* Coalition government faces fierce feud over Lords reform
* Liberal Democrats intent on reforming House of Lords
* Conservatives split over switch to an elected upper house
By Estelle Shirbon
LONDON, April 23 (Reuters) – Britain’s ruling coalition
faces its fiercest internal battle yet over arcane plans to give
people a vote for the upper chamber of parliament, the House of
Lords, an issue that has vexed politicians for 100 years but
leaves most voters unmoved.
Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and his deputy,
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, say reform of the roughly
800-seat upper chamber, which traces its roots back a millennium
to Anglo-Saxon times, will strengthen British democracy.
But Cameron faces stiff resistance from within his own
Conservative ranks that could weaken him and sour relations with
Clegg, whose party is strongly in favour of move. The row has
the potential to split or paralyse the coalition for a time,
although few expect it to bring down the government altogether.
Polls suggest that most voters are broadly in favour of an
elected upper house, as opposed to the present chamber largely
appointed by party leaders according to their strength in the
lower house. But it is very low on their priority list.
Yet for Liberal Democrats, who have seen their support
collapse and some of their cherished goals elude them since they
entered government for the first time in 2010, the Lords is
profoundly undemocratic and reforming it is an article of faith.
Disavowed by many who voted for them two years ago only to
see the junior party buckle to Conservative demands, Liberal
Democrats see this as their chance to leave a lasting legacy.
“I just feel it’s an absurd anachronism. I feel embarrassed
when we in the Lords, after a good debate perhaps, can’t carry
the day because we have no mandate, we have no legitimacy,” Paul
Tyler, a Liberal Democrat who sits in the upper house with the
title Lord Tyler of Linkinhorne, told Reuters on Monday.
During debates in their ornate red and gold chamber in the
Palace of Westminster, peers address each other as “the noble
lord”, “the noble baroness” or, if they are from the same party,
“my noble friend”. Protocol requires that peers who are also
bishops be addressed as “noble and right reverend lord” while
some senior military commanders are “noble and gallant”.
Such archaic conventions date back to past centuries when
the chamber was made up of Lords Spiritual – bishops of the
Church of England – and Lords Temporal, or aristocrats. They
project a fusty image to many and today most Britons are barely
aware of the work of the Lords.
But behind the pomp and ceremony a debate is raging.
“DUELING CHAMBERS”
Conservative rebels, including some cabinet ministers, say
parliament will be bogged down for months in recondite arguments
over constitutional arrangements when it should be spending its
time on more urgent problems such as fixing the economy.
The Lords’ power was largely removed in favour of the
elected lower chamber, the House of Commons, in 1911 in a reform
led by the Liberal Democrats’ political forebears, the Liberals.
The peers in the Lords complement the work of the MPs in the
Commons in making laws and holding the executive to account. But
though they may revise legislation – and indeed are prized by
many for their expertise – the Commons has the final say.
Opponents of the new reform plan say that electing the Lords
would enhance the power of Britain’s disciplined and powerful
party machines, making the chamber less consensual and more
partisan as well as more assertive, potentially challenging the
primacy of the Commons and leading to parliamentary deadlock.
“We are in danger of seeing dueling chambers flaunting their
rival democratic mandates,” said Peter Hennessy, a journalist
and historian who entered the Lords in 2010 as Baron Hennessy of
Nympsfield. A “crossbench” peer, he has no party.
Matters are coming to a head because the government intends
to put forward a bill on reform as part of the May 9 Queen’s
Speech, the annual ceremonial presentation by the monarch of the
government’s legislative programme for the coming year.
The aim is to pass the bill as quickly as possible so that
the first elections to a reformed House of Lords can take place
in 2015, when a general election to the Commons is also likely.
After months dissecting the government’s draft plans for
Lords reform, a joint committee of MPs and peers from all major
parties published their recommendations on Monday.
The main ones were that 80 percent of peers should be
elected, while 20 percent should be appointed and that the size
of the House should be cut from over 800 to 450 members, who
would each serve for one 15-year term.
But the committee chairman Ivor Richard, or Baron Richard of
Ammanford, from the opposition Labour party said it had been
impossible for the 26 members to agree on some key elements of
the proposed bill. This does not bode well for its passage
through the 650-seat Commons and the even bigger Lords.
Describing the subject matter as “dense”, Richard, a former
MP and European Union commissioner, said he hoped that, should
there be a need for another committee on Lords reform in future,
“someone else would chair it”.
After his official presentation, rival factions staged
briefings in different corners of the labyrinthine Palace of
Westminster, home to both houses of parliament on the banks of
the Thames. As they set out their competing views, it offered a
glimpse of the complex political manoeuvres lying ahead.
“INDUSTRIAL-SCALE PATRONAGE”
As things stand, Lords serve for life and most are appointed
by parties, under a system Clegg has described as
“industrial-scale political patronage”. A seat in the Lords has
long been seen as a reward for major party donors, retiring MPs
or others with friends in high places.
The average age of peers is 69 and there are more who are
over 90 years old than under 40. Only one in five is a woman and
a disproportionately high number come from the affluent
southeast of England.
The last major Lords reform, in 1999 under the Labour
government of Tony Blair, got rid of hundreds of hereditary
peers, scions of the old aristocracy, leaving a rump of 90 of
them. The number of appointed peers has soared since then.
Blair created 162 Labour peers during his decade in office,
while in two years as prime minister Cameron has already
appointed 47 Conservatives to the upper house. At each occasion,
prime ministers also appoint peers from other parties. Tyler
said that if the system was left unchanged, it was only a matter
of time before the number of Lords grew to over 1,000.
He said there was a lot of self-interest in the anti-reform
camp, not only among Lords who were reluctant to vote themselves
into extinction but also among MPs with their eye on a seat in
the Lords later on in their careers.
But his opponents rejected that accusation, saying that
while there was broad cross-party agreement on the need to
reform the Lords, the current proposals were half-baked.
Said Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi: “The nation won’t thank
us for an ill thought-out reform.”
(Editing by Alastair Macdonald)
