The government’s proposals for House of Lords ‘reform’ are a nonsense, but that’s no reason to give up on more sensible and progressive options for change. Devolution has brought us half-way into a UK federation: the near-universal recognition of the need to reform the House of Lords offers an excellent opportunity to establish a federal-type second chamber on the pattern of the many successful federal democracies around the world, namely a Senate with equal representation for each of the units which constitute the federation — in our case the four nations of the UK.
Professor Bogdanor, our leading constitutional expert, has recently dismembered Mr Clegg’s proposals for reform of the Lords in an article in The Times (protected by a paywall), but concluded that the present House of Lords was doing little harm and might do some good, so it was best to leave it alone — an argument against reform of any kind used by conservatives down the ages. I offered my federal-type alternative in a letter published in The Times on 29 August 2011:
Sir, Professor Bogdanor (“100 years on, the Lords is doing fine as it is”, Opinion, Aug 18) is surely wrong to argue from the obvious unacceptability of the government’s proposals for House of Lords reform that we’re therefore permanently stuck with this anachronistic, undemocratic body. The Professor asks how, “in a non-federal state”, voters can be represented in two differently elected chambers. But in a recent book he has himself described our post-devolution constitution as “quasi-federal”, and the experience of many federal democracies suggests a valuable role for an elected second chamber representing the UK’s four nations.
As in, for example, the US and Australia, each nation should have equal representation in a federal-style Senate, with (say) 20 Senators elected from each: 80 in total should be quite enough — the Americans manage with 100 — compared with the present 831 members of the Lords. House of Commons primacy would be safeguarded by the Senate’s strictly limited powers (as now) and by the Commons’ role as the sole maker of governments and home of ministers. Equal Senate representation would help to limit England’s predominance, long a source of anomalies and discontent. A federal-type Senate would encourage resumed progress towards the inevitable, and highly desirable, eventual destination of a fully federal UK, providing the only durable answer to the West Lothian Question and other anomalies arising from half-completed devolution, and the best chance of saving our country from disintegration as a result of Scottish secession.
I had offered the same proposal in a letter in the Guardian only two months or so earlier, and reproduced it in a blog post at the time (“The need for a federal senate instead of the house of lords“, 7 June). In that post, and in responses to some of the comments appended to it, I argued the case both for a federal-style Senate instead of the House of Lords and also for a federal United Kingdom as the logical destination of the process of devolution on which we have embarked, but which is now stalled, despite the serious challenge to the status quo posed by the demand of the SNP government and parliamentary majority in Scotland for independence and the disintegration of the United Kingdom. There’s no need to spell all that out again here now.
I should however issue just one clarification: some of the comments on that earlier post, and two or three messages that I have received since the publication of my letters in the Guardian and The Times, have mistakenly supposed me to be recommending that the existing House of Commons should be converted into an English parliament, equivalent to the Scottish parliament, the Welsh Assembly, etc., while the House of Lords should become a single-chamber federal parliament, both bodies presumably continuing to sit in the Palace of Westminster. This would in my view solve almost nothing and indeed would create new problems and fresh confusion. The concept of a federal parliament in the whole of which all four UK nations would have equal numbers of representatives, irrespective of population size, would be obviously absurd: it makes sense only in the context of a second chamber (like the US Senate) where the other chamber is elected on the basis of population size, either more or less exactly as under Proportional Representation (PR), or roughly as in the UK House of Commons and the US House of Representatives.
A UK federation certainly does require an English parliament: we can’t go on indefinitely with the nonsense of a Westminster parliament elected (or, in the case of the House of Lords, appointed, God help us) and constituted as a parliament for the whole of the United Kingdom, but simultaneously functioning in its spare time as a parliament for England (without anything remotely resembling an English government to accompany it). The fact that most English people blithely assume that the parliament at Westminster, with members elected to it from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, is nevertheless at heart an English parliament, only adds further confusion and resentment to the hopeless muddle we are currently in. If and when we wake up to the need for a proper federal system, a new parliament — and, just as important, a new government — will have to be established in and for England, concerned purely with English internal affairs. It’s unlikely to be situated in London, for that would risk continuing confusion between the English parliament and government on the one hand, and their federal all-UK counterparts at Westminster on the other. It would also fail to satisfy the strong feelings in some regions of England that London is too far away and too London-centric to understand or cater for their needs. The Westminster parliament and government would continue to be responsible for those all-UK matters which the four nations will have agreed should be handled centrally and uniformly – principally foreign affairs, defence, external trade, and some (but not all) kinds of taxation.
