The next session opened in February, 1907, with a King’s Speech which noted that ‘serious questions affecting the working of our parliamentary system had arisen from unfortunate differences between the two Houses’ and announced that ‘His Majesty’s Ministers have this important subject under consideration with a view to a solution of the difficulty’. A very substantial programme of legislation, including a Licensing Bill, was also announced.
To what extent the union ist Party was alarmed by this vague threat of constitutional reform is difficult to judge. F. E. Smith in the debate on the Address declared confidently—but not very accurately—that the Liberal Party had been attempting for 250 years to quell the House of Lords by resolution, and that their latest attempt was likely to be no more successful than previous ones had been. But the actions of Lord Newton1 and of the union ist Peers who supported him were more significant than the words of the Tory Party’s principal frondeur. Lansdowne’s biographer, then an active but independent member of the Opposition in the Upper House, took advantage of the easy days in the early part of the session when there were no Government bills to mutilate and introduced a measure for the reform of the House of Lords. This was an issue which had been raised on a number of occasions previously, notably by Rosebery in 1884 and 1888. But neither of these attempts nor any of the others had prevented the Upper House emerging from the ‘century of reform’ in exactly the same mould, save only that bankrupt peers could no longer sit and vote, in which it had entered it.
Nor was Lord Newton’s bill any more effective than the efforts of Rosebery and the others had been. Its significance lay not in its practical result, but in the fact that it emanated from the union ist side, in the sweeping departure from the hereditary principle which its acceptance would have involved, and in the support which it received. It provided that hereditary peers not possessed of certain qualifications were to elect only one fourth of their number to represent them in the Upper House, and that the places so vacated were to be filled by life peers appointed by the Government of the day; and its supporters included the Duke of Devonshire, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Duke of Northumberland. Lansdowne and Cawdor, speaking officially for the Opposition, expressed no direct hostility to the proposals and contented themselves with postponing the issue by having it referred to a Select Committee, which was impressively strong in its composition, but which took eighteen months to report.
The direct opposition to the bill had come from the unusual combination of Lord Halsbury,1 the die-hard ex-Lord Chancellor, and the supporters of the Government. Crewe, the Lord President, saw the issue with great clarity. Newton’s proposals, while they might make the House of Lords less of an anachronism, would do nothing to make it less partisan; his idea that there existed ‘a sort of reservoir of eminent men who were not partisans and who might profitably be added to the House’ was ‘pure fallacy’. In any event, it was ‘not expedient to proceed with the discussion of various proposals for reforming the constitution of this House until provision has been made for an effective method of settling differences which may arise between this House and the other House of Parliament’.l
In this view Crewe had the full support of the Prime Minister, who, as his biographer has informed us, ‘from the beginning, was clear in his mind on one point: a Liberal Government would be extremely ill-advised to touch the composition of the Second Chamber until it had settled its powers. To set up a nominated Second Chamber composed of grave and reverend but necessarily conservative-minded individuals would, if such a Chamber succeeded to the powers of the present House, both increase the evil and abolish the remedy which the present system provided in the last resort through the creation of peers. On the other hand, to set up an elective Second Chamber would be to destroy the unique character of the House of Commons, and to introduce a new dissension into the heart of the Constitution’.m
This was the soundest of radical doctrine, and a great advance on most Liberal thought on the subject during the ’eighties and ’nineties. The pursuit of these principles alone was to prevent