Should the SNP support Cameron's plans to weaken the powers of the Lords?

Here's an interesting discussion point, given that I know how most of you feel about the House of Lords.  At some point next year, the Commons will probably be invited to vote on whether to abolish the power of the Lords to block secondary legislation.  If so, we'll enter into Alice Through the Looking Glass territory, because we'll have the Tories posing as modern-day Asquiths and Lloyd-Georges and trying to transfer power from unelected peers to the elected chamber, while the constitutional 'reformers' in the Corbyn-led Labour party and the Liberal Democrats will be standing up for the ancient rights of the Barons and the Bishops.  To be fair, there's a pragmatic case to be made that almost any check on the power of a government "elected" on just 37% of the vote has to be better than nothing.

But for the SNP, there isn't such a straightforward conflict between principle and pragmatism.  Unlike Labour and the Liberal Democrats, they have no stake at all in the Lords (through their own choice), so it's arguably in their interests to see the Lords stripped of more powers, and for the focal point of opposition to the government to be in a chamber where the SNP are the third-largest party and hold almost a tenth of the seats.

The decision they make could be crucial, because there is a smattering of right-wing libertarians on the Tory backbenches who will be instinctively mistrustful of an executive that is trying to make itself too powerful.  If the SNP and the DUP join with Labour and the Lib Dems to vote the plans down, it would only take a handful of Tory rebels for the government to be defeated.  Even without the DUP, the Tory rebellion wouldn't have to be huge.

So what do you think the SNP should do?  Should the priority be to chip away at the powers of the Lords, even if in the short term that further empowers the Tory government?

The Tories only have two options for exacting revenge on the Lords, and neither of them are great

I'll be genuinely fascinated to see what wheeze the Tory government are going to come up with to prevent any future defeats in the Lords of the sort they suffered last night.  Unless I'm missing something, there are only two options -

1) Amending the Parliament Acts to curtail the Lords' powers further.  Even if that was a relatively modest curtailment, the parliamentary process to achieve it would not be at all straightforward - if the Lords resisted it, the Parliament Acts themselves might need to be invoked for only the eighth time in history.  Which begs the obvious question : if you're going to go to all that time and trouble anyway, doesn't that strip away your excuse for not undertaking proper democratic reform of the Lords, namely that it would be a time-consuming "distraction"?

2) Flooding the Lords with new Tory peers to give the government a majority.  This would cost the taxpayer over £2 million, and would surely lead to billboard posters along the lines of the No2AV campaign's timeless "classics" -

"She needs a new maternity unit NOT one hundred more Tory peers.  Our country can't afford it."

"He needs a bulletproof vest NOT one hundred more Tory peers.  Our country can't afford it."

And if this is supposed to be some sort of constitutional "solution", doesn't it set an obvious precedent?  It would take membership of the Lords to a truly ridiculous 1000, but a future Labour government would be quite within its rights to flood the chamber with Labour peers to give itself a majority, which would increase the membership still further.  Then the Tory government after that would be able to do the same thing, and so on into infinity.

Mind you, maybe that is a solution, because eventually we'd get to the point where every single person in Britain is a member of the House of Lords, and then finally we'd have a democracy of sorts.  And we'd all be very wealthy people, so what's not to love?

Euan McColm's examples of the SNP's "Blairism" are mostly policies Jeremy Corbyn agrees with

In a bid to upgrade myself in Euan McColm's mind from "idiot" to "f***ing idiot", I thought I'd take a quick look at his latest Scotland on Sunday column. As you know, I do accept that there's a grain of truth in his notion that the SNP would find itself to the right of a Corbyn-led Labour party (assuming Labour holds together after a Corbyn win, which is doubtful), and that this would at times be uncomfortable and disadvantageous. But his contention that the SNP are a centrist, Blairite party posing as left-wing, and that Corbyn would expose the fiction, is absurd.

Let's just run through some of McColm's specific examples...

