I say, Tony…
…try smearing this:
The queen has been left “exasperated and frustrated” at the legacy of Tony Blair’s 10 years in power, friends have disclosed.
So how do you think the New Labour high command will do it, as they are wont to do? Will we shortly be reading in a sympathetic newspaper about a ’semi-detached’ queen with ‘psychological flaws‘, perhaps? How about destroying her career with trumped up charges?
One’s republican fervour wavers momentarily.
Posted on May 27th, 2007 at 9:13 am
| See also • The return of the semi-detached ayatollah • Modern education: first religion, now royalty • Can’t say it too often |
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Filed under Blair, New Labour, UK politics |
Unless and until a written constitution is hammered out which clearly limits the power of the majority party in Parliament to basically run an unchecked elected dictatorship (including changing the constitution at will), I really don’t see how anyone can be in a really big hurry to ditch the Lords or the Monarchy.
Strange how we need an unelected aristocracy to keep this democracy thing working.
Which is why the Lords was put there in the first place.
Not to keep the ariso’s in government, but to provide the checks and balances that NuLab are now trying to destroy.
he he, you are on top form at the moment Mr Yogurt.
Strange how we need an unelected aristocracy to keep this democracy thing working.
Yep. I’m massively conflicted on Lords reform. The old buggers have been the only things between us and John Reid of late.
Democracy is not fundamentally good and hereditary power is not fundamentally bad. The sooner everyone manages to reconcile themselves to that idea, the better. The unthinking crap spewed out when Labour first started scrapping the hereditaries (”we’ve got to get rid of them because they’re not elected”) was almost as irritating and embarrassing to behold as the public outrage when the Queen didn’t pretend to be upset when her son’s promiscuous bitch of an ex-wife died.
But such is Britain under Labour. We’ve become a nation of idiots. This is why democracy is fundamentally flawed - it only works for the best when voters are informed and intelligent. For the last ten years, we’ve been constantly kept in the dark about what’s really going on (changing recording methods, setting arbitrary targets, releasing false reports, etc.), ignored when we’ve become inconveniently vocal, and - realising our ignorance and lack of importance - have slipped into celebrity-obsessed imbecility to boot. We don’t deserve to vote and parliament doesn’t deserve power - monarchy is the only solution. Fact.
/exasperation
Its arrogance on a massive scale to belive(as blair does)that he can improve a system that has evolved over hundreds of years and works.It would seem that the only thing stopping nulab from imposing their will is the lords.
There’s some ahistorial nonsense in the postings above. The House of Lords hasn’t “evolved” - its form and functioned have altered drastically at ertain moments in history including abolition during the Interregnum. Its ability to permanently block legislation did not “evolve” away, it was disposed of after a great struggle and a constitutional crisis.
Moreover the only way it was “put there in the first place…”to provide the checks and balances” was because the powerful nobles who comprised the better part of it wished to dominate the power of the monarchy.It wasn’t some wise balancing act on the part of some constitutionalist - it was a power struggle.
Why it is “irritating”, in a democracy, to wish to remove a chamber which is not elected, escapes me. It may well be that hereditary power “is not fundamentally bad” and Aristotle would have concurred (though he would not, I think, have admird the Lords) but it is not actually consistent with democracy. Nor is it remotely consistent to complain that we are not provded with informastion and then to suggest monarchy, the least open of all political arrangments, as a solution to that. (It is possible that Nosemonkey is being ironic and I am missing it - I certainly hope so.)
I didn’t think it was possible to miss the irony of the final bit, it must be said… Live and learn.
Still, the “not consistent with democracy bit” - neither (if you’re taking the strict “direct democracy” interpretation that you seem to be) is a written constitution, because that prevents the current will of the people from overriding what their ancestors laid down as inviolable. Nor are unelected judges laying down verdicts on laws passed by elected representatives in ways that those elected representatives didn’t intend. But both those methods are ways of keeping elected governments in check that have been proven to work - just as has the House of Lords.
(You could even argue that in a bicameral system - where each chamber is elected at a different time - it wouldn’t be democratic for the earlier-elected chamber to try to block legislation being pushed for by the most recently-elected one, as they would be going against the current will of the people. Which was, I believe, one of the major reasons the Commons were initially wary of an elected Lords - it would undermine their own moral high ground as the only fully-elected chamber… Similar things can be seen in the States, where the use of the presidential veto after the midterms is always met with a sound tut-tutting if the other party has gained control of Congress.)