But there’s no reason for us to have to wait for these changes to be agreed and brought into operation — that will take many years. We can replace the obviously undesirable House of Lords with a federal-type Senate, if not tomorrow, then as soon as the necessary legislation can be prepared and passed, if necessary using the Parliament Act to force it through a probably recalcitrant House of Lords. It would be a huge improvement in our constitutional arrangements: it would signal a willingness on the part of England not to use its disproportionate size and wealth to the detriment of the three smaller nations or in a way that involves constantly interfering in their internal affairs: it would improve the ability of the second chamber, with its new democratic credentials as an elected House, to hold the government to account, despite its iron control of the House of Commons: and it would symbolise our country’s quasi-federal status, reminding Professor Bogdanor and others that the devolution process is only half completed. There’s more work to be done.
Post-script: Ephems is going on holiday now for the next three weeks or so, with only sporadic and partial access to the internet. So there will be no responses to comments for a while. Some of the questions and objections that this post is likely to prompt are already answered, e.g. in the June post mentioned earlier, especially in responses to comments there. These still hold good, in my opinion anyway. Others will just have to hang in the ether: I don’t promise, or even intend, to deal with them all, or any of them, on my return. Those posting comments in Ephems for the first time, or the first time for a year or two, may have to wait longer than usual for their comments to be ‘approved’ for publication in this blog. For any such delays I apologise.
And now to finish the packing.
Brian
As soon as the Libyan rebels appeared to have captured most of Tripoli, there was an outbreak of decidedly premature triumphalism by some, but not all, of the noisiest cheer-leaders for the NATO bombing campaign and Britain’s prominent role in it. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former Foreign Secretary who should know better, relieved himself of an article in the London Evening Standard which sneered at Tony Blair’s successful establishment of mutually beneficial trade and investment relations with Libya, and exulted that
It is a relief that the present Government has been far more robust in its approach to Libya. David Cameron, in particular, is entitled to credit for taking the lead in calling for international action and ensuring that the RAF has been one of the lead participants in the successful Nato action. Nato forces will be needed for a few more days but it is certain that they will be able to declare their mission accomplished in the near future.
Whichever sub-editor on the London Evening Standard wrote the heading of another article, by the American academic historian and diplomat Professor Philip Bobbitt, went one better, with the chilling words:
Libya shows the way the West can now intervene
– although Bobbitt’s enthusiasm for western intervention in the affairs of second and third world states was somewhat more tempered than his sub-editor’s effort suggested:
Above all, will the publics of the Nato countries see events in Libya as validating preclusive interventions, when the experience in Iraq has convinced them that intervention is too costly, too bloody, and too lawless?
Still, Bobbitt’s article celebrated what he portrayed as an exciting new precedent for the UN Security Council to authorise western military action anywhere in the world where some disaster seemed likely to happen unless action was taken to stop it, a hair-raising doctrine that the professor christened ‘precursive intervention’ (a wonderful example of a scholarly high-falutin’ term designed to sterilise a brutal and bloody reality).
Dismayed by these arguments for repeating the Libyan adventure all over the place in the future, I wrote a dissenting letter to the Evening Standard, which duly published most of the first part of it on 24 August. I had written:
Sir, In 2004 I was one of 52 former British ambassadors and high commissioners who signed a letter to the then prime minister strongly criticising many aspects of our government’s role in Iraq. The Iraq and Libyan situations are different in many ways but similar in others, such as the West’s reckless defiance, in both cases, of the UN Charter. The attack on Iraq was never authorised by the UN Security Council. Our initial military intervention in Libya was authorised by UN resolution 1973, but we ignored that resolution’s primary demand for an immediate cease-fire, and its requirement that outside military force should be used only to protect civilians. After intervening to protect Benghazi, we brazenly supported the rebels militarily to bring about régime change, contrary to resolution 1973 and international law.
As in Iraq, by our intervention in Libya we have assumed a potentially expensive responsibility to help sort out the post-civil-war mess, probably including sending ground troops to maintain security. Any Libyan government we help to create will risk being regarded throughout the middle east as a western puppet. Even if western military intervention for a limited purpose was justified, Britain had no obligation to participate, given our disproportionate role in Afghanistan and our parlous budgetary situation. We can’t afford our libraries but apparently we can afford to spend millions on bombing and rocketing a small country in the middle east which posed no threat to us. A former Foreign Secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s, praise of David Cameron for rushing us into this costly and unnecessary adventure is incomprehensible.
