that his left-wing col- leagues, as they disperse for their summer holidays, will forget their wrath at his failure to send the aristos to the guillotine. Again, he may—and this is certainly something some of his colleagues fear— spend his time on the Scillies hatching up a plan to try and make the Govern- ment's rejection of the Boundary Com- missioners' recommendations appear retrospectively respectable, by introducing a half-baked measure of local government reform, along vaguely Redcliffe-Maud lines, in the next session of parliament. Any such move, although appealing to the Prime Minister's taste for dramatic Initiatives'—a predilection his colleagues have come to fear even more than bad trade figures—would inevitably alienate the vast majority of those concerned with local government, arouse the outright opposition of the Tory party, and make any worthwhile measure of local govern- ment reform infinitely harder to achieve.
But the summer recess—and this is its great virtue—may also allow time for the Government itself to have second thoughts on the Bill, before it is too late. It surely cannot fail to see how much damage it is doing to constitutional government in Britain, what an appalling precedent it is setting. Even from a narrowly partisan viewpoint, it cannot be in Labour's long-term interest to depart from the practice of all-party agreement on this type of issue. The odds are that when, in a few years' time, the Consti- tutional Commission reports, it will fall to a Conservative government to imple- ment it, including such matters as the precise representation a semi-autonomous Scotland or Wales (from both of which Labour at present draws such dispro- portionate strength) should have in the Westminster parliament. To turn this sort of issue into an element in the party political battle can only be bad for the country, bad for politics and bad for Labour. Yet this is the kind of result that may well spring from the Govern- ment's present attempt to fiddle itself a few extra seats at the next general election. It is still not too late for the Government to think again, to withdraw its Bill and, to act honourably. In:the national iateria. —and in its own—it should do so.
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