Voting and Equivocal Mandates: Reform of the Lords should heed the EU experience
Mandate is an interesting word. Apart from sounding like a brand of aftershave or perfume formulated by the losing team from a task on “The Apprentice”, in a democracy it’s the authority for political action bestowed on the winning party by the people. As political parties come into elections with a manifesto, while it might be correct to say that the winning party has a mandate to govern, it’s much more difficult to say that there’s a specific mandate, based on an electoral majority, for each component of the manifesto. There’s no way of extrapolating from the mandate resulting from an overall Parliamentary majority to what the majority may feel about specific issues or policies. However, it doesn’t really matter. For a representative democracy that rarely uses referenda, a mandate from the people on each specific issue isn’t required, as the authority to govern includes all of the specific policies. For David Cameron and George Osborne to suggest, after the election and currently, that they had a ‘clear mandate’ for ‘tough’ EU negotiations seems like political tautology. And of course it may not even be true if a ‘clear mandate’ means a majority of the voters.
However, with millions of votes also cast for MEP’s, it seems the EU can respond to the sabre-rattling of Cameron and Osborne with their own mandate. But it’s worth considering how it’s derived and what it means. The EU, like the UK, has elections. The major difference is that those voting for the MEP’s are not voting to form a government. The governing body of the EU is made up of commissioners chosen by each of the member states. The function of the MEPs in the European Parliament is effectively to rubber-stamp the policies handed down from the governing body, or in the case of electing the President of the European Commission, rubber-stamp the choice of the member countries.
Rather bizarrely, this elected body of MEPs functions more like the UK’s unelected upper house, the House of Lords. The UK’s main legislative chamber, the elected House of Commons, is more like the unelected governing body of European commissioners.
Without the electorate being able to remove the EU’s governing body, it’s a model that can hardly be called democratic. In fact it could be said that the EU electorate is actually voting to maintain the status quo of the current undemocratic system, with an associated mandate. On the other hand, it could be argued – just – that as each particular EU member governments are mandated by their own electorate, firstly to maintain the status quo and stay in the EU, and secondly to send their representative commissioner, then this bestows some vicarious democratic trappings to the EU’s governing body.
Even if this were the case, the commissioners of the EU’s governing body have shown they can act independently. For example there’s a trade agreement currently being negotiated between the EU and the USA. It’s being conducted behind closed doors without involvement from the member governments. Over 3 million EU citizens have signed a petition to stop the talks, which might actually suggest there isn’t a specific mandate, but this has been ignored. The important and disquieting question is who is the commissioner responsible for these talks, Cecilia Malmström, answerable to? Again this seems to diminish the scant democratic credentials of the EU. Such anomalies are hardly surprising as the EU has developed on the back of the political ambitions and direction of various Presidents of the European Commission from its modest beginnings as a free trade area. With its earliest aim of furthering France’s agriculture and Germany’s industry, it now has political aspirations to form a United States of Europe along the lines of the USA. However, the president of the USA is elected by the people with a mandate to form a government.
The unease within an electorate of a member state who vote in the current EU system, indeed for any democracy, is that it results in mandates for two governing bodies from effectively the same electorate: In this case the government of the member country and the EU. With two very different systems, it’s hardly surprising that there are myriad conflicts with both governing bodies effectively claiming the same mandate. From this it’s clear that voting does not a democracy make. It’s a necessary but by no means sufficient condition and has to result in a unique mandate for an elected party to govern. If a democracy has the same elector voting for a number of representatives, then it must ensure that the roles of these representatives do not conflict.
This brings us on to the recent spat between the elected Conservative government and the unelected House of Lords. Amidst worries that many families would be worse off, the Government’s plans to cut tax credits were narrowly approved by the House of Commons but were defeated in the Lords. Since 1911, the House of Lords is not supposed to block financial legislation that has been approved by the lower house. However, some claim that this was secondary legislation, as opposed to a formal money act, in order to expedite the process through the chambers, and therefore the Lords were entitled to vote against it. Many think that this amounts to a constitutional crisis, with the House of Lords overstepping the mark and challenging the authority of the House of Commons. There could be more challenges as David Cameron is the first Conservative prime minister without a majority in the House of Lords. He has threatened to create dozens of new Conservative peers, despite the House of Lords being the world’s largest legislative body with over 800 members. Such a move in itself could lead to a constitutional crisis, leading to reforms of the upper house. However, this would be welcomed by many.
It’s hardly surprising that many feel the need for reform, as the House of Lords, with its role of debating and amending bills (or with restrictions, rejecting them), is an integral part of a constitution that is itself a burgeoning hodgepodge of tradition, convention, statutes and precedent. However, it seems that the root of the current conflict is an unpopular bill and an issue that has become more politicised than it should, mainly because the government does not have a majority in the House of Lords. The good thing is that currently it’s relatively easily fixed, but how much more difficult would it be with an elected upper chamber?
Given the nature of the role, an elected upper house would find it very difficult to avoid the kind of conflicts similar to those resulting from the mandates given to the member states and the EU. Although there have been proposals to make the Lords less political by having elected terms of 15 years for members of a reformed upper house, it’s highly likely that the traditional parties’ election machinery would be responsible for the majority of members. With two chambers having all the members mandated, and worse, perhaps operating politically in tandem, who would have precedence in the types of unforeseen conflicts within such a complex constitution? As the upper house is effectively the last port of call before legislation is foisted on the public, it may be preferable that members of upper house be above politics, and not even enter if they have political baggage.
A point lost on many of those demanding an elected upper house is that voting on its own doesn’t make a system more democratic, especially if doesn’t result in a clear, unequivocal mandate. I sometimes think we could do a lot worse than using the computer equivalent of a pin and the electoral roll as the best way of selecting members for an upper house.
So as for the burning question of the day, should the House of Lords be an elected assembly?
