A Day in the Life Peers of Labour (With Apologies to the Beatles)

Civitas, 27 January 2009

I read the news today, oh boy/About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad/ Well, I just had to laugh, I read the paragraph.
He blew his street-cred as a peer/ By being willing to make laws for cash.
And though the bribe was rather small/ He didn’t notice it was just a trawl
By ‘papermen on look out for those to appall/ Their readers with from the House of Lords.

I read the news today, oh boy/ One twenty K for Blackburn, Lancashire.
And though the bribe was rather small/ No more than just imagined cash.
He was yet willing to count it all/ So we could know how many grand
It takes to fill the trough at the House of Lords.
I’d love to turn you on…
… to the following proposal for Second Chamber reform.
For, seriously, it was not ( I hope) just Schadenfreude that has led me to bowdlerise the Beatles song.
Last week’s exposure by Sunday Times reporters of the apparent willingness of several Labour peers to abuse their positions in return for cash has brought back into public prominence the question of reform of the Second Chamber, and I have a serious proposal about how it could be reformed for the better.
With hindsight, of course, it can now be seen more clearly that a system of hereditary peerages was designed to insulate members of that Chamber from susceptibility to bribery. By abolishing hereditary peers and filling the Chamber instead with political apparatchiks, the present Government has no one but itself to blame for the disgraceful state of corruption into which the Sunday Times scoop has seemingly shown it to have fallen.
It is not, in my view, a coincidence that the only peers whom the journalists pretending to be lobbyists found willing to accept cash for favours were Labour ones. This is not a party-political point, and I am sure that dishonesty and susceptibility to corruption are not the prerogative of any one party. As a (if not quite, the) good Lord once said: ‘All power corrupts…’
However, it strikes me that those whom Michael Oakeshott accused of what he called the vice of ‘Rationalism’ in politics are far more likely to be found among the ranks of Labour politicians than of Conservative ones. While there is no direct correlation between susceptibility to corruption and this political pathology per se, it is nonetheless political Rationalists who are least likely to have internalised the ethos of a political culture upon which the viability of an unelected chamber such as House of Lords depends. As Oakeshott explained so well:
‘The particular quality of Rationalism in modern politics derives from the circumstance that the modern world succeeded in inventing so plausible a method of covering up lack of political education that even those who suffered from that lack were often left ignorant that they lacked anything. Of course, this inexperience was never, in any society, universal: and it was never absolute. There have always been men of genuine political education, immune from the infection of Rationalism (and this is particularly true of England)… Still, [general experience of the world on which the new man, lately risen to power, often relies]… is not a knowledge of the political traditions of his society, which, in the most favourable circumstances, takes two or three generations to acquire…
‘Like a foreigner or a man out of his social class, he [the rationalist] is bewildered by a tradition and a habit of behaviour of which he knows only the surface; a butler or an observant house-maid has the advantage of him. And he conceives a contempt for what he does not understand: habit and custom appear bad in themselves… Consequently, the rationalist is a dangerous and expensive character to have in control of affairs… and he does most damage, not when he fails to master the situation,… but when he appears to be successful: for we pay the price for each of his apparent successes is a firmer hold of the intellectual fashion of Rationalism upon the whole life of society…
‘Rationalism… amounts to a corruption of the mind; …. it dries up the mind itself… In short, the Rationalist is essentially ineducable; and he could be educated out of his Rationalism only by an inspiration which he regards as the great enemy of mankind. All the Rationalist can do when left to himself is to replace one rationalist project in which he has failed by another in which he hopes to succeed. Indeed, this is what contemporary politics are fast degenerating into: the political habit and tradition, which not long ago, was the common possession of even extreme opponents in English politics, has been replaced by merely a common rationalist disposition of mind.’ [from Michael Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in Politics’]
In recalling these passages from Oakeshott’s rightly famous essay, I do so not so much with the Labour peers in mind whose corrupt ways were seemingly exposed in last week’s Sunday Times. It is rather with Tony Blair in mind, and the other bunch of constitutional vandals of his party who, in 1999, decided to remove hereditary peers from the Second Chamber and replace them with largely political appointees.
The country is now paying the price for such a wilful and misguided act of Rationalism. From that moment on, poor old Walter Bagehot must never have stopped turning in his grave. For he had seen full well the inestimable value of a hereditary peerage such as Britain had in its Second Chamber. In his 1867 classic The English Constitution, he observed:
‘The use of the House of Lords… is very great… The function of an order of nobility is to impose on the common people… what otherwise would not be there… The order of nobility is of great use, too, not only in what it creates, but what it prevents. It prevents the rule of wealth – the religion of gold. This is the obvious and natural idol of the Anglo-Saxon. He is always trying to make money; he reckons everything in coin; he bows down before a great heap and sneers as he passes a little heap… From this our aristocracy preserves us…. Money is kept down, and so to say, cowed, by the predominant authority of a different power.’
Still, a century and a half on from when Bagehot wrote, the democratic genie is well and truly out of the bottle. There can surely be no return to a Second Chamber whose members are drawn from an hereditary aristocracy.
Granted the need for such a Chamber, what can be done to rescue the House of Lords from the present plight in which it and the country have been placed by the 1999 reforms that have seen it now become filed with largely acquiescent political placements?
An elected Second Chamber would not remedy the problem at all, only compound it. Daniel Hannan once made a very sensible proposal in connection with House of Lords reform. He proposed that the present murky and unsatisfactory system by which peers are appointed be replaced by a system that involves seconding ‘city and county councillors, chosen in proportion to their party strengths in each authority… Such a chamber would sit for three or four days each month, so that its members would remember that their primary responsibilities were in their own localities; they would not, in other words, go native in the metropolis.’
There is a lot of merit in Hannan’s suggestion which is well worth serious consideration by a future Conservative administration. However, for my taste, it still has too much of the party political system about it wherein the players (professional politicians) and amateurs (voters) are still kept at arms length from each other, and the amateurs denied any real say in what goes on.
In the spirit of direct democracy which seems so much in the air at the moment, and out of recognition there is no way back to the good old-bad old days of a hereditary Second Chamber, I should like to make an alternative proposal.
My proposal is that we should take leaf out of the book of ancient Athens and appoint peers by lot from the general electorate. Unlike jury service, there would be a right of refusal, but like it terms would be strictly fixed limit. To inject the needed element of authority to which Bagehot averred, and to preserve an element of greater than average wisdom gained by experience that life-peers supposedly provide (but which sadly some have all too conspicuously been seen not to), I propose that only those above 60 years old should be eligible for selection by lot.
I must say that I am rather taken with this idea, and find myself warming to it the more that I think about it. One reason it appeals to me is that such a system would do something to redress the terrible ageism that continues to afflict society in general and the labour market in particular and about which Help the Aged and Age Concern have taken out a full page advertisement in today’s newspapers.
Another reason is that I have turned sixty and am rather partial to the idea of a spell on the red leather benches of the Lords and all the other perks associated with being a member of the House of Lords.
Being impecunious, I am unable to bribe my way into the Chamber as some have been claimed to have done. I do not even have enough spare cash to play the National Lottery in hope of winning a sufficient sum to bribe my way in. With my proposal, I would effectively get to play in such a lottery, but without having to venture a stake.
More seriously, I do think the present kafuffle about cash for laws has raised the question of House of Lords reform back up the political agenda, and that my proposal genuinely seems as good as any as I have seen on the table. If anyone can spot flaws with the proposal, please do let me know. I would be genuinely interested to learn what they are.