As the Government announces plans for a reformed House of Lords, David Marquand and Anthony Barnett discuss whether a new chamber should be chosen by lottery.
David Marquand (Oxford): At first sight, the idea of ‘sortition’ for the reformed House of Lords (or Senators or whatever) is attractive. But when you reflect on it it becomes distinctly unattractive.Here’s why:
First (a minor – but still significant – tactical objection), It clearly won’t happen; and it’s a mistake for constitutional reformers to give the impression that whatever the Government proposes they will be against.
Second (and much more serious): The main point of having an elected Second Chamber is to give it democratic legitimacy, so as to make it a stronger check on abuses of power by the elective dictator who controls the Lower House. Whatever may have been true in ancient Athens – not really a democracy, remember, since slaves, women and foreigners couldn’t participate – in today’s world democratic election is the only source of democratic legitimacy. An upper house chosen, in effect, by chance would be less legitimate than the Commons, not more. It would be a permanent focus group, as far removed from true democracy as the Government’s proposed Citizen’s Summit.
Third, PR elections to the Upper House – and it is surely inconceivable that it would be elected by First Past the Post – would mean that the Upper House was more legitimate than the Lower. I don’t think such an absurd imbalance could last for long. Sooner or later (and I think sooner rather than later) PR for the Upper house would force the Government and Opposition of the day to agree on PR, or at the very least AV, for the Commons. With every passing day the absurdity of FPTP for the Commons becomes more glaring. We now have PR elections for London, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales: that already makes FPTP for the Westminster Commons a massive anomaly.
The best way to get rid of the anomaly is to make it even more glaring – which PR elections for the Upper House would do. To put the point in another way, the most important single objective for democratic reform is PR. That would, at a stroke, deprive the executive of an automatic single-party majority; end the dreary game of triangulation; liberate currently unrepresented currents of opinion like the Greens; and enable a politics of pluralism and negotiation to take root in this country. A Senate elected by PR would be really big step in that direction; it would be madness to throw that chance away.
Fourth, between the lines of your comment there is a very dangerous suspicion, not just of the particular political parties we have in this country, but of political parties as such. But representative democracy depends, among other things, on political parties. The alternative is plebiscitary democracy, which isn’t really democracy at all, but populism – a totally different thing. The greatest obstacle to democratic reform in this country is, of course, the deep-seated majoritarianism of our political class. (Itself, incidentally, a weird kind of plebiscitary thinking). But the second greatest is the sour, resentful, chip-on-shoulder populism that pervades the tabloid press and that provides rich fodder for xenophobic demagogues of all kinds – notably on asylum seekers, and on virtually all aspects of the EU. We, above all, should recognise that the people can be wrong as well as right, that democratic government depends on responsible citizenship, and that the practices of citizenship have to be learned.
Anthony Barnett (London OK): David, I'll respond to you four points in reverse order. We agree completely about the need to overcome sour populism. Very well put. There is a lot of it about in response to David Davis, who has taken a serious issue to the public, and a lot of learning in the hardest and best sense is needed. To achieve this we need lively political parties, again I agree. The pamphlet Peter Carty and I wrote on this, The Athenian Option, which is about to be republished as a book advocates a stronger, party based Commons as the only legitimate source of legislation. But we also need more public interest in and identification with the legislative process. The proposal that a second chamber selected by lot, whose role is to assess legislation in clear, specified ways, is designed to increase intelligent interest in politics, not turn it into a game.
I'm strongly for PR for the Commons for all the reasons you say. Will a form of PR in the upper house lead to this? Not automatically. We will see what system is put forward. I suspect a closed list system, even though James Graham says they can't to do this (I hope he's right). How the candidates are selected is crucial to your argument here so let's hold fire on this one.
On your second point about democratic legitimacy, this all depends on having a clear description of functions and roles. The current situation where the Lords both originates legislation and is used by the government and drafters as a second tier of writing primary legislation, is very confused. It is slightly more of a check on the executive than the Commons - but that is not saying much. What the Commons is now going to do is to rewrite the way the second chamber is composed without having a serious assessment of what its functions and role should be. This is wrong. Matt d'Ancona wrote a good column on this in the Telegraph praising Frank Dobson on this very point.
Could an Athenian option happen? The lesson of the last ten years is that for reforms to work they need to be undertaken in the spirit of reforming the whole - piecemeal is becoming disintegrative, and indeed increasing the sourness and depletion of the democratic spirit. I think it is essential to approach constitutional change now in an inventive fashion that will appeal to people's imagination (including the need for an English parliament as you have said, but is that more likely than rethinking the second chamber?). The proposal is not put forward in a spirit of impossibilism, as you suggest, but on the contrary. We are now going to completely reinvent half of our parliament. Great! What is the best way of doing this, taking advantage of the opportunity to look at the system as a whole?
For more on the political uses of lotteries, see the Sortition series from Imprint Academic, which is republishing The Athenian Option by Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty.