Archive 00001
Extract from Welsh Fabian Yahoo Chatroom 16 November 2001
You are in the company of Roger Warren Evans

Lords Must Go!

Am I alone in the world? Am I alone in thinking that the Government is making a dog's breakfast of Lords Reform? Is there anyone out there who is reaching the tether's end on this subject?

Let me come clean. I am an abolitionist. That was Labour Party policy until after 1983, and it was the right solution. The only acceptable solution to the problem of the House of Lords, which has plagued UK politics since Lloyd George failed to finish the job in 1911, is outright abolition.

If you strengthen its democratic/elective content, you create unacceptable constitutional tensions between the two Houses. If you do not, you leave a poodle Chamber, peopled by retired politicians who cannot drag themselves away from the perceived adrenolin of Westminster, and who serve out their days in the Chamber of the Living Dead. And now, at a time when political careers are (it seems to me) likely to start earlier and finish earlier that in earlier decades, MPs will more than ever wish to keep their noses clean and please the Commons whips, in order to stake a good claim for consideration in the After Life.

In the Commons, we already have hundreds of under-employed MPs who try to occupy themselves busily with local social work (called "surgeries"), often interfering with local councillors' functions, in planning, housing, and so on. My contention is that the Lords should go - and 200 MPs should be set up as a Scrutiny Chamber, with similar revising powers to the Lords, and given a 		useful job to do. That would still leave 450 in the mainstream Commons, which is roughly the number in the equivalent French, German and Italian legislatures... Also the same number as in the American House of Representatives. That would solve all the problems of democratic legitimacy. Two chambers are NOT necessary – the Scottish Parliament enacts primary legislation, but has not been equipped with two chambers, so there is no "revising function" there.

The Government has quite a different wheeze, to find work for idle hands – let's make another 100 MPs, they say, into Ministerial bag- carriers, so that they continue to drool at the prospect of a ministerial salary and a ministerial pay-off and a ministerial pension, and keep themselves suitably in line. It is an awful undemocratic device, when we should surely be re-learning some of the principles of a democratic/elective constitution. It would be far wiser to clear all the titled gents and ladies out of the Lords, and let MPs do the work – a great increase in legitimate career opportunities, and no conflict of democratic legitimacy.

Does anyone else share my sense of shame at being caught in a Party with such awful ideas? Am I alone in thinking that "only abolition will do"? That Labour was right in the 1970s and the early-1980s, and that we are wrong to go along with the Super Patronage system that is unfolding "before our very eyes"! Will anyone join me in forming a lobby entitled "LORDS MUST GO"….?

Roger Warren Evans

NB This was published on 16 November 2001. I had one reply, from a retired economist in Bridgend, but none of the younger Fabians took up the cudgels.

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