A Great Day for Liberty?
by Matthew Humphreys
Throughout the last few centuries of British, and particularly English history, the House of Commons was perceived as favouring the liberty of the common man over the privileges of the aristocracy. In a succession of reforms, the balance of power between the monarchy, the House of Lords and the House of Commons slowly shifted to favour the Commons, and the pool of individuals entitled to vote for and become Members of Parliament was slowly extended from a relatively limited strata of the wealthy to include basically all adults. Today, in a monumental irony, it is what’s left of the unelected House of Lords that is fighting for the liberty of all Britons, most recently in its steadfast opposition to a wrongheaded “anti-terrorism” bill supported by the Labour Party which dominates the Commons.
The bill in question was originally designed to give the Home Secretary power to unilaterally impose “control orders” designed to severely restrict the freedom of persons suspected of being terrorists prior to any actual trial, though the government had already been forced to amend the bill and shift the power from the Home Secretary to the judiciary. Opposition parties (led by the Conservative Party, showing that for all its faults it is still capable of sound judgement) attempted to further amend the bill to insert a “sunset clause” that would cause the provisions to expire in twelve months time, the intention being that parliament would then review the system’s operation and debate a new bill renewing the provisions—but having the option of making possible adjustments based on the evidence of the first twelve months.
With the House of Commons effectively under a Labour Party stranglehold, the opposition there failed. However, the House of Lords still retains some sense of independence and refused to budge, leading to what many commentators are (metaphorically) describing as a constitutional ping pong contest. The House of Lords remained in session for a record 31 straight hours last Thursday and Friday, with some news sources on Friday humorously reporting that it was “still Thursday in Westminster” (this being the case because Thursday’s business had yet to be concluded, and thus the day's parliamentary session had not been bought to an end).
Then, Friday afternoon, Lord Onslow (one of the few remaining hereditary peers, who hold their seats by inheritance), to the apparent chagrin of some Labour MPs, angrily yet eloquently summed up the principle at stake: “Temporary politicians should not be allowed permanently to remove the right of habeas corpus.” Prime Minister Blair and Home Secretary Clarke meanwhile repeatedly insisted both within parliament and outside that there would be no climb-down-then in a stunning turn around at 3:30pm, offered exactly that. The compromise isn’t quite the sunset clause the Conservatives wanted, but in its effect it comes damn close: The government has promised that a fresh bill will be presented to the Commons within 15 months, thus placing the current provisions up for re-debate and potential repeal.
Most of the commentaries I’ve read describe it as “a great day for British liberty” or some similar cliché. But I am not so sure: the elected politicians in the House of Commons wished to curtail a right that has, in principle if not always in practice, been held by Englishmen for centuries (and subsequently by Scots and Welshmen as the island of Britain gradually unified), and were stopped only because of the unelected peers. Furthermore, a hereditary peer, a hold-over from the aristocratic system of old, enunciated an objective truth about rights that seems to be completely lost on most of the current inhabitants of the elected house. (And in truth of course, the vast majority of those in both Houses who did stand against this legislation grasp the relevant principle only inconsistently-there are only a very small number of sitting British politicians whom I would describe as reasonably consistent libertarians.)
Ultimately, this is but a minor victory for liberty; the “great day” will come only when every elected politician consistently grasps the principle of objective individual rights and when the parliamentary system is reformed on the basis of the kind of sound philosophical reasoning we have not seen since the days of John Locke, rather than the piecemeal spur-of-the-moment manner in which the British system has been mangled of late. And on the evidence of recent events, I am forced to wonder whether such a future system might find a place for an unelected chamber after all.
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