Political

Lords reform: the real story is how little is being changed

Both the Mail on Sunday and Sunday Telegraph ran stories over the weekend about angry Conservative MPs threatening the government’s plans for House of Lords reform, causing the plans to be “watered down”.

Skip past the story of MPs who think anger management (lack of) is a wise way to run the country (who knew so many Tory MPs see Gordon Brown as their role model?), delve into the details and you find a rather different story.

That is because the two changes being dressed up in such lively language are not deserving of it. First, there is making clear on the face of any legislation that the House of Commons remains the predominant half of Parliament. That has always been the intention of the plans and explains many of the other details already in it. Putting this more directly into the legislation is perhaps a sensible change, but it isn’t a dramatic one or one that indicates a change of plans.

Then there is the confirmation of using regions as the constituencies for electing the Lords rather than smaller ones. Again, this isn’t new. Senior Liberal Democrat sources I’ve spoken to about the details of electoral options over the last year have consistently expected that we’ll end up using the same constituencies as for the European Parliament elections – Scotland, Wales and the English regions.

Again, saying this at this point has some merit as it will help reassure those MPs who in the guise of the national interest are keen to avoid the possibility of an elected Senator for a smaller area breathing down their neck week in week out in “their” constituency.

There is a more substantial implication in this, which matters rather more (and hasn’t been mentioned in the media reports). It is simply that the larger the constituency, the greater the likely number of candidates and so the stronger the practical argument against using STV. Any Liberal Democrat member who has wrestled with the enormous ballot papers in some of the party’s internal committee elections will know how unwieldy STV gets for the voter when the number of candidates on the ballot paper is well into double figures.

Open lists rather than STV becomes the more likely voting system as a result, but then that too has long been the expectation of many Liberal Democrats in Whitehall anyway. Even many STV fans acknowledge that if you end up with constituencies elected 10 or so people and hence large numbers of candidates likely on the ballot paper, the voting system is not at its best. This will generate more debate in Liberal Democrat ranks than the other points, but it too is not a new point.

If all this counts as “watering down” the legislation, it’s a remarkably arid version of watering down.

 

I’ve updated the piece to remove my firm prediction of the number of candidates on ballot papers with STV as on reflection that was rather over-egging my predictive abilities.

2 responses to “Lords reform: the real story is how little is being changed”

  1. No matter how hard they try to downgrade the Lords, if it is elected by PR (of whatever type) while the Commons is elected by First Past The Post (sic), the "Lords" will not be inferior to the Commons; will not do whatever the Commons wants; and will provoke conflict between the two houses. The solution is to elect the Commons by STV! Simples.

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