1) 'The SNP are centrist because they're opposed to tuition fees, and that's a middle-class preoccupation.' But Corbyn is opposed to tuition fees as well, whereas Blair introduced them in the first place. You were saying, Euan?

2) 'The SNP are centrist because they would slash corporation tax.' The last time I checked, that policy had been abandoned. Unless you have psychic foreknowledge that it is going to be reintroduced, I can only assume that's a bit of a fib, Euan?

3) 'Corbyn is likely to raises taxes on the better-off, but the SNP have refused to use Holyrood's tax-varying powers.' Holyrood's tax-varying power is on the basic rate of income tax only - there's no option for singling out the better-off. More extensive powers are on their way, but they haven't arrived yet. Again, unless you've got psychic foreknowledge that the SNP will choose not to use the new powers when they do arrive, I'm not quite sure what your point is?

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If Labour follow Eric Joyce's advice and withdraw their peers from the House of Lords next year, what would the Tories be forced to do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They would just find it much easier to get their legislation through. As things stand, the Lords is likely to be the more problematic chamber for the government over the next five years (they're way short of a majority there), but a Labour boycott would solve that problem at a stroke. Even if Corbyn becomes leader and adopts the SNP practice of refusing to nominate new peers, that would be mildly helpful to Cameron in resolving his arithmetical challenge.

From a Scottish point of view, there are two ways of getting rid of the Lords. The first is independence, and the second is a UK government committed to abolishing the upper house, or making it elected. The idea that there is a third option of depriving it of legitimacy and then shaming a Tory government into abolishing it is a total non-starter. You can't delegitimise an institution that never had any democratic legitimacy in the first place. It's less than twenty years since all the hereditary peers were still in place, which gave the Tories an obscene and permanent numerical advantage over all other parties combined. Did that lack of legitimacy trouble their consciences? Not in the slightest.

See if you can reconcile these two recommendations from the House of Lords

Recommendation A :

"Senior Tories urged Prime Minister David Cameron in March to block Scots from voting in the 2015 general election.

The peers' conclusion is in line with the Scottish government's White Paper on independence, which argues people must be represented politically at UK level until the day of independence."

Recommendation B :

"The proposed date of Scottish independence should be delayed if it is not in the best interests of the rest of the UK, a House of Lords report has said...

Labour peer Baroness Jay of Paddington, who chairs the constitution committee, urged the UK government to "put the rest of the UK's interest first" in the event of independence negotiations.

She said: "The prime minister should feel under no obligation to conclude negotiations by March 2016.""

So it seems that Scotland will be "represented" in the UK parliament and government until the day of independence, but that the government and parliament we are "represented" in will be required to act only in the interests of the rest of the UK, to such an extent that Scotland may be held hostage on a colonial basis for an indefinite period of time, against the freely expressed democratic wishes of its people.

Yup, that all makes perfect sense. If there's a No vote, can we have a law saying that London MPs must act solely in the interests of Scotland? Fair's fair.

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Alex Massie returns to a familiar theme, but unfortunately it's no more convincing than the last time he gave it a spin -

"It [the anti-independence campaign] could go further still and argue not only that Scotland is British (a point in large part conceded by the SNP leadership, what with their talk of the Social Union) but that Scotland actually is Britain. For without Scotland, what is Britain? Only England and a handful of dependencies (sorry about that, Wales) and since England cannot leave Britain* the fate of Britain – and Britishness – will be determined by Scotland.

*Yes, yes, yes, Britain as a geographical entity will still exist after independence but that’s not what we mean by Britain in this case is it? No it is not and it is tendentious piffle to pretend otherwise. That includes you, Mr Salmond."