Professor Bobbitt sees the NATO action as setting a useful precedent under a new doctrine of ‘preclusive intervention’, asserting that the Security Council broke new ground by authorising force when no other state was threatened by Libya: but that overlooks the Security Council’s formal finding that the Libyan situation constituted “a threat to international peace and security”, and the Charter recognises no such thing as a right of preclusive intervention. Our involvement is by no means over and we shall come to regret ever taking on this open-ended commitment.
I wonder when our senior civil servants and diplomats, our air marshals and generals, will discover the intestinal fortitude to say to their naïve glory-seeking ministers:
“Sir, There are persuasive arguments for a western military operation to forestall the human catastrophe which you foresee, but there is nothing in the UN Charter (which constitutes international law on the use of force in international affairs and with which we are legally required to comply) that would permit the Security Council to authorise a military attack of the kind you envisage: so anyone who launched such an attack in the circumstances and for the purposes that you describe would be committing the crime of aggression, and liable to prosecution in the International Criminal Court.
“Furthermore, even if the Security Council were to authorise such military action, there is no reason why Britain should take part in it, and many compelling reasons why we should not. We have played a major role in Iraq and Afghanistan, second only to the Americans, and unmatched by any of our EU or other partners. We are imposing on our own population unprecedented cuts in vital social services on which the poorest and most vulnerable in our society depend, in order to reduce a budget deficit for which ordinary British people are not responsible: to embark now on a military adventure certain to cost many millions of pounds would be wildly irresponsible in present financial circumstances.
“It’s anyway far from certain that the political and social objectives for Tsetseland which you wish to achieve can be achieved by military force: and even if they were, our participation in the attack would impose on us an obligation to help financially and in other ways with a costly process of post-war reconstruction which could go on for decades, over which we would have no control and which we could not afford.
“Finally, you, the relevant government ministers, have very sensibly approved cuts in the UK defence budget which reflect a more realistic appreciation of Britain’s place in the world but which will make it impossible for us to arm and equip our soldiers, seamen and airmen adequately for an operation on the scale that would be required, to reinforce them if necessary, to rotate them to allow adequate rest and recovery, to take care of the wounded and of the families of those who may be killed, and at the same time to continue to fulfil our military commitments elsewhere in the world, including at home. Against this background, we are bound to tell you that our armed forces are in no position to undertake the kind of military action which you envisage. If you want a purely symbolic British contribution to this operation, and provided that it is properly and unambiguously authorised by the UN in accordance with our Charter obligations, we could probably find the money for a small team of communications experts and an ambulance unit.”
Brian
On 3 July New York Magazine (not to be confused with the New York Times magazine) published an analysis of the challenges threatening President Obama’s re-election which has a huge resonance for us in the UK, as well as creating a stir in the US. The wonderfully punchy article, by Frank Rich, the celebrated former NY Times commentator, is re-published in today’s UK Observer magazine, although with only a vertical and microscopic acknowledgement to New York Magazine and not reproduced on the Observer magazine website. Fortunately however it can be read in full, across six web pages, on the NY Magazine’s website, here. It should be compulsory reading for everyone interested in British and American politics at this time of economic and financial crisis and the threat to both our countries from the resurgent know-nothing right wing.
It’s worth noting that the original article in New York Magazine (of which Rich is now Editor-at-large) is headed “Obama’s Original Sin”, which seems a poor summary of the article’s thrust, while the Observer has seen fit to re-title it “Obama: the betrayal”, which in my view badly misrepresents it. Rich’s concluding paragraphs give something of the flavour:
“A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There’s nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so—and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it’s essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.
The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation—so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.
There are of course many significant differences between the problems facing the US and those facing the UK. One is that the US administration is headed by a liberal Democrat who came to power on a tide of reformist enthusiasm but whose performance in office has disappointed many of the voters who helped to sweep him into the White House, whereas the British government is headed by a Conservative prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer whose positions towards the far right-hand end of the political spectrum are increasingly apparent. Another major difference is that the President’s ability to carry out the policies he himself favours is gravely circumscribed by a majority in the lower House of the Congress largely composed of economically illiterate and politically irresponsible Republicans, whereas our prime minister’s power to impose whatever policies he likes is virtually unlimited (his junior coalition partner can block him only by committing political suicide, and he has almost total control of parliament). As a result, potentially disastrous policies are being imposed on both countries by a right wing party in hock to big business and the bankers, fixated on deficit reduction at whatever cost, despite the appalling risk of a second and even deeper recession. In both countries a desperately needed policy of renewed stimulus by central government to revive aggregate demand in the economy, to tackle unemployment and accelerate growth, is blocked in Washington by ideologically blinded Republicans and rejected in Britain by the governing party in its historic role as the political wing of the City, beholden to the bankers, the company directors and the retired army Majors, most of whom seem to think that Keynes was Milton’s surname and rhymes with beans. Our situation in the UK is perhaps marginally even worse than that in the US: until and unless Ed Miliband grows into the role that history demands of him, we don’t even have a Barack Obama, warts and all.