It’s not perfect to have an unelected, hereditary body being able to veto legislation, no - but it is more flexible than some of the alternatives, through the sheer fact of weight of numbers (several hundred peers being less fallible than one judge or one piece of paper with rules drafted decades/centuries ago). But one thing that is certain is that elected bodies need to be held in check just as much as do absolutist monarchs/dictators/whatever.
(I would be more coherent and concise, but have had a fair amount of wine… Sorry…)
I don’t think there’s any resaon to think that a herditary chamber has any greater capacity to act as a check than has an elected chamber, and plenty of evidence to suggest that the large majority of the hereditary members will be lazy, socially ignorant wasters whose greatest enthusaism for attendance comes when they have the chance to vote for a poll tax.
An appointed chamber might very well be worse (though when you hear people talk about “hardworking peers” and how the Lords have blocked draconian measures coming form the Commons, do bear in mind that normally those aren’t hereditary peers) but a hereditary chamber isn’t just “not perfect”, it’s by and large a chamber of sponging Tories.
This, by the way:
But one thing that is certain is that elected bodies need to be held in check just as much as do absolutist monarchs/dictators/whatever
is the sort of exaggeration which gives internet discussion a bad name.
Sorry, ejh - I was going to engage further as I usually enjoy discussions about the British constitution (it being a bit of a pet topic), but have now realised that there’s no point when your arguments consist wholly of unsupported assertions and generalisations backed up by snide remarks that come dangerously close to ad hominem attacks.
However, before I go, four words that sum up the reason why having two elected chambers can be very dangerous: the power of party. (And if you don’t know why party politics is a bad thing, find someone else to explain it to you - as you seem to be wilfully misunderstanding everything I say, I really can’t be bothered.)
Sorry for the comment box spat, Mr McK - won’t happen again, but that’s what you get when you post about the constitution. Everyone’s an expert, but no one knows what they’re talking about.
Sorry for the comment box spat, Mr McK
Don’t mind me. At least nobody got called ‘filth’ or ‘cunt’ on this occasion.
There’s an excellent conversation here if we could just ramp it back a bit. I’ll try and weigh in later when I get more time.
Oh, don’t be silly.
Firstly, I believe that the second largest turnout for a vote in Lords history was to pass the poll tax. That’s an assertion, all right - is it correct?
Second, I assert that where the Lords have blocked Commons legislation it’s not on the whole been the work of hereditary peers (you seem to be under the impression that the Lords is a hereditary body - this has not been entirely true for centutries, if ever, and its prominent legal minds would not normally be hereditary). If this is not so, it might be better to meet that claim with some contrary facts rather than with a hissy fit.
Third, if you really think that elected bodies require checks as much as dictators or absolutist monarchs, it might be as well to support that claim with some examples, since it seems to me to be the absolute essence of an “unsupported assertion”.
Fourth - party politics. I actually know a fair bit about this and interestingly, yesterday I voted in an election using the party list system, a system I dislike because of the scope it gives to party patronage. There are, however, many things to be said in favour of party politics, and simply claiming it as “a bad thing” as if it were self-evident is out old friend - the generalisation. Oh, and the “unsupported assertion”.
Fifth, there is nothing in my previous posting which resembles an “ad hominem attack” of any sort, leading me to believe that you do not understand what the term means.
As a rule, when somebody stomps out of a comments box saying that other people don’t know what they’re talking about, it often means that they themselves expect to be listened to as the expert when they are not. This is manifestly and regretttably the case here.
Very well then - but I’ll do this via a couple of links to keep the reams of text down. My basic take on the Lords can be found here, and my fundamental problem (and worry) about the British system was neatly summed up by Lord Hailsham back in the 70s.
That explains why I reckon democracies need checks just as much as monarchies and dictatorships. Plus - I’ll avoid Godwin’s law by not mentioning 1933 - Mugabe and Tito were both elected, to name but a couple. And that’s before you mention King Juan Carlos - an hereditary ruler appointed by a military dictator, who was arguable the single most selfless and decent political reformer of the last 50 years in his returning Spain to freedom from tyranny.
Democracy is not all it’s cracked up to be - which is why my problem with the Lords reformers is largely the slogan of “x is bad because it’s not elected”. Just because something is not elected doesn’t make it bad, and just because something is elected doesn’t make it good.
Any reform of the British system needs to start not from the viewpoint that “we need more democracy”, but “we need more transparency and safety from unfair impositions by the state”. If more democracy is the best way to achieve that, fine. But I’m pretty much convinced that the party system will always get in the way - it’s not in any political party’s interest to limit the power of the state. So unless you get a government as selfless as Juan Carlos, and prepared to legislate itself into a weaker position, we’re screwed.
