The Parliament (No.2) Bill : victim of the Labour Party's constitutional conservatism?

Green, Lavi David

Abstract

This thesis assesses the failure of the UK House of Commons to pass an item of legislation: the Parliament (No. 2) Bill 1968. The Bill was an attempt by the Labour Government 1964-70 at wholesale reform of the House of Lords. Government bills would normally pass without difficulty, but this Bill had to be withdrawn by the Government at the Committee Stage in the Commons. While the Bill’s failure is often attributed to a backbench filibuster, this was a necessary but not sufficient cause for the failure. The filibustering would have been overcome if the Bill was supported enthusiastically by a larger number of the Labour backbenchers.

The Labour Party had an attachment to the Westminster Model of British Government. Within this constitutional conservatism, there was a conservative standpoint on the House of Lords which consisted of three tenets: firstly, the Lords’ existing anachronistic/irrational composition was considered as preferable to a rationalised composition, since this protected the supremacy of the House of Commons; secondly, it was thought that a Labour Government should be focussing on economic and social reform, rather than on Lords reform; thirdly, there was a distinct lack of theory, or theorising, on the Second Chamber qua Second Chamber, which was based on the Labour Party’s empirical, atheoretical, and pragmatic approach in general.

The Parliament (No. 2) Bill was intended to appeal to the Labour Party on the basis of a range of selling-points: 1) abolishing the Lords’ hereditary basis, 2) abolishing the Lords’ capacity to impede the Commons, 3) strengthening the Commons’ scrutinising functions, 4) technocratic reform of the governance institutions, and 5) modernising Parliament as part of a wider institutional modernisation. The thesis concludes that these selling-points were insufficient to overcome the Labour Party’s conservatism on Lords reform, grounded as it was in a broader constitutional conservatism, and that this overall conservatism was the principal cause for the Bill’s failure.

Citation

Green, L. D. The Parliament (No.2) Bill : victim of the Labour Party's constitutional conservatism?. (Thesis). University of Hull. https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4222163

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Feb 21, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 23, 2023
• Keywords: Politics
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4222163
• Additional Information: Department of Politics, The University of Hull
• Award Date: Sep 1, 2019