Well, yes it is what we mean, actually. If what we mean by "Britain" is instead simply a political state (which is actually called the United Kingdom of Great Britain AND Northern Ireland), then it must logically be possible for either Scotland or England to leave it. Or else it must be impossible for either Scotland or England to leave it, because whatever would be left couldn't be considered Britain. But what has no logical basis is the claim that Scotland can leave Britain, but England can't. That implies Britain is the name we give to whatever state London happens to be the capital city of at any given moment, which is precisely the kind of proprietorial nonsense we're puncturing by pointing out that Britain is a geographical and cultural entity that Scotland will have just as big a stake in after independence. Norway didn't "leave Scandinavia" when it became independent of Sweden.

Nuclear democracy

On a number of occasions I've made the point that Britain is, at best, a semi-democracy, due to the House of Lords being unelected. Some people react incredulously to that notion, and insist that the power of the Lords is merely to revise and delay - the Commons will always ultimately decide.

But the truth of that statement hangs by one extraordinarily slender thread - namely the Parliament Act, which allows the Commons to overrule the Lords by a cumbersome procedure. Indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that the Parliament Act literally is British democracy - strip it away, and the unelected chamber has unfettered power to thwart the will of the electorate.

Curious, then, to witness the Telegraph's reaction to suggestions that the government may use the Parliament Act to ensure the elected chamber has the final say on gay marriage. Apparently the Parliament Act is a "nuclear option" that is only intended to be used in "exceptional circumstances". Really? That's a bit bloody convenient for the conservative elite of this country, isn't it? The moment the government tries to "enforce" democracy, it's subject to dark mutterings that it's doing so far too often and not selectively enough.

Sorry, guys, but democracy is not supposed to be a special once-a-decade treat. Time to choose - is Britain a democracy, or isn't it? If it is, then by definition the Parliament Act is not a "nuclear option", but an indispensable tool that ought to be used just as often as necessary. And the Lords, not the Commons, decides by its actions how often that is.

It's extraordinary to recall that one of Michael Forsyth's objections to devolution in the 1990s was that the Scottish Parliament's decisions would not be subject to "revision" by unelected Lords. That complaint sounded funny at the time, but it sounds positively unhinged now.

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I also have a new article in the UK edition of the International Business Times, about the significance of welfare reform to the debate on independence. You can read it HERE.

Worried about elective dictatorship at Holyrood? Just think of it as a system "that works".

It's a bit rich to hear the opposition parties grumbling about the dangers of Scotland becoming an 'elective dictatorship' under majority SNP rule.  Perhaps the Liberal Democrats might have some credibility making that claim, but certainly not Labour or the Tories - any party that believes in royal prerogative powers and a majoritarian voting system for Westminster by definition believes in elective dictatorship.  That's what the Westminster system is all about, and it successfully delivers it 95% of the time.

One specific concern that is being raised relates to unicameralism - the committees are supposed to do all the work a revising chamber would do in a bicameral system, and it was never anticipated that a single-party government would have a majority in all the committees.  But the reality is that in bicameral systems it's scarcely unusual for governments to have majorities in both chambers.  Most obviously, every Tory government at Westminster until 1997 had the House of Lords in its back pocket thanks to the hundreds of hereditary peers.  No wonder it was only ever Tories who described the previous composition of the upper chamber as an "anachronism that works".

Five reasons why Hamish Macdonnell has made my eyes roll to the heavens - again

I've just caught up with Hamish Macdonnell's Caledonian Mercury article from a couple of weeks ago, entitled 'Five reasons why the AV system should be voted out'. I of course wholeheartedly agree with his opening sentiment that the No campaign should be moving on to substantive points about the subject in hand, and away from their ludicrous and offensive "electoral reform kills babies and soldiers" claims. But as for the five suggested reasons themselves...oooh, where to start. Let's take them in turn -

1. "The current system works...whether it is the most fair system or not, it works. FPTP has, generally, delivered the outcome the country wanted to see."

