I am rather an admirer of Andrew Rawnsley, and greatly enjoyed his book Servants of the People. But his article yesterday on Lords reform is so chock-full of errors and false assumptions that it demands a response. So here below is a brief analysis and rebuttal of the piece.
The greatest obstacles to Lords reform sit in the Commons by Andrew Rawnsley
There were almost no issues on which all three of the biggest parties were of the same mind at the last election. But there was one which united them in near perfect harmony. Tories, Labour and Lib Dems were agreed that the House of Lords was indefensible. David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg concurred that it was absurd for a country which is supposedly a mature democracy to have one half of its legislature populated by prime ministerial appointees with a rump of hereditary peers. All three parties made manifesto commitments, broadly along the same lines, to give Britain a revising chamber which was fit for the second decade of the 21st century.
Er, no. The key phrase in the Tory manifesto simply says “We will work to build a consensus for a mainly-elected second chamber to replace the current house of Lords”.
Writing in his masterpiece Democracy in America, the great social commentator Alexis de Tocqueville acknowledged that the Senate was a particular adornment to the US Constitution: “The Senate contains within a small space a large proportion of the celebrated men of America ... eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose arguments would do honour to the most remarkable parliamentary debates of Europe.”
How wise it was, then, of the American founding fathers to insist on direct election to the Senate. Except that they didn’t.
Today the renowned Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and its dazzling conductor Gustavo Dudamel are coming to town. But the town isn’t London, or Manchester or Birmingham. It’s Raploch, a tough estate on the outskirts of Stirling in Scotland, where the “Bolívars” will be playing a concert in front of 8,000 people.
Back in 1990 Sir Thomas Bingham had barely started to accumulate what would become a dazzling array of gongs and titles, including Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice, Senior Law Lord and Knight of the Garter. But I had done enough homework on my potential father-in-law to know that our first meeting would be no pushover.