Brian
More than enough has been written from all parts of the political spectrum about the underlying causes of the recent riots, looting and arson all over England. Most of those causes are too obvious to need re-stating. It’s equally important to consider the likely consequences of these events and how, if at all, they might be limited. The worst of the consequences must be the probable demise of the proposals of the enlightened Conservative Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, for sharply reducing the bloated size of our prison population, concentrating on the rehabilitation and humanising of those prisoners who genuinely need to be there, and thus reducing current appallingly high rates of re-offending. A key part of this programme, the replacement of the indefensible system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection or IPPs, for which this blog and hundreds of contributors to it have persistently campaigned, is unlikely to win public support in the current atmosphere of savage (and largely justified) animosity against the thieves, muggers and arsonists who briefly gained control of our streets only a few days ago. In the current climate of fear and vindictiveness among our political classes, anything remotely associated with liberalisation of our medieval prison and penal policies will be howled down and torn to pieces by the slavering hounds of punitive reaction. Ken Clarke must be one of the most disappointed and saddest men in politics. The abandonment of what remains of his reform programme, now probably inevitable, ranks among the most tragic casualties of these dreadful events.
A more general consequence will be the huge cost of financial and other support for those who have lost their livelihoods, been made homeless, or been injured, by the indiscriminate violence and the looting and torching of shops, businesses and homes. Huge insurance pay-outs will lead to overall increases in premiums, which will necessarily be passed on eventually in higher prices for everyone. Inescapable government expenditure on sustaining the homeless and those whose jobs have been destroyed, as well as contributing to the cost of re-building gutted premises, will inevitably add to the budget deficit, paid for ultimately from increased taxation or, more likely, yet more cuts in other social services. The level of household demand in the economy, already so low that it’s paralysing the country’s recovery from recession, will be further reduced by the loss of people’s livelihoods and resulting destruction of their spending power. The off-setting stimulus provided by rebuilding activity and the jobs it will create will be temporary and short-lived, as the Japanese experience after the floods and tsunami has demonstrated. On the plus side, the manifest need for generous government support of the victims of the looting and destruction may help to discredit once again the neo-liberal lie that central government expenditure is the problem, not the solution. The further stimulus to the recovery of demand and return to growth in the economy that only fresh medium- and long-term government spending can provide might even gain general support, now that ministers are forced to acknowledge the government’s responsibility for helping the victims of the riots. Even our pig-headed Chancellor will be hard put to it to avoid some bumping up of public expenditure in these saddest of circumstances.
Analysis of the underlying causes of the riots in the left-of-centre media has been generally predictable. What many commentators have described as the root causes of the class conflict (I use the term advisedly) that we have been witnessing in this past week are mostly so obvious as hardly to be worth stating. It’s hard to restrain one’s anger with a governing class that has ruled us for the last three decades largely in the interests of the rich and privileged, imposing on us an economic and financial system based on a self-interested, intellectually disreputable, discredited and indefensible ideology, recklessly dismantling, step by step, the unifying social contract, evolved during the second world war and the first few decades after it, which during all that time was almost universally accepted at all levels of society as palpably fair. It was Mrs Thatcher, with her simple-minded dogmas and petty provincial values, who began the work of destruction – to the despair not only of Labour and Liberal progressives but also of committed Conservatives like Edward Heath, Michael Heseltine, Lord Carrington and Harold Macmillan.
After the Thatcher-Major years, the Blair-Brown government had notable achievements to its credit in rescuing large parts of the welfare state and social services from the depredations and neglect of its Tory predecessors, but in other areas it continued Thatcherite policies of neoliberalism, further dismantling almost all democratic restraints on the financial and business sectors, ignoring the growing mountain of private debt, continuing to privatise essential public utilities, relying increasingly for government revenue on the grotesque profits of the financial sector at the expense of declining industry, and explicitly indifferent to the resulting increase in gross inequality in society and the social consequences that have increasingly flowed from it. A succession of reactionary New Labour and Tory home secretaries have exploited international terrorism in order to justify more and more draconian measures of repression designed to keep the lid on the inevitable anger and frustration of a larger and larger under-class, augmented by immigration, degraded by the breakdown of the family and of enlightened education and by unscrupulous profit-driven tabloids, and ruthlessly exploited by a greedy and unprincipled private sector indifferent to the public interest and focused exclusively on short-term shareholder value. The international banking failure and resulting global recession have given our current political masters a further pretext for winding down what remain of our social services, making the poorest and most vulnerable of our citizens pay the price of the greed and antisocial antics of the investment bankers and businessmen. The justified sense of injustice has been sharply aggravated by the recent evidence of the continuing antisocial greed of the bankers and other rich tax-dodgers, the scandal of MPs’ expenses, the revelation of industrial-scale law-breaking by the media and the collusive bribery of the police.