I beg pardon? A clear majority of the electorate voted for centrist or left-of-centre parties in 1979, 1983 and 1987, and yet unalloyed Thatcherism was the outcome "the country" wanted to see? The only possible way of reaching that conclusion is via a kind of circular logic - it must have been the outcome they wanted because they voted for it. How do we know they voted for it? Oh, because that was the outcome the electoral system delivered. If we'd had PR during the eighties, there may well have been a more moderate centre-right coalition government (and quite possibly even a centre-left coalition), and we'd now have a journalist in Macdonnell's position looking back and sagely noting that what we got was, after all, exactly what the public voted for. The difference is that he would have been right.

"Far better, it would seem, to have a system which reflects the mood of those key swing voters who carry with them the mood of the nation, than to hand it those candidates who come third, fourth or fifth."

Yes, I think I can see where Hamish is going astray here. He believes the "mood of the nation" is not determined by the majority of the whole electorate, but rather by a majority of the 65-70% of the electorate who happen to vote for one of the two largest parties - a 'majority' that worked out as just 35% of the vote for the Labour government in 2005.

2. "FPTP usually delivers strong government."

For strong government read "elective dictatorship". Remember the poll tax, Hamish? Its implementation entirely against the public will may have been a sign of governmental 'strength', but how that was in any sense a good thing is a bit of a mystery.

3. "AV is not actually backed by any major political party in Britain."

But there are many, many parties and individual politicians who regard it as clearly preferable to first-past-the-post. In an imperfect choice between two systems, should they really be voting for the system they prefer less?

4. "The real argument here is between FPTP and single transferable vote (STV). The Lib Dems want STV, not AV. If that is what they want, then we should have a real and proper debate about the merits of a fair system of proportional representation and the current winner-takes-all system. That is the real argument."

Say what you like about the Lib Dems (and I generally do), but if the Tories had been democratic enough to offer a vote on the full range of options for electoral reform, it seems rather unlikely that offer would have been rejected. It is those opposed to electoral reform who have moved heaven and earth to prevent Hamish's "real argument" from taking place, not the Yes campaigners. Mysteriously, Hamish fails to clarify how voting No will actually take us any closer to having that real argument, rather than - as it surely will - move us much further away.

5. "There is no reason to change the system if it’s not broken."

See above.

"I worked at Westminster during the dying days of the John Major government, which had such a narrow majority it risked defeat on every vote. The precarious nature of that administration reflected the public mood and worked at keeping the government from doing anything too outrageous."

Well, do you want an electoral system that delivers "strong government" or don't you, Hamish? If you do, that clearly wasn't what we had during the Major years, was it? And are you now suddenly saying you want an electoral system that prevents a government from doing anything "too outrageous" against the public will? In that case, why do you support the system that gave us unalloyed Thatcherism on 42% of the vote?

Taking the five points together, the thrust of Hamish's argument is as clear as mud. He seems to concede that PR would be fairer than the current system and a referendum on that would be worth having - and yet two of his points are really arguments against PR and in favour of majoritarian systems in general, of which (more's the pity) AV is one.

He finishes by going off on a rather random tangent to inform us that not only does first-past-the-post 'work', but the old system of hereditary peers making laws for the rest of us mere mortals also worked "really, really well". At least that helpfully puts in a better perspective where he's coming from. Yes, of course the Lords 'worked', if your main political concerns were protecting privilege, preserving discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and permitting animal cruelty in the name of sport - and doing it all against the democratic will of the electorate, naturally.

