Trouble In The Lords- January 2011

The Lords have been sitting through the night which is something that we in the Commons used to do quite regularly until we changed our rules. When I was an Opposition whip and had particular responsibility for a bill, I would take soundings from colleagues and informally agree a reasonable time table with the Government whip. Only if we then misbehaved and failed to live up to the bargain would the Government respond by imposing a guillotine to curtail the debate.  The system worked and guillotines were relatively rare.  The last government then went a step further: instead of waiting till a guillotine became necessary they started imposing one on every bill at the outset before the real debates even started.  The advantage being that governments can squeeze more bills through the sausage machine in a given time; and the disadvantage  that large parts of bills went through with clauses and amendments never subjected to detailed scrutiny.

Luckily, that detailed scrutiny could be given in the Lords because there the wretched device of the guillotine does not exist. They simply never needed it because their Lordships behaved and never sought to deliberately delay a bill. If they disagreed with it they sent it promptly back to the Commons, they never used time wasting as a tactic until now.  The House of Lords has recently received a number of new peers quite a few of which are ‘rough trade’ from the Commons who, to the alarm of peers from all parties, are behaving in a partisan way very uncharacteristic of the upper house by filibustering the bill that is currently going through.

The Bill is in two parts: it enables a referendum in May on the Alternative Vote system for parliamentary elections (this is the system used in Australia); and it requires the redrawing of constituency boundaries with 50 fewer MPs and with each constituency having the same number of voters.  The bill is ‘time sensitive’ because it must be completed by early February if there is to be time to organise the referendum to coincide with the local elections in May. If that opportunity is missed it will cost tens of millions of pounds to organise a separate vote and there will be a danger of a very low turnout.  The bit of the bill that the filibusterers really hate is the provision for reducing the number of MPs and equalising the number of voters. This reform will deprive Labour of an inherent electoral advantage because its seats currently tend to have fewer voters. They believe that if they persist in delaying the bill with endless debate, the Government will panic at missing the February window for a May referendum and drop the rest of the bill to which they are so opposed. I doubt that the Government will back down so I think their Lordships are in for many more sleepless nights.

The problem is that this has not happened before, but now that it has the House of Lords may be irretrievably broken.  Having discovered the power of delay on this bill the Government’s opponents may seek to use it on every bill. As night follows day the response will be to protect government business by introducing guillotines in the Lords, wrecking the opportunity for proper scrutiny there just as it has done in the Commons.