Hereditaries; life peers; and now, the Stevenson lords

Next week, the pilot version of a new politician-factory cranks up

Special report: Lords reform

Hugo Young
Guardian

Thursday September 7, 2000

In the course of the next month, English life will change, or not, in two fundamental ways. Trial by jury will be curtailed, or not. The right to roam over private land will be created, or not. These are big decisions. They're the stuff of political judgment and even conscience, which in a decent system MPs would determine. But the decisions aren't going to be made by MPs. Whether changes take place will be decided very soon by the House of Lords.

The Commons, fully whipped, have done their voting, in line with the wishes of the government. There has been no conscience or judgment about it. Shortage of parliamentary time now gives the Lords much leverage. They can force changes on ministers who want to get the rest of their measures. There will have to be some horse trading, at the behest of a House that consists of two types of people: a rump of hereditary peers, and more than 550 recipients of political patronage over the years. Few voters demonstrate a sense of outrage at this. Some even regard the Lords as a body with more wisdom than the Commons. Such is the degraded respect in which democratic politics is held.

Those of us who have retained our capacity for revulsion, however, are now offered a sop. The experiment begins next week. It will be quite something to watch. Out with genetic accident and prime ministerial spoils, in with the modern tools of rational selection. A commission chaired by Lord Stevenson of Coddenham gets to work, not merely proposing but deciding on future non-party members of the Lords, maybe a dozen or more a year. It is the forerunner of a much bigger project, as recommended by the Wakeham committee on Lords reform. If Wakeham ever gets enacted, the only way anyone will become a Lords legislator, whether on the party or non-party ticket, will be by grace and favour of the Stevenson commission.

The forms are ready, the website is prepared, the rules will be announced on Wednesday. Anyone can apply for a legislator's seat, or be put up for one. They'll need to be "suitable", of proven achievement in their field, and demonstrate a measure of comfort at the prospect of making a speech. Robust independence is what the commissioners will be looking for, though prior membership of a party will apparently not be regarded as a disqualification on that account.

In place of baronial birth, or the whim of Tony Blair and his predecessors, comes a politician-factory more reminiscent of Brave New World. The suitability-tests by questionnaire will be extensive. Many candidates will fail for want of distinction. Referees will be required, and there will be sift after sift to detect the genuine article. Nobody knows how many citizens will apply, but when the sift gets down to the last 100 or so, there will have to be interviews since, in this system, unlike the one that's lasted half a century, it cannot be guaranteed that every appointee will be known, one way or another, to those who hand out the honours.

They are no longer supposed to be honours, in any case. What seems certainly to be happening is the end of peerages as honours, as well as the reduction of Mr Blair's appointing power. Also the end of the crossbench peer as the fount of singular wisdom. Crossbench peers at present have no obligation to work or vote, and are often too idle or embarrassed to do so at the very times they are needed. A number are phony cross-benchers anyway, pretending not to have party ties. The Stevenson batches will therefore be known as non-party peers, and will be expected to turn up and work.

They will have been appointed, moreover, by a commission purified of all possible taint. Each member of it - themselves the fruit of another suitably apolitical tool, the head-hunter's search - will declare every interest under the sun, past, present and possibly future, including not just business links and financial holdings but the more elusive matter of friendship networks. Among themselves they intend to be scrupulously open about who knows whom, to guard against suspicion that something other than absolutely objective criteria is being used. Thus will everyone be insulated from every whiff of impropriety, as the whistle-clean cohorts roll off the production line into the chamber where they'll be empowered to decide the further future, whenever it arises, of jury trial or the right to roam.

Will they have a better right to do so than the present lot? Certainly the calibre of a small fragment of peers should improve on the placemen and reward-merchants thrown up by prime ministerial caprice. Dennis Stevenson, as chief appointer, is a man of impeccable disinterest and rampant modernity. The commission will strive for younger peers and ethnic peers and female peers and peers from outside London. If it ever got its hands on the total appointment list, including the party people, we might see an end to the party hackery that wafts many over-age deadbeats, including all former cabinet ministers, into the Lords - which is one reason why the Wakeham package reform is unlikely, in my opinion, to be allowed to happen.

But the Stevenson peers, in the end, will have the old problem. The commission proposes going through this rigmarole in order to produce more democratically acceptable choices, a better and more committed House. If it is too explicit about its choices being "representative", it could end up in trouble with the law, finding the equal opportunities commission on its tail: one commission chasing another comically up the backside. But the central point of it is to increase the Lords' perceived legitimacy, by appointing a wider spread that will somehow make the second chamber closer to being a proxy parliament of the people.

It's charged with going to heavy lengths, in other words, to avert something much simpler. The Stevenson commission is proposed as the model by which a democratic parliament can be avoided. All this inviting and scrutinising and vetting and sorting and squeaky-cleansing, by a group of commissioners who painstakingly drain themselves of every undeclared deformity, is the British establishment's typical halfway house, its historic method of survival: a modest gesture of improvement, masking the preservation of the essential status quo.

A Lords to which one could believably entrust the future of jury trial doesn't need to be wholly elected. A tranche of nominees, with single 10-year terms, would add savour and judgment, and the Stevenson commission looks like a good way to find them. But Wakeham's maximum option was for 35% elected peers, its preference for 15% or less. The government's last known figure was zero. The more one observes the de facto power of the Lords increasing, the more such trivial legitimacies seem null and void. The case for far more election gets greater by the vote. Beware all substitutes, the more plausible the fishier.

hugoyoung@compuserve.com