The grandfather faultline

During my online meanderings over the last two or three days, one thing that's been impossible to miss is how extraordinarily touchy some Liberal Democrat supporters are just at the moment. There's a discernible tendency to attempt to shout down anyone who dares to suggest that the following two propositions may not be entirely beyond dispute - a) that the Lib Dems had 'no choice' but to go into coalition with the Tories, and b) that the new government will see out its intended five years. My guess is that this is because they want freedom from any responsibility for the dangerous decision they have just made, and because they frankly haven't a clue whether the coalition will last five years but are desperately trying to convince themselves that it will. Rather comically, I was shouted down by Political Betting's Lib Dem (but Tory-friendly) proprietor Mike Smithson on the latter point when I hadn't even mentioned anything about the government's prospects for survival! Ironically, my own best guess - as I stated several days ago - is that our new posh masters will indeed see out their full term, but I certainly don't think that's inevitable. My assessment is of course informed by our experience here in Scotland - back in 1999, coalition seemed such a novel and strange concept (just as it does now to our friends down south), and looking ahead four long years it was very hard to believe that something wouldn't crop up to tear the relationship apart. As we now know, Labour's new best enemies stuck with them through thick and thin, not only for four years, but for eight. The closest thing we came to a flashpoint over that whole period was the free care for the elderly issue.

But that brief moment of crisis offers an intriguing clue as to where one source of danger might lie for this new coalition, so much less natural in composition than its Scottish predecessor. What would happen if there were a parliamentary vote, in which the opposition parties are lined up to support something that the Lib Dems passionately believe in but are expected to vote against because of the pact with the Tories? The ideal scenario would be if Labour under a new leader were to table an amendment on the AV referendum bill, to instead offer the electorate a choice of the more proportional AV+ system. Sadly, that's highly unlikely to happen, courtesy of Labour FPTP dinosaurs such as Tom Harris.

But there's another possibility. Craig Murray has been offering some hints over at his blog about the likely shape of Lords reform, and it's a far cry from the thorough-going democratic overhaul I had imagined when I wrote my post the other day. Terms of office for new elected peers of twelve years (!), and a 'grandfather principle' that allows current peers to stay in parliament for the rest of their lives. Just consider the implications of that. I have no idea who the youngest peer is, but off the top of my head I do know that Baroness Sayeeda Warsi is just thirty-nine years old. Now she may be a Tory, but she's quite a nice Tory, and I don't think it's entirely fair that Britain should find itself in the awkward position of having to wait impatiently for her demise before it can style itself a democracy.

So, there may lie the opposition parties' opportunity. It's not hard to imagine Labour and the nationalist parties tabling an amendment that casts out the 'grandfather principle', thus ensuring that it would not take potentially well over half-a-century to arrive at an elected upper house. Would the Lib Dems really be able to bring themselves to vote against democracy? I have a horrible feeling they might, but I'd certainly relish seeing them put to that test - and to a good few others.

Jacqui Smith dissembles, but only to an extent

It was hard not to feel a touch sorry for Jacqui Smith on Question Time last night as she saw her safety-net of a potential seat in the House of Lords flash before her eyes. She couldn't afford to put a single word out of place as David Dimbleby pursued the inexorable logic.

"Do you think MPs disgraced by the expenses scandal should be rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords?"

"No, I don't."

"Do you think you have been disgraced by the expenses scandal?"

"Yes, I think to some extent I have been."

"So you think you shouldn't be rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords?"

"David, this isn't about individuals..."

Yes, I think we can safely assume that in six months' time, having been sent packing by the voters of Redditch, Baroness Smith will be reminding us - "well, I did only say 'to an extent'".

Time to mimic the new Sark Lark?

In the days when the Labour government was sceptical about House of Lords reform (now it's not sceptical, it's just sloooow), the late Lord Williams of Mostyn routinely did a sterling job of defending the indefensible. One of his favourite lines of argument was that in America all sorts of public officials - including judges but also even less probable office-holders - are elected. But the fact that most other countries failed to follow that example didn't mean they were less democratic - not every single public position needs to be elected in a democracy, he would say. True enough. But in a parliamentary democracy, it is surely rather essential for the entirety of parliament to be elected.

You can read my new article on the urgent need for Lords reform here. My (slightly mischievous) starting-point is that Britain could learn a thing or two about democracy from Sark!

Also still available to read is another article I wrote nine months ago about the predicament of the Labour party. I thought for a little while in the autumn that the second 'Brown bounce' might have rendered my central conclusion questionable, but not anymore!