15 May More on Blair’s Legacy
There is a thoughtful piece in the New Republic by David Fontana, Alex Massie, and Oliver Kamm on the legacy of Tony Blair. I think it adds some real insights on Blair’s contributions that were neglected in my previous post. Here is a key excerpt:
What, exactly, is Tony Blair’s legacy? With Iraq at the center of the news, much of the coverage of his decision to step down as prime minister next month concluded that his legacy is nothing too substantial. Indeed, The New York Times reported that Blair is not widely considered to be “one of Britain’s greatest prime ministers” and is instead in a “secondary tier” of British leaders.
This is only half right. Blair has done as much to change the policy and constitutional structure of his country as any British leader in several hundred years–and more than perhaps any other Western leader in the past generation. But, because it appears that he did not realign the political and electoral life of his country behind his Labour Party, his legacy will be that of an important policy transformer–but not a political transformer.
Blair was in power for only ten years, but the changes he pushed through during those ten years make your head spin. The United Kingdom has been, for several hundred years, one of the more centralized countries in the Western world. Led by Blair, Scotland now has a Parliament, and so does Wales; Northern Ireland exercises more self-government than it has in some time; and cities like London now govern themselves much more than before, with their own elected mayors. For hundreds of years, Britain has had a substantially hereditary second branch of the legislature, the House of Lords; Blair led the process of reforming the House of Lords by removing almost all hereditary peers. Blair changed the way that health care and education operate, by creating market mechanisms and other similar systems of quality control. The United Kingdom has for the past several decades been one of the few democracies in the world without a written constitution enforced by courts; so, in 1998, Blair pushed through Parliament the passage of the Human Rights Act, which creates a de facto written constitutional regime, with a new Supreme Court at front and center.
Regarding reform of the House of Lords, I posted the following comments over a PrawfsBlawg a few months ago:
The bulk of my comments come courtesy of a chapter by Dawn Oliver from Jeffrey Jowell and Dawn Oliver, eds., The Changing Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 5th ed., 2004).
First of all, after the Salisbury convention, the government is ‘entitled to have measures that were promised in its election manifesto given a fair wind in the House of Lords….’ Secondly, it is the sole prerogative of the House of Commons ‘to withdraw confidence from the government so that a general election or resignation of the government followed by appointment of a new Prime Minister charged with producing a new administration should take place.’ Finally, it is also the sole right of the Commons ‘to grant or refuse supply to the government, so that the Lords are not entitled to amend or delay—beyond a month—the passage of a money bill.’ This is clear evidence that the House of Lords plays a secondary governance role vis-à-vis the Commons, and this is no doubt a function of the latter’s democratic legitimacy. It would seem that having elected members in the upper house has implications for the primacy of the Commons with respect to its electorally (politically) derived democratic legitimacy.
The House of Lords, on the other hand, counters well-known problems associated with democratic majoritarianism with its largely constitution-preserving and constitution-enhancing functions: ‘the revision of legislation, especially on technical or drafting points; …delaying legislation in order for the Commons or the government to reconsider a proposal where there are serious concerns, in the House or elsewhere, about its wisdom; [serving as] a constitutional watchdog…; [scrutinizing], for instance, the grant of delegated power, of deregulation orders, and of European legislation; and…debating matters of public importance.’ The fact that these functions take place in a ‘House of Parliament’ makes them a bit of an anomaly, but they exist elsewhere as extra-parliamentary constitutional and legal functions deemed necessary or desirable for the maintenance of (democratic) constitutional integrity. This is one way in which the House of Lords reflects the fact that by design and default it complements the House of Commons.
Oliver provocatively remarks that the House of Lords ‘is not a body of “representatives” though to an extent it is a body of “voices”—a “civic forum”—in the sense of a body of people who can contribute particular and significant perspectives to debate.’ Democracy, as deliberative democratic theorists appreciate, is a talking-shop as well as a working-shop, and the House of Lords is well-suited to the former task.
