From today's Daily Telegraph

Beware a House offended
(Filed: 20/06/2003)
By dismissing the Lord Chancellor in his high-handed way the Prime Minister has left the House of Lords looking and sounding like a nest of wasps into which some careless person has rudely thrust a stick. Much of the angry buzzing springs from what many peers view as rank discourtesy: a failure to consult them over major constitutional changes involving their own House.

It is a wholly valid complaint and one not met by the Prime Minister claiming, rather cynically, that he has granted the Lords a new freedom. Their presiding officer, he argues, is no longer to be a Lord Chancellor appointed by the Prime Minister. Henceforth they can choose any Speaker they please. That cuts no ice with the peers. Unlike the Commons, the Lords conducts its proceedings without direction from a Speaker's chair. That was the virtue of the Lord Chancellor. In wig and robes he looked a commanding figure, but he did not rule the Lords. They rule themselves and set great store by it.

A stronger underlying cause of anger is a feeling among peers that the Government has it in for them. It made that plain enough some while back by ejecting most of the hereditary peers. Indeed, as Lord Williams of Mostyn, the Labour leader of the Lords, makes clear to Rachel Sylvester, he would like to get rid of the lot. Yet even without most of the hereditary peers, the House of Lords has made itself fairly tiresome to the Government in recent months. With cross-bench support, it has amended and sent back to the Commons items of legislation of which it disapproved.

It has been seen on certain occasions as more representative of public feeling than an elected Commons tightly controlled by government whips. A Government accustomed to getting its own way has not taken kindly to this. It can, of course, offset in the Commons any change made in the Lords but this consumes parliamentary time, something of which a Government with a heavy legislative programme is always short.

In their present mood, the Lords might well decide to increase the Government's difficulties. We shall get some indication of this if and when the Government's mangled proposals for the future of foxhunting come before the Lords. In normal times, there is an understanding between government and Lords.

Both sides observe limits. By conduct that even the emollient Lord Williams has to admit was discourteous, the Prime Minister has put that understanding at risk. The breach that threatens might have serious constitutional consequences. It lies with the Prime Minister more than the peers to avoid it.


Lords' pub music reprieve
The Government suffered a defeat in the Lords when peers voted to exempt small venues such as pubs from requiring entertainment licences for live music.

The vote came during a debate on Commons amendments to the Licensing Bill which introduces a radical shake-up of the alcohol and entertainment licensing system and abolishes fixed drinking hours. The Opposition move was carried by 128 votes to 113, majority 15.
Small premises where live music is provided to an audience of fewer than 200 and where entertainment finishes before 11.30pm would not have to meet the licensing requirements under the latest peers' amendment.