26.11.1998

Constitutional confrontation

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” (K Marx, F Engels Selected Works Moscow 1935, vol 1, p247) These words from the opening of Marx’s brilliant Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte shed some interesting light on the two major constitutional confrontations between the Lords and Commons that have taken place this century.

The first - ‘tragic’ in the classical sense because it involved the decline of a great party - took place in 1909. The old Liberal Party, the voice of mercantile and manufacturing capitalism, was entering its senescence. With its left flank exposed to attacks from the Labour Party and under pressure from its own radical wing, the Liberal Party decided to try and woo the working class by embarking on a programme of radical social reform. The outcome was the ‘people’s budget’ of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, which proposed the introduction of higher death duties, a supertax on high incomes and a new levy on unearned income derived from land development. These measures represented a frontal assault on the interests of the landed aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie, so it is hardly surprising that the House of Lords persistently refused to approve the budget. After fighting an election in 1910 on the slogan of ‘peers versus people’, the Liberals brought in the Parliament Act of 1911 to curb the powers of the upper house.

Almost 90 years later ‘peers versus people’ has made its reappearance, but this time as part of a farcical battle between Labour and the Tories about ‘democracy’. Ostensibly, the argument is about Labour’s European Parliamentary Elections Bill: specifically its commitment to use the closed-list form of proportional representation in next year’s Euro elections. In reality, however, it is a dress rehearsal for the hereditary peers’ last stand in resisting the withdrawal of their right to sit in the upper house - a measure that forms the centrepiece of Labour’s legislative programme for the new parliamentary session announced in Tuesday’s queen’s speech.

By rejecting the government’s bill on an unprecedented five occasions, the Lords have set in train a constitutional confrontation that seems likely to dominate Westminster for many months to come. A minor issue that is of no interest whatever, except to professional politicians and the metropolitan media, has been erected into a major question of ‘principle’, but in trying to seize the democratic high ground, both sides have indulged in an orgy of sanctimonious high-mindedness that merely serves to demonstrate their bad faith.

First, the Tories. In point of fact, it is a mistake to view the 272 hereditary peers who take the Tory whip and the 311 hereditary cross-bench peers as the last remnants of feudalism. Only a small segment of the hereditary peerage is composed of the traditional landed aristocracy. The vast bulk of hereditary peers are recent creations and owe their titles to the fact that their forebears paid for them in hard cash. These ‘noble lords’ are for the most part political and industrial magnates, representatives of the big bourgeoisie, whose fortunes are derived from trade. Acting as a coalition of reactionary class interests, they have consistently done everything possible to promote the cause of capital. The ladies and gentlemen who now strain at the gnat of closed lists in the European elections - they had no difficulty, incidentally, in supporting such a system for the Scottish parliament and the Welsh assembly - were happy to swallow the camel of the poll tax and any number of other repressive measures. Ironically, were it not for the fact that Blair plans their liquidation, they would no doubt be eager to help him realise his authoritarian, anti-working class vision of ‘New Britain’ through such policies as the reform of the welfare system.

In a profoundly disgusting spectacle, these men, whose very existence as unelected members of the upper house is a blatant affront to the most elementary notions of democracy, now mount their chargers in defence of the democratic principle. Yet, in another irony, their hypocrisy and bad faith have brought forth arguments that have some truth in them.

In the first place, Blair’s determination to emasculate the hereditary peers, so long as it is unaccompanied by concrete proposals for a wider reform of the second chamber, leaves him open to the accusation that all he intends is to replace a house of privilege with a house of patronage - that he intends to stuff the Lords with placemen and women who will ensure a smooth passage for all Labour’s legislation. Blair has promised a royal commission, but has failed so far even to set out its terms of reference. No full-scale review of the Lords is likely to be completed until well into the next century.

Furthermore, there is no doubt that the closed-list system, whereby electors cast their vote not for an individual but for a party, is part of a package of measures designed to centralise power. The selection of candidates for huge, multi-seat constituencies would certainly be more easily manipulable. Blair will ensure that only ‘trustworthy’ candidates find their way into parliamentary bodies that thus become mere tools in the hands of government and its unelected bureaucratic organs.

Notwithstanding the truth of these objections, it is self-evident that the Tories’ stance is profoundly hypocritical and founded on Hague’s desperate search for an issue which he can use as a stick to beat the Blair government, thereby enhancing his own weak position as Conservative Party leader. Hague’s is not a struggle for democracy, but a desperate wrecking tactic.

What of the agreements of Labour and the Liberal Democrats in this battle for ‘democratic’ supremacy? Here too we find bad faith and plain deception in abundance. To begin with, Blair may cry that the Tories’ rejection of his bill is an “affront to democracy”. Ashdown may go into apoplexies about the Tories thwarting “the sovereign will of parliament and the British people”. But the fact is that there is no electoral mandate whatever for the closed list system. The Labour manifesto merely contained the bland statement that Labour had “long supported a proportional voting system for election to the European parliament”.

