Every day when I walk through the Members’ Lobby and under the Churchill arch into the Chamber of the House of Commons, I pass Lloyd George on my right. I thought about him at the end of last week.
This is because we were debating the final stages of the Hereditary Peers Bill – the proposal to abolish the remaining right of Hereditary Peers to sit in the House of Lords.
Listening to the debate got me thinking about Lloyd George’s landmark 1909 budget – the one sometimes referred to as the ‘People’s Budget’.
You see, Lloyd George – then Chancellor of the Exchequer in Asquith’s famous Liberal Government – had introduced a budget aiming to raise money for a new social welfare programme by introducing a new income tax and a 20% tax on any increase in the value of land when it changed hands. Included in this programme was the plan to introduce the first funding of old age pensions. Unsurprisingly, Britain’s wealthier land-owning members of society were not happy.
This included Peers – who were having none of it at the other end of the Palace of Westminster. Subsequently, the Conservative Chief Whip in the Lords – Earl Waldegrave – requested that his colleagues attend the reading of the Bill to oppose it. A four line whip – I might add!
His will was done – and the budget was opposed in the House of Lords by 350 votes to 75.
At this point it’s worth observing that we were approaching nothing short of a constitutional crisis. The two Houses of Parliament, green and red, set firmly against one another.
So what happened next? Asquith called a General Election and, albeit by a smaller majority, the Liberals won. Now Asquith was a wily old bird and he thought the way to sort out the Tory majority was to get King George V’s permission to create enough Liberal Peers to outnumber them.
The newspapers of the time were full of little else. Tory Lords began to get the jitters and they split into two factions: ‘’Hedgers’ – who hedged their bets by pragmatically supporting the bill and ‘Ditchers’ – who would fight to the last ditch attempt to oppose the budget at all costs.
The rest is history, and on 28th April 1910 the ‘People’s Budget’ was passed.
Casting even further back. In 1642, King Charles I entered the House of Commons to arrest five MPs and remove them from the Chamber. He did not succeed, and 7 years later was beheaded. No Monarch has ever been allowed to freely enter Parliament since. All this is to say that the Commons have never taken kindly to an attempt to overturn public will by an unelected authority. The House of Lords’ pushback to Lloyd George’s budget was no exception. Their reluctance to cooperate had far reaching consequences and in 1911 the Parliament Act was passed, which established the legal primacy of the House of Commons for the very first time.
Returning to last week. When I sat down in the House of Commons Chamber, my colleague Sarah Olney said to me, ‘this is an astonishingly well humoured debate, Jamie, colleagues on different sides of the house are even making the occasional joke’.
At this I raised an eyebrow. Could this really be Act V scene v of a historic drama which has since 1909, coloured the relationship between the Commons and Lords?
And yet, I could see for myself that what she said was true. Yes, some Conservative MPs made points about Hereditary Peers bringing great knowledge to the Lords, suggesting that they should be allowed to keep their seats in the Lords at least until they were infirm or departed. But alas, none of this was taken completely seriously. This new Government is pursuing modernisation with cast iron conviction, and any defence of the old ways seem to ring as comic satire throughout the Chamber, regardless of how sincerely meant.
Indeed, the House of Lords was once mocked by Gilbert and Sullivan in his 19th century comic opera Iolanthe:
“Bow, ye lower middle classes! Bow, ye tradesmen, bow, ye masses!”
Those lyrics from the “Entrance and March of Peers” rang through my mind…
And, pinch me, was I dreaming. Watching the debate it did appear to me to be more of an act than a reaction. Similar to Gilbert and Sullivan, it was clear that any defence of inherited supremacy was met with derision and ridicule.
Back in July, the House of Lords had backed a Conservative amendment that would block the expulsion of sitting Hereditary Peers, proposing instead to end by-elections, thus reducing the number of Hereditary Peers overtime.
“Division!”
And so we departed to the Aye and No lobbies to determine the fate of those Hereditary Peers – rejecting this amendment by 336 votes to 77.
As a Liberal, I’m proud to have been one of the 336. We are a modern country which values equity, opportunity and representation for all. Those who sit in our two houses should never forget they are here by democratic mandate, or merit – a chance possible for all and granted to those who work for it. I simply cannot find it in myself to justify a body that legislates by blood. It is the stuff of an unjust past.
So there it is. Last week was the most surprising final paragraph of the tale of our two houses which has seen thunder, lightning and high drama. As the Speaker might have said, with an eye to history, ‘the hedgers have it, the hedgers have it’.
The Hedgers have it
