Mr Balfour's Poodle (30 page)

In effect the delaying powers left to the House of Lords under the Parliament Act proved to be still more substantial in the case of the Home Rule Bill than in that of the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill. Not merely an interval of five times the statutory period, but the Easter Rebellion of 1916, the destruction of the Irish Parliamentary Party, the outbreak of one civil war and the sowing of the seeds of another intervened before different men negotiated a different settlement in 1922. The evil of haste was given a wide berth.

After these excitements, the third measure to pass under the Parliament Act—the amending Parliament Bill of 1947—had a very quiet passage into law. But it was a much tamed House of Lords which had to deal with it. After 1945 the peers enjoyed the same nominal powers as in the years immediately before 1914, but they did not enjoy the same confidence in their own position in the state. The second Parliament Bill did rather less than keep pace with the change of spirit which had already occurred. It first passed through the House of Commons in the autumn of 1947 and came up
for second reading in the Lords at the end of January, 1948. The debate was adjourned in order that the Government might consider an Opposition suggestion for a Constitutional Conference and an attempt at an agreed solution. A few days later the Government announced its willingness to enter into such talks, and the conference was accordingly set up. It was slightly shorter-lived than the conference of 1910, but equally fruitless in its results. A measure of ill-defined agreement was reached on the future composition of the Upper House, but the conflict on powers was not resolved. The Government amended its demand for a maximum delay of twelve months from the date of a bill's first second reading in the Commons to one of nine months from the date of its first third reading, if that should prove to be a longer period. This concession was designed to cover a situation in which a bill had a slow passage through the Lower House. The Opposition, for its part, was prepared to advance as far as twelve months' delay from the first third reading. The difference of three months proved insuperable. It was not as slight as may appear to be the case, for the Government's proposals would have ensured the legislative utility of the fourth session of a radical Parliament, while the Opposition's offer would have confined this inviolability to the first three sessions. Furthermore, as in 1910, this difference of principle shrouded an intense concern, on both sides, with a particular measure. The nationalisation of the iron and steel industry was as effective a bar to the agreement of Mr. Attlce and Mr. Churchill in 1948 as Home Rule had been to the agreement of Asquith and Balfour thirty-eight years earlier.

Foundering on this rock, the 1948 conference abandoned its work at the end of April. In June the interrupted second reading debate was resumed in the House of Lords, and the
bill was rejected by 177 votes to 81. The Government was then confronted with the problem that, if it allowed parliamentary sessions to begin and end at the normal time, the bill would not become law under the processes of the first Parliament Act until a date dangerously near to the statutory end of the Parliament. Its choice of electioneering dates would be seriously impaired. A brief special session was accordingly summoned for September, 1948, during which the bill completed the second of its three rounds. On this occasion it was rejected by the peers by a vote of 204 to 34. The normal 1948-49 session was then extended until December, 1949, and the bill was able to complete its third lap in a leisurely way. It came before the Lords for the last time on November 29, was rejected by no votes to 37, and received the Royal Assent on December 16, the last day of the session and the last sitting day of the Parliament of 1945. This second Parliament Act has not yet been called into operation.

The Constitutional Conference of 1948, as has been noted, was concerned with the composition as well as the powers of the House of Lords. In the former aspect of its work it followed a trail which had been well-worn in the years since 1911. But all those who had trodden it had failed to reach their destination and been forced to retrace their footsteps. The Asquith Government attempted to honour the terms of the preamble to its Parliament Act by setting up a Cabinet committee to consider reform. But no agreement was reached and no scheme emanated from the Government.
¹
The next excursion was made by the Lloyd George Coalition, which appointed the all-party Bryce Conference in 1917. The result of their deliberations on this point was a unanimous suggestion that a majority of the places in a reformed House of Lords should be filled on a non-hereditary basis, but no further agreement. The most popular view in the conference, however, was that the occupants of these non-hereditary seats should be elected by the House of Commons or by a joint committee of both Houses.