The House of Lords complements the House of Commons in its intra-parliamentary ‘checking’ function with regard to an uninhibited majoritarianism while furthering the principles and practices of good governance (e.g. in providing non-party political mechanisms of accountability), a function provided by external, independent institutions in other constitutional regimes (i.e. those without parliamentary sovereignty): ‘My suggestion is that the House of Lords is coming to fill the gap and to compensate for the fact that other non-parliamentary checking institutions commonly found in written constitutions do not exist in the U.K.’
The constitutional ‘watchdog’ function mentioned above is seen, for instance, in the committee work of the upper chamber: the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the House of Lords Constitution Committee, its European Union Committee, and the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. As Oliver reminds us, ‘the House of Lords is in many respects a highly regarded and effective chamber in much of what it does. In its Annual Report for 2001-2 the House claimed to be one of the busiest parliamentary chambers in the world. Although its members are part-time, it is a full-time house. Increasingly its best work is done in committees and is of a non-partisan, technical, expert, or constitutional kind.’
Heretofore even party-aligned members of the House of Lords have acted in ways that reflect relative freedom from party pressures (without assuming all such pressures are negative): ‘Cross-benchers will often hold the balance in the House, and this means that the parties seeking the support of cross-benchers—as will often be the case since no one party has a majority in the House—have to argue the issues on the merits rather than appeal to party loyalty.’ Of course instances of members acting in a highly politically partisan manner ‘presents a legitimacy problem which could in turn undermine the apolitical and democratically desirable activity of the chamber.’
I leave the (mine, not hers) conclusion entirely to Oliver, who states than ‘An elected or substantially elected house would not…add value to the political process. A second chamber that was able to paralyse on party political grounds a government supported by a majority in an elected first chamber would tip the balance too far away from effectiveness and towards populism. [….] Further, in my view, elected members would not be well fitted to perform the important scrutiny and watchdog functions that the House of Lord performs. They would not necessarily have the required expertise and impartiality for these functions. These functions require substantial numbers of impartial and expert members, beyond the 20 per cent of cross-benchers currently in the House. People who do have the necessary combination of qualities would be unlikely to be willing to stand for election on a party ticket. Many such people are not politically committed and not aligned with political parties, or if aligned would not want to go through the process of submitting themselves for selection to stand for election and then standing for election. […] The present arrangements do provide people with the required expertise and impartiality, and they work in conditions which promote and respect that impartiality and do not expose them to undue party political pressure. Election could not in my view be expected to provide sufficient numbers of appropriately qualified people.’
Finally, while the UK has not had a written constitution as such (plenty of historical ‘constitutional’ documents and rulings however), I don’t think there are any persuasive reasons it needs (or needed) to have such a document. All of the reforms seem designed to imitate the U.S. as the definitive model of what a Liberal, constitutional democracy should look like. This seems awfully foolish to me.
[I do, however, applaud the changes in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.]
erratum: over at PrawfsBlawg…
media coverage concluded)“that his legacy is nothing too substantial”
I’d say his legacy is very substantial, indeed:
655,000 Iraqis dead, the once-proud middle-class destroyed and professional classes forced out of the country, 15% of the population either internally displaced or having fled, several civil wars raging within the country, the infrastructure of which, including health and basic services, has been utterly destroyed, the poisoning of Iraq with DU weapons, the squandering of what was left of the world’s good will toward the U.S. and Britain, the destabilization of the Middle East and the ‘radicalization’ of God-only-knows-how-many Muslims (and others) who burn with the lust for revenge (including our own homegrown terrorists–e.g., the ones who planned to attack Fort Dix, who incidentally were quite secular in their lifestyles), thereby endangering our security…let’s see, have I forgotten anything? –Oh yes, and of course, the precious blood of over 3400 of our brave American killing-machines, who will be envied by the many thousands who have returned with traumatic brain injuries (which will no doubt result in more murders–of Americans, this time).