Well, it’s “lamentable” in the sense that I felt like crying when I read his article in the Observer today. My first reaction was: “Shut up, why don’t you?” It is so frustrating to have a former Liberal party leader arguing against the coalitions’ Lords reform package.
But then you read through Steel’s arguments and you see that his position is built on sand.
Lord Tyler brilliantly puts the opposite view here.
Let’s take Lord Steel’s specific points:
Yet its proponents cannot have considered what would happen if the votes of the future 20% unelected were outrageously to sway a matter against the elected majority in both houses.
But the Parliament Act will remain in place, ensuring the supremacy of the Commons. That has been made clear.
Increasing numbers of MPs are also recognising the dangers of an elected upper house undermining the primacy of the House of Commons, and of having elected senators (with a 15-year tenure as proposed), possibly of different political parties, wandering about their constituencies claiming, correctly, that they too have a mandate.
The Second Chamber members’ constituencies will be much larger than Commons MPs’ constituencies. They will have about half a million voters. So the situation will be rather like MEPs visa vis MPs at the moment. The focus on the much smaller Commons constituencies will still naturally come from the Commons MP, simply because they will have that one area to focus one, while the Second Chamber member will have an area five times as large to represent. The issue of, perhaps, duplicating case work can easily managed through the convention of the good manners of communication. In any case, what’s wrong with a bit of healthy competition? It happens in all other walks of life.
The public has not yet woken to the fact that a full-time salaried house is going to be a lot more expensive than the present, part-time, unpaid one.
I cannot believe – simply cannot believe – that a former Liberal party leader is telling us that we can’t have democracy because it is too expensive!
What is rather annoying is that David Steel keeps going on about his bill. David, your bill is history. Get over it!
Liberal Burblings 
Is what Steel is saying really so terrible? Fine, the Commons will be supreme, but there is a danger of unelected votes being the deciding factor on a matter, as he says, even if the only result is that it gets sent back to the HoC. And he has a point re wages – how much more would an elected HoL cost?
As for Steel’s bill suggesting immediate reform, I can’t see the problems with it. His Observer article makes the point well that Clegg’s reforms will be completed only by 2025, beyond his lifetime, so this nasty suggestion coming from here and elsewhere that Steel is fighting to save his own seat is just plain wrong. Steel has made it clear that he is in favour of reform today, and his bill should be supported rather than ridiculed.
In the absence of anything else, no, his package is not terrible. But for goodness sake, the coalition have brought forward a sensible package which includes one of his recommendations (the independent appointments commission) and would achieve, at last, 80% elected status in the second chamber. It is infuriating that he is opposing this long-held Liberal party, Liberal Democrat principle of democratisation of the second chamber. I know he wants a fully elected chamber in the long term (presumably by about 2889) but by opposing the 80/20 proposal of the government he is in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
And it is ridiculous to say at the same time that the measures don’t complete until 2025 and also talk about “evolutionary change” being needed. The government proposal is evolutionary – it takes fifteen years, and it starts in 2015 with a third of the house becoming elected – so it would start to take effect virtually as quickly as Steel’s package.
In short, this is completely muddled thinking by David Steel. He hasn’t even made an effort to think through the proposals properly.
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The rather obvious answer to the question, “what will happen when the votes of the unelected sway the issue?” is, “exactly the same thing as has happened with every vote cast in the House of Lords for almost 500 years”. It would a good thing, just once, to have a vote in our second parliamentary chamber decided by the votes of parliamentarians who HAD been elected, because that has NEVER happened yet. The Steel position is akin to a demand that 80% election is unsatisfactory because it isn’t 100% election, yet who himself then proposes 0% election – exactly the sort of shameless intellectual contortionism which characterised the No2AV campaign. There are various forms of 0% election, and some of these are better than others – but not a single one of them can hold a candle to 80% election.
Those who are genuinely concerned with a battle over primacy should understand and accept that composition will no longer be an acceptable basis for primacy. If there are amendments to the Parliament Act that need to be made to reassert the old conventions then we should debate them; but the difficulty in doing so will not be taken by the Government as an acceptable argument for doing nothing.
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