The test of any government is whether it can get its legislation through its parliament. For a coalition government this test is fundamental to its survival. The Coalition led by the Tories, with the Lib Dems enjoying the taste of real power for the first time in nearly a century, has just failed that test. No longer does the government look a sure thing until 2015. It is now much more likely to move, if it does survive its term, to a menu style programme, with each item separately negotiated and agreed; a slow and fractious process. It will, before 2015, in order to allow the parties to re-establish their independence in advance of appealing to voters, move to a Confidence and Supply basis. Senior Liberal Democrats are now hinting this in public and planning it in private.
Yesterday’s withdrawal of the vote on the timetable of the House of Lords reform bill was a technical defeat, but a blow nonetheless. The bill itself sailed through with an overwhelming majority, so all parties can say they support an elected House of Lords, while a political stunt by Labour and a rebellion against Cameron by Tories, shut off the oxygen supply necessary to give the bill life into law.
There is no political issue which promotes a greater degree of pompous rhetoric nor self righteous commentary among politicians than reform of the Upper House. All are blind to the core of the problem. It is this. Ask any leading Judge or Q.C and they will tell you that the quality of the legislation put on the statute books over the last thirty years is very poor. There is too much of it, doing too many things with ambiguity, opaqueness and contradiction. We can recall the paralysis at the Bank of England in the 2008 crash, as it found the left hand of the law demanded of it what the right hand of the law forbade. We need to look at the root cause of these duff products and start at the factory which makes them.
This idea of an elected lower house which has all sovereign power (it doesn’t) and an upper house of appointed or hereditary worthies (they aren’t as worthy as they think) acting as a kind of legislative quality control, sounds lovely. But in the modern world it does not work. Never in our history have we been burdened by so much legislation of so little merit and never have politicians been held in such low regard. The proof of the pudding, as the saying goes, is in the eating.
That modernisation of the institutions of our democracy is overdue, is obvious. That fewer, better, laws with sharper focus are called for, nobody denies. Signs that we have a government lacking the authority to fix all this are growing. A factor which has helped the U.K’s triple A rating has been its decisive government willing to do what has to be done. If restive Tory backbenchers continue to stab the Coalition in the back, the Lib Dems will retaliate. This will make harmonious relations in Cabinet difficult. That will worry the ratings Agencies.