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Tesseraction posted:To add to what forkboy84 said, it's worth mentioning that in the United Kingdom our Upper House can block legislation indefinitely, much like the Senate in the United States, but the Parliament Acts added in a caveat that something in a party's General Election Manifesto has the right to overrule a Lords' vote. This is why, for instance, Tony Blair managed to implement a ban on fox hunting despite the Lords voting it down every time it came through to them. This is not quite right, you're crunching together two separate concepts here. The Parliament Acts mean that the House of Lords can only delay any primary legislation by one year (originally two), or a money bill by one month. Doesn't matter whether or not the bill was in the manifesto; if the Commons passes it enough times and the government is prepared to wait a year, it goes to the Queen for Royal Assent. The original two-year delay (and the general lack of a strong government that would have been prepared to do something controversial enough to use it) was such a deterrent to trying that eventually after the Second World War the government passed another act (using the powers of the original act, almost the only thing it was ever used for) to reduce it to one. There's also something called the Salisbury convention, which was thought up by the Conservative peer Lord Salisbury after the 1945 election to preserve the House of Lords' existence/prevent a socialist revolution. The Tories, as you might expect, had a gigantic majority in the House of Lords (it was still made up of hereditary, not life peers), and although the original Parliament Act was in force, this meant that they could have spent a lot of the next five years blocking Labour's welfare state legislation, which they had an overwhelming popular mandate to enact. Salisbury therefore declared that the House of Lords would not vote down any bill that was enacting a manifesto promise, and every House of Lords after that has sensibly agreed to do the same thing. The thing with the Hunting Act is constitutionally very interesting since, despite the government having spent four years dancing up and down with a neon sign reading "HEY WE REALLY WANT TO BAN FOX HUNTING", this is what the 2001 manifesto said (tw Blairism): quote:The House of Commons elected in 1997 made clear its wish to ban fox-hunting. The House of Lords took a different view (and reform has been blocked). Such issues are rightly a matter for a free vote and we will give the new House of Commons an early opportunity to express its view. We will then enable Parliament to reach a conclusion on this issue. If the issue continues to be blocked we will look at how the disagreement can be resolved. We have no intention whatsoever of placing restrictions on the sports of angling and shooting. That second sentence is a masterpiece of disingenuousness; it wasn't nearly as simple as that. Anyway, you will note that the manifesto does not say, in as many words, "We want to ban fox-hunting". (A free vote, after all, implies that the Government's own MPs may vote the measure down, so clearly they can't be that committed to it...) It does everything possible to imply it, but didn't actually say it. (The 1997 manifesto used similar wording, "We want a free vote", not "We want to ban hunting".) Based on that, the Tory peers then (not unreasonably) decided that banning fox-hunting was not an explicit manifesto promise and that the Salisbury convention didn't apply. After a load more bullshit the Government used the Parliament Act 1949 to get the latest Hunting Bill to the Queen, and then the Countryside Alliance very helpfully made a legal challenge (on the grounds that it was unfair that the 1949 act was only passed by using the 1911 act to force it through) which gave us a firm legal opinion that the 1949 act is legitimate.
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Mar 29, 2016 12:40
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 14:46 |
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