Secondly, Blair misrepresents the argument as one between a notionally united Labour Party in the Commons and a bunch of recalcitrant Tory hereditary peers in ‘the other place’. Not so. As Dr John Marek (Labour member for Wrexham) pointed out in a speech on November 10, there is no majority among the parliamentary Labour Party in favour of closed lists - merely a three-line whip to ensure compliance with the leader’s orders. If Blair were sincerely intent on demonstrating his party’s commitment to democracy, why did he not allow a free vote in the Commons? Likewise, there is no absolute unanimity among Labour peers on the question. Three Labour lords, notably the former cabinet minister Lord Shore of Stepney, have rebelled against their party throughout. As Shore put it: “The so-called ‘people versus the peers’ issue is bogus. It has been introduced simply because the real issue has been lost” (The Daily Telegraph November 20). But a glance at the voting figures for the fifth and final rejection of the bill is instructive. On a miserable turnout of just 395 peers out of a total of 1,164, the Tories succeeded in rejecting the bill with the support of 26 cross-benchers, five bishops and just three Labour rebels.

Blair’s attack on the undemocratic nature of the hereditary peerage and his assault on the hereditary principle in general falls down in two significant areas. First, all members of the Lords are unelected - some sit there by virtue of their birth, others by virtue of their political appointment by successive governments. Secondly, and more importantly, Blair’s distaste for the hereditary principle is highly selective. He shows no sign of wishing to remove the very fountainhead of all hereditary privilege in this country, namely the monarchy itself. On the contrary, Blair wants and needs to retain the monarchy, albeit in a ‘modernised’, more ‘democratic’ guise, as a source of legitimation for his plans to bring about a constitutional revolution from above.

Blair’s brilliantly opportunistic stage management of the aftermath of Diana’s death inaugurated a new relationship between Downing Street and the palace. Minor changes in royal protocol are just the superficial signs of a more significant attempt to save the House of Windsor from itself and give it a new role. A key figure in this process is the Prince of Wales, who knows that his own fate will be bound up with that of New Labour for the foreseeable future. Not for nothing was Mandelson a guest at the prince’s recent birthday party. Turning this Hanoverian emotional cripple into a credible figurehead capable of presiding over a ‘21st century of radicalism’ will stretch even Mandelson’s presentational talents, but he will use every means to achieve it.

The common thread which runs through every manifestation of Blair and New Labour’s politics, including its approach to the current constitutional confrontation between the Lords and Commons is an authoritarian determination to exercise control over every aspect of political life. Blair’s penchant for ‘strong government’ means nothing less than the ruthless centralisation of power in the hands not of the bourgeois parliament, but in those of the government and Labour’s Millbank machine. Notionally, according to the mythology of bourgeois ‘democracy’, the House of Commons should be the keeper of the executive, but in reality it is no more than an impotent creature. It is in the power of the executive to make up the rules as the game proceeds. Those constitutional reforms that apparently concede greater representation and pluralism in politics by devolving some of Westminster’s powers to the Scottish parliament and the Welsh assembly are in reality little more than peripheral window-dressing or sops.

In the meantime, the debacle over the European elections has only added to the strains in the relationship between Blair and Ashdown caused by Labour’s cool reception of the Jenkins report and the misbegotten efforts to give Ashdown a lifeline in the form of closer collaboration between the two parties. Blair’s initial response to the Lords’ rejection of his bill - a truculent threat that he would abandon a commitment to PR in next June’s elections - caused Ashdown yet more difficulty with his own party and led him to charge Blair (in private at least) with outright betrayal of their covert coalition.

Significantly, Ashdown has felt compelled to warn his party that aspirants to the Liberal Democrat crown “should not hold their breath” and that there are more things he wants to do with the Liberal Democrats before giving up the leadership. If, as seems possible, even the use of the Parliament Act is not sufficient to guarantee that the European elections will be held under some form of PR, we can expect that the replacement of Ashdown as leader will be placed on the agenda.

His fall would mark a significant setback for Blair’s plan effectively to co-opt the Liberal Democrats as a wing of an enlarged ‘centre-left’ New Labour party. Preserving the present shaky alliance and transforming it into a unified force capable of keeping the Tories in permanent opposition remains Blair’s key strategic objective. Small wonder, therefore, that Blair’s mask has slipped in recent days, and that his determination to destroy the Tory majority in the Lords has been redoubled.

While various sections of the bourgeoisie line up against each other in defence of the constitutional monarchy system, we communists and partisans of the working class raise the banner of republican democracy. We call for the abolition of the House of Lords, not for its reform, and we insist that the obscenity of a monarchical state, in which our people are not citizens, but subjects of the crown, must likewise be thrown on to the scrapheap of history, where it belongs. We demand the fullest democracy under capitalism, including the right of self-determination for the peoples of Scotland, Wales and Ireland. We fight for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales, and a united Ireland.

Maurice Bernal