I’m not suggesting that every thief or thug out on our streets on recent nights has been acting in protest or even in knowledge of these scandals: only that the discrediting of such a broad swath of the ruling classes has created a palpable atmosphere in which even once respected members of society have been shown to be shamelessly grabbing what they can for themselves, inevitably prompting the question: if they can do it, why can’t I? Now the riots, looting and arson of the last few days are providing yet another pretext for still more repressive measures against the victims of the crude class warfare which has been shamelessly waged against them throughout the time in which most of them have been alive.
Yesterday I spent some hours listening appalled to the debate on the riots in the house of commons, specially recalled for the purpose from its holidays on the Mediterranean beaches and in the North American mountains. Tory after Tory, including David Cameron with reckless clarity, declared that poverty, unemployment, the abolition or curtailment of even basic welfare payments, rotten and inadequate housing and schools, the lack of hope or opportunity, or any of the other desperate deprivations that we, the rich, have visited on our fellow-citizens, couldn’t “excuse” the criminality that we have been experiencing on our streets. It shouldn’t need saying that absolutely no-one, not even the most rabid letter-writer to the Guardian, has suggested for a moment that these grim conditions “excuse” crime. Deliberately confusing the definition of contributory causes with ‘excuses’ is a cheap and discreditable trick. But those who see only criminality in what has been happening, and who can’t imagine doing anything about it beyond increased savagery in sentencing and punishment, should have no place in public life. Unfortunately that applies to a sizeable number of those who govern us, on both sides of the political fence.
Rioting and criminality by some members of an oppressed and neglected under-class are nothing new. I was living and working in New York at the time of the riots that followed the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, both justly regarded as champions and eloquent voices for the dispossessed (it’s still legitimate to ask oneself cui bono? who benefited from silencing them?). I remember the great satirist Mort Sahl remarking with brutal irony at that time on the spectacle of thousands of poor Americans expressing their grief and anger over the murders of their champions by breaking into stores and stealing refrigerators. Again and again in continent after continent resentment against authority manifests itself in attacks on the nearest available target, usually the police. It doesn’t require any expertise in Keynesian theory to recognise rank injustice and grotesque inequality in a consumer society and a celebrity culture where people experience acute poverty in the midst of blatant and extravagant luxury enjoyed, often, by those who have seemingly done nothing to earn it. As every parent and teacher knows, one of the first moral judgements pronounced by small children is invariably “That’s not fair.” There comes a point when those who know that their treatment by society is not fair but who feel helpless to do anything about it feel justified — wrongly according to the social code by which we have to live — in taking the only action open to them to gain some control of their own lives. That’s inexcusable; but then so is the condition to which we have reduced our society. Many of those who took to the streets last week will end up in an over-crowded prison, abandoned in their cells for perhaps 22 hours a day, depersonalised and in many cases criminalised for life by the experience. The ‘remedy’, being essentially irrelevant, will be worse than the disease — not only for the teen-age looters and arsonists, but for all of us.
Update, 2300hrs 12 Aug 2011: Those who, like me, are disturbed by the sentence of six months’ imprisonment passed on 23-year-old Nicholas Robinson, an electrical engineering student, for stealing bottles of water worth £3.50 from a branch of Lidl in Brixton, are urged to read a sober and scrupulous analysis of the sentence in MTPT’s blog, here (hat-tip: Tony Hatfield on Facebook). The only possible conclusion from this analysis is that the sentence was a travesty of justice and that it ought to be immediately reduced on appeal to a community service order asnd curfew. It will be worrying if the atmosphere of fear and vindictiveness generated by the riots is allowed to result in excessively harsh sentences being passed on those who in many cases don’t deserve the sympathy that such injustice will evoke. The same applies to whole families now being evicted from their council flats or houses on the basis that one family member has been charged — but not yet even convicted — of participation in looting or other riot-associated offences. This reeks of both collective punishment and blatant disregard of the principle of entitlement to the presumption of innocence until convicted in a court of law. We are seeing evidence of fear and panic on the part of our governing class: not a pretty sight.
Brian
