He would like it to become a house of nominees in practice, no doubt, a chamber of cronies and donors. If the Prime Minister had his way, he would now extend that dictatorship to the House of Lords. She was capable of flexibility the intellectual coherence of Thatcherism can be overrated. She also believed in thinking policies through she used the word "strategy" a lot, and tried to ensure that she had one. She would only have shown alarm if her policies had not come under fire. Lady Thatcher relished debate and opposition. What was he saying when Margaret Thatcher was ramming through her legislation? But there is a difference. That is why nothing seems to work.Īny Tory who complains about Mr Blair's elected dictatorship might seem to lay himself open to the charge of hypocrisy. That is how the country has been governed since 1997. After all, if it does not succeed, we can always have another Bill next year. Get Alastair Campbell to spin it into headlines, and pass it into law. Come up with a good wheeze, including lots of initiatives and targets. As with Lords reform, the Government believes in legislation without cerebration. On health, education, crime and transport, Mr Blair has rammed through Bill after Bill and none of them has achieved its stated aim.
But, if Mr Blair's Commons had been in the food business, it would have been closed long ago on the grounds that its products were unfit for human consumption. This might be more acceptable if the sausages were any good.
None of his predecessors has shown so little respect or affection for Parliament, which is why he has done everything possible to neuter the House of Commons and turn it into a mere legislative sausage factory. This is a Prime Minister with no interest in intellectual debate and nothing but aversion for any forum in which he might be subjected to it, including Parliament. He is against it because he cannot abide challenges. Mr Blair regards that as a bad idea, for the worst of reasons. Yet the more democratic the chamber, the more likely it will be to challenge the Government. No upper house would be worthy of the name unless it possessed legitimacy and it is hard to confer legitimacy these days without a significant democratic input. He has become aware of what he regards as a danger: that a reformed chamber will also be a stronger one. He is unhappy about the likely conclusions. The Prime Minister is not only opposed to thinking because of the effort involved. The Blair/Cranborne deal was intended to be temporary: ce n'est que le provisoire qui dure. Lord Irvine of Lairg, the PM's agent in these matters, has been extolling the virtues of procrastination. It may be that Mr Blair would prefer a sore foot to a sore brain. But full-scale reform would require full-scale thought. Lord Cranborne assumed that Mr Blair would find the presence of the surviving hereditaries so intolerable that he would feel compelled to press ahead with full-scale reform.
Some Tories were prepared to consider reforming the Lords in order to ensure its legitimacy. Though sentimentally attached to the peerage, they were aware of the problems which an hereditary Upper House would have in resisting the excesses of the popular chamber. Their views diverged sharply, as was elegantly summarised by Roy Jenkins in Mr Balfour's Poodle, his book on the constitutional crisis leading up to the 1911 Parliament Act which ensured the supremacy of the Commons. That point would have been self-evident to earlier generations of reformers, whose approach to the Lords was always determined by their opinion of the Commons. Yet as that chamber's ability to discharge its duties is much more in doubt, there is no point in addressing the second chamber until we have considered the first one. It is also the wrong question, for the House of Lords is a second-order issue the primacy of the Commons is assured. In the first place, Mr Blair will take no notice, so no action will follow. Tomorrow, it will hold a debate on the House of Lords a doubly pointless exercise. The House of Commons is about to waste its time.
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