(As a final aside, you mention the poll tax - fine. Brought in by a democratically-elected government as part of its election manifesto - and the same party was returned at the next general election as well. Isn’t democracy great?)
Firstly, the opening paragraphs of Quentin Hogg’s snippet is highly tendentious if it is not in fact (as I would have said) nonsense. It’s one the aforementioned generalisations, and sweeping even by the standards of the genre.
Secondly, being elected does not in itself make a democracy (Tito might have been surprised to hear his rule so described) and nor should one overste Juan Carlos’ role in Spanish democracy. There’s no question that he did well both after Franco’s death and (ultimately) after Tejero’s putsch, but his role in neither was quite as unambiguous as some people like to believe. Nor was his role remotely as important as that of real, actual democrats who risked beatings, imprisonment and worse during both crises. None of the many thousands who did so would have accepted that hereditary rule was superior to democratic - indeed, the opposite contention was what they were struggling for. And without that sturggle there’s no reason to think that Juan Carlos would have seen the way the wind was blowing. Indeed there would have been no wind at all.
“We need more transparency and safety from unfair impositions by the state”. We do. We would get the opposite from any hereditary system. The point is that in a monarchy decisions are taken not in public fora after public debate but by those who have access to the person of the monarch - hence the existence of bodies such as the Privy Chamber and the Privy Council and the historical struggle for supremacy between the two.
It’s not in any political party’s interest to limit the power of the state. Nonsense. In fact political parties have very often done so, for reasons of principle or because it was in their interests of their supporters that those powers be limited. The power over the subject of a modern democracy, even with New Labour’s offences against the principle, is rather less than under a hereditary system. L’etat, c’est moi is not really consistent with the legal rights of the subject.
Yes, the poll tax was brought in by a democratically-elected government (and supported enthusiastically by the hereditary parts of the constitution) and yes the party responsible was returned to power at the next election. You neglect to note that this was with a different leader (quite hard to arrange with a hereditary monarchy - it didn’t happen quite that way with Ship Money) and on the promise of abolishing said tax, which they proceeded to do.
Which highlights the problem with this sort of argument. It involves making some highly tendentious and arguments and sizeable leap of logic, citing historical examples that are rather more complex than presented and then ignoring the host of historical examples that point in the opposite direction. Trying to present monarchial power as limited power, when of course it is essentially the opposite, may be an amusing debating-society challenge but is not really to be taken seriously as a contribution to constitutional theory.
Which is, erm… Why I didn’t do it. Read what I wrote again and pay attention to what I said, not what you think I said, and come back to me. (If you can try to be patronising, so can I…)
Citing specifics in this kind of argument is always futile, because there simply is no perfect system of government, and it’s blatantly impossible to do an accurate summary of any historical event in a couple of hundred words (though you underestimate the personal involvement of Juan Carlos far more than I over-egged it).
But you started it, so ner… I was initially trying to keep to the kind of loosely-sketched theoretical generalisations that are more appropriate for comment box discussions. (I even resisted mentioning Plato and enlightened despots after you brought up his pupil, in a vain attempt try and avoid pointless sidetracks.)
If you like, lay out your reasoning why a democracy needs no firm checks (as you seem to be arguing), and precisely how you would reform the current system to prevent potential abuses of power of the like we’ve seen in recent years. (There are ways of doing this democratically, but the current proposals won’t do it - not without simultaneous reform of the Commons, Cabinet and royal prerogative, none of which are on the cards.)
My take on the current constitutional arrangement is simple - the current half-arsed reform of the Lords was ill-considered and has created an even worse situation than before, and as yet I see no sign that the current proposals to continue those reforms are going to create a situation that is in any way better. It was - and this was the main, general point of what I was saying (after the initial joke post) - reform for reform’s sake (largely based on an entrenched Labour party opinion that the old Lords was fundamentally Tory), without truly considering what the reforms were meant to bring about beyond enabling the Commons (i.e., at least during recent parliaments, the government) to have an easier time of it.
(You would, by the way, probably find we agree on a lot more than you seem to think we do - but after your misreading of my first joke comment I get the impression that you now think I’m a hardcore evil foxhunting Tory monarchist. Nothing’s ever that simple. I, on the other hand, have written you off as one of those well-meaning reformers who can’t understand the practical reasons why the old system existed bar the simplistic “ruling class entrenchment” thing - and a lack of full comprehension is never the best place from which to start out when you’re talking of reforming things.)
Citing specifics in this kind of argument is always futile
But when I don’t, I’m making unsupported assertions! ¿Qué va?
*sigh*
!
I’ve never eaten a bucket of popcorn so quickly!