The Government has done something which there were lively fears before the general election that it wouldn't. The Tories' bleatings for a larger democratic element are wholly unconvincing – or will be, other than in the unlikely event that Iain Duncan Smith can find the courage and vision to overcome the vested interests of Tory peers and exploit Labour backbench discontent in the Commons and his own party's numerical strength in the Lords to force a genuinely elected second chamber into being. The Tories had their chance in the last Parliament – preferring instead to allow Lord Cranborne to be suckered by the Prime Minister into a deal which had nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with saving the skins of existing peers, life and (for a year or two) hereditary.And that's about it. For it turns out that even the best of three bad options contained in the Wakeham Royal Commission's report – which would have allowed about a third of peers to be elected – proved too radical for the Government.
Those who want the Government to go much, much further include the many dozens of Labour MPs – many of them impeccably mainstream – who have signed an Early Day Motion calling for a "wholly or substantially" elected second chamber: Lord Hurd, Kenneth Clarke, the former Tory Lord Chancellor Lord Mackay (who saw little wrong with a fully elected senate), the former Labour Leader of the Lords Lord Richard, and the redoubtable backbench Tory Andrew Tyrie. All are too subversive for a Government which now invites us to congratulate it for a system in which a clear majority will be subject to undiluted patronage, a fifth put in by a discredited Appointments Commission which the White Paper quaintly praises, and a further miserable fifth by actual election.To these complaints, the Government argues that anything more would undermine the legitimacy of the Commons I do not believe this for a moment. Would a half-elected Lords have supremacy over a fully elected Commons? But the poverty of this argument is more profound than that. What Commons legitimacy, one is tempted to ask? This argument for a breathtaking lack of trust in the electors would have a great deal more validity if the Government had so much as lifted a finger to strengthen the Commons' powers of scrutiny over the executive, or to release the – anyway too low-powered – Select Committees from the clammy grip of the party whips.Which brings us to the Leader of the Commons, Robin Cook. Mr Cook fought a lonely, and largely unsuccessful, battle in the Cabinet for a bigger elected element and for a White Paper with "greener" edges – ie a more flexible one. I'm told that Lord Irvine was far from being his only opponent, and had the strong support, for example, of David Blunkett and Jack Straw.But Mr Cook is also beginning to show a commendable interest in Commons reforms that go further than ensuring hours which are convenient for its members.
He is on record as pronouncing that "good scrutiny means good government" – an obvious truth but in this Government also a revolutionary one. The question is whether he will get his way over the Commons as he failed to do over the Lords.War overshadows these mundanely domestic issues. Not, it should be said, for the fatuous reason advanced only by those who still don't get how much the world was changed by 11 September and unbelievably think Tony Blair shouldn't be travelling at present That isn't the problem at all. Indeed, while Lord Irvine may have been his executor, the White Paper bears the unmistakeable and active imprint of a Prime Minister keenly aware of the domestic agenda.No, it overshadows these issues by creating the notion that they don't matter But they do. Anything which even temporarily slows the government machine is seen as interfering with the divine right of a winner-takes-all administration to get its business through. That's not of course what Labour used to say about the poll tax. And what of its own U-turns from asylum to tuition fees? Isn't it possible that a more robust legislature might have prevented these – admitted – mistakes in the first place?But that isn't all.
