Cllr. Gavin Ayling

Clever old Wonko and his friend and fellow Witanagemot member, Kev, have placed the blog war posts in parallel — visible on the same screen.

See the two posts together.

What have we all in common? We believe England should have a Parliament

As announced on Monday Mr Wonko has mentioned to me that he doesn’t agree with the idea of an elected House of Lords….

Well, let me explain why I do.

The House of Lords is the second House. Its main tasks are to amend and block legislation that it doesn’t believe are appropriate or safe and to pass legislation that it does believe is safe.

Throughout the greater part of the 20th Century the party in power in the House of Commons switched, with relative frequency, between the two main parties. Each party, while in power, appointed new Lords to the House from their own political affiliation and others. The majority, of course, with political sympathy for the party in power. This has meant that, in the main, the Lords who are appointed have been reasonably balanced but have favoured the Conservatives because they were in power more than Labour.

The Lords, though, also include Heriditary Lords; Lords who are Lords because their family was rich or liked by the King or Queen long ago. So the House which can block or allow legislation to pass is, to all intents and purposes, Conservative.

Before the 2nd World War (lazy as it may seem, I haven’t bothered to check when for this post) the party in power threatened to stuff the House with loads of liberal sympathisers and, to avoid this happening, the Conservative opposition allowed the Parliament Act to pass. This act allows the House of Commons to pass legislation without the House of Lords’ approval so long as it is presented several times. It hasn’t been invoked many times because the House of Lords, by convention, does not oppose laws that are included in a party’s manifesto.

The House of Lords, then, is useless if a Government really wants to pass an ill-considered law.

I have recently (thanks Ed) been reading about whether if being “democratic” is necessarilly a good thing. The book (link may be added later) offers the example of a democratic decision being made about religious freedom; it is democratic to allow people to vote on other people’s right to practise a religion, but not necessarily a ‘good’ thing.

That said, that the HoL is not democratic can be assumed to be a bad thing when its primary roles are to make decisions on the validity of laws made by a democratic institution.

So how would an elected HoL differ from the House of Commons? What’s the point of having two elected Houses?

The House of Commons is elected using First Past the Post (FPTP). Each constituency can choose one MP and, if you live in a ’safe’ seat, your vote is effectively useless. The Electoral Commission works hard to try to ensure that the result of elections is reasonably fair. The danger with this method (as has been shown to real effect recently) is that one party could have 49% of the voters in every constituency and win no seats. The Labour Party polled approximately the same proportion of the votes in 1992 and in 2005. But the result was different!

The great things about the way the House of Commons is elected, though, are that each person in the country has only one MP and there are rarely hung parliaments.
- Each MP knows that they are individually accountable to their electorate and, ideally, they work for the people in their constituency. If an MP doesn’t do what they are supposed to, they can be thrown out as happened to gift George Galloway a seat at the last election.
- Because each area returns an MP from only one party, it is rare for one party to fail to get an absolute majority. This sort of failure means that none of the winning parties’ radical policies can be implemented and no-one gets what they want.

So, for all its flaws, FPTP is an excellent way to elect Members to the Parliament which proposes Law and which, under the British system, makes up the Executive.

But for a second House, one which is screening laws for dangerous irregularities, or protecting the constitution, an absolute majority is not necessary. In fact, an absolute majority of any party would make the House either useless or obstructive. So the second House would benefit from either proportional representation (PR) or different-sized constituencies or both. A second House elected by PR would reflect, hopefully, the public’s feelings on matters, and would have an unambiguous mandate to block laws or ask for amendments.

The European Union’s pathetic Parliament is elected by PR in super-constituencies. Where I live in the South East, we overwhelmingly elected Conservative and UKIP MEPs. But, because of PR, there are MEPs for other parties too. What this does, in effect, is make the MEPs non-accountable. I cannot approach my MEP, because there are several. If I do approach one, it is not likely to be an MEP for a party I didn’t vote for; in fact, it’s more likely that I’ll approach one for the party that I did vote for. But then there is more than one MEP for that party. This poses two problems: (1) I may not like the politics of one of the candidates but like the politics of the other (so which party should I vote for) and (2) neither candidate has any real compulsion to help me.

In the House of Commons this would pose real problems for the electorate and, I would suggest, result in greater apathy than already exists. But in the House of checks and balances (currently known as the House of Lords), it doesn’t matter. These people are not representing you in specific times of trouble, or over decisions that matter to you — they’re just representing your opinion when it comes to the laws made by the House of Commons.

If I were completely out of touch with my senses and wanted to vote BNP, Green or Communist, my vote wouldn’t be wasted. My opinions would be reflected by an equal proportion of Green “Peers” who would make my opinion on laws known and would block (in as much as they could) any non-green laws. Likewise if I had voted BNP, the politically correct anti-racism laws that I was opposed to would be voted against by the same proportion of “Peers” as there were voters in the country.

Hopefully, the BNP and Greens would not get many votes. They would almost certainly not get enough votes to block any legislation. But at least the opinions of those relatively unusual people would not be completely ignored by the system.

A return to an entirely Heriditary HoL is another option. But this poses the unanswerable question: Why would we assume that a child of someone assumed a good judge of a law, a good judge of a law himself. It is an accepted fact that companies who’s ownership is handed down from father to son etc. do less well than companies who’s manager is the person most suitable for the job. And who better, in the case of the second House, than the people to decide who that should be?

So, in summary, currently the HoL is impotent and has no democratic mandate. And an elected HoL would have a democratic mandate and real and appropriate power. What more could you want (other than a President — but that’s another debate)?

I have a new post up at the Cameron Leadership blog.

Bio-diversity. It’s assumed to be a good thing. But is this BBC News article a pointer to a misunderstanding of nature?

Nature requires that vulnerable species — species least able to change to survive — die out. Extinction should be allowed to happen.

Humanity has decided that extinction is a bad thing because humanity is so often the cause. But when it is not, or is in only a tenuous way, it is not to be lamented that a species might become extinct — this is evolution in action.

Though, of course, as the Now Show said on Saturday, there’s nothing to fear from Bird Flu if you’re not in agreement with Richard Dawkins — bird flu must mutate (read: evolve) for there to be any danger to humans transmitting the disease to other humans. And that can’t happen can it?!