I spoke at a meeting of the Blairite ginger group Progress last night, and frankly it would have been more fun addressing corpses in a mortuary. The committee room in the Commons was suffused with an end-of-regime atmosphere. Brave hopes had gone. Plans for the future felt futile. Every face looked depressed.
The subject, you see, was reform of the House of Lords. I tried to stir the audience by telling them the story of Kenneth Tynan visiting New York in the early Sixties. Tynan was going through a Marxist phase, as many men of his class and generation were to do. At a Manhattan party he started spouting pre-fabricated chants about class consciousness, the dialectic, hegemony and such like. William Phillips, who had edited Partisan Review in the Thirties, and had fought furious polemical battles against the supporters of Stalin’s massacres and show trials, was astonished to hear the same stale communist slogans coming from a dandified Englishman of the upper-middle class years after Stalin’s death.
“Young man,” he said after Tynan ground to a halt, “your arguments are so old I’ve forgotten what the answer is.”
The same applied to arguments for keeping an unelected second chamber, I cried. Our great grand-parents knew why they were wrong. Surely, as Labour faced defeat, it would want to create a credible Lords from where elected representatives could assault Cameron’s governments. Did we really have to go through all that anti-democratic junk again, almost 100 years after Lloyd George first proposed removing the peerage? Couldn’t we just get on with it?
The somewhat bathetic answer was – er – no we could not. It’s too late. No bill replacing the aristocrats and quangocrats with elected representatives would make it through Parliament before the May 2010 election. Even modest proposals to ban criminals and tax dodgers from sitting in the second chamber would probably run out of time.
As Tony Wright MP, warned the Labour crowd, people would look back with astonishment that, after 13 years of a professedly modernising Labour government, the Lords was still there at the end –unreplaced, unreformed and as unconscionable as ever.
Carry on Quangocrats
4 Comments to “Carry on Quangocrats”
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At least you turned up and stayed, Nick.
That’s a lovely answer by William Phillips. I bet from his life in those strong, dangerous political times, he would think the people who shouldn’t be are presently just playing or being bored by politics.
If the British generation coming into adulthood now had to give their impressions of how a centre left labour party seems to them, how far do you think these would be from what it should really look like on paper, giving the financial climes, banks and the continuing oxygen for those unelected peers, and more, as examples. -
I think they should either bring back the landed aristos. There’s no buggering point having a democracy if there’s no liberty under law – something that we’ve almost lost under Labour.
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Why should we trust Labour to reform the Lords when they have already botched so many other constitutional reforms? They’ve already fiddled about with the Lords a bit, making it even crapper than before. I’m not sure that directly appointing people who give you money is any improvement on the hereditary principle, which at least incorporated an element of randomness.
Nick Cohen