In 1922 Lord Peel
¹
brought forward a series of official proposals on behalf of the Coalition Government. These provided for a section of the Upper House to be elected by the hereditary peers, another section to be elected from outside, and a third to be nominated by the Crown. But the reception was cool or hostile and the plan was not proceeded with. This became a common pattern. It applied to the proposals of Lord Chancellor Cave
²
in 1927, based upon the work of a Cabinet Committee, and to the unofficial plan of Lord Clarendon
³
in the following year. Both of these plans
provided for an Upper House of about 350 members, 150 of whom were to be elected by the hereditary peers and 150 nominated by the Crown. Lord Clarendon made it clear that the latter 150 should be nominated in proportion to the strength of the parties in the House of Commons and should serve, unless re-nominated, for one Parliament only.

Lord Salisbury made the next attempt in 1933. He accepted the main outline of the two preceding plans, but left vague the method of choosing the second group of 150. There was a suggestion of indirect election through county councils. An essential part of these proposals was the return to the new Upper House of most of the powers which the House of Lords had lost under the first Parliament Act, and the exclusion for the future of any sudden change in the balance of the new House by the use of the prerogative or other means. As a result, Salisbury's scheme aroused bitter Opposition hostility and did not even secure official Conservative support.

A feature of these inter-war reform plans was that, although in this they conflicted with one of the recommendations of the Bryce Conference, they would have left unimpaired the permanent Conservative majority in the Upper House. As such, the proposals naturally failed to interest the other parties. Their primary objection to the House of Lords was that it was partisan, with the fact that it was hereditary and archaic an added but essentially secondary irritant. Reconstruction which did not touch the fundamental point therefore appeared as little more than window-dressing by the Conservative Party.

During the Constitutional Conference of 1948 an attempt was made, in principle, to meet this difficulty. All the party representatives agreed that ‘the revised constitution of the House of Lords should be such as to secure as far as practicable
that a permanent majority is not assured for any one political party'.
^d
As agreement upon powers was not reached, the need to give concrete shape to this principle did not arise; and had it done so it may be surmised that the task would have proved more difficult than the easy statement of approach may have suggested.

As a result of the failure of this conference the preamble of the first Parliament Act has entered upon its fifth decade of non-fulfilment. Nor is it easy to see the conditions for an agreed reform arising in the future. In a broad sense the positions of 1910 are still occupied by the contending parties in the state. The right, attracted by instinct and tradition to the existing hereditary House, contemplates a change only because its attachment to a powerful Second Chamber is still stronger. The left, distrustful of the existing archaicism but interested above all in the supremacy of the Commons, sees the relationship between the two Houses, rather than the composition of the second, as the dominant issue, and is unwilling to accept a reform which might increase the prestige of an Upper House still essentially conservative. This is a deadlock which the nation has survived for some years, and the continuance of which it may face with a degree of equanimity.

A direct comparison of constituency with constituency is impossible. Population shifts have changed the character of many divisions and, through the redistribution which they have made necessary, have obliterated many more. The best that can be attempted are ‘big city' and regional comparisons. The basis on which they have been made is that, in 1906, ‘Liberal' seats are taken to be those in which Liberal, Labour or (in what is now the United Kingdom) Irish Nationalist candidates were elected, on the assumption that, without left-wing opposition, an orthodox Liberal could always have won a division for which a Labour or Nationalist representative was chosen; in 1945, on a similar assumption, ‘Labour' seats are taken to be those to which Labour, ILP or Communist but not Liberal candidates were elected. These assumptions give for 1906, 438 out of 592, or 74%, of the seats in what is now the United Kingdom to the Liberal Party, and, for 1945, 402 out of a total of 640 seats, or 63%, to the Labour Party. In estimating the relative importance to the two parties of different areas this disparity between their absolute strengths over the country as a whole must be taken into account.

The drawing of satisfactory regional boundaries is not easy. A straightforward acceptance of those normally used for administrative purposes would amalgamate too many occupationally and socially disparate areas, and thus obscure important differences of political affiliation. The method employed has been to treat separately the County of London and eight other large cities; to amalgamate the
East Midland towns of Nottingham, Leicester and Derby into one unit, the Lancashire parliamentary boroughs (other than Liverpool, Manchester and Salford) into another, the Yorkshire parliamentary boroughs (other than Leeds and Sheffield) into a third, and the Scottish burghs and districts (other than Edinburgh and Glasgow) into a fourth; and to divide the rest of the country into counties or small groups of similar counties. It has produced some clumsiness, but it has endeavoured to avoid the marriage of areas which are obviously incongruous.

The results of the comparison are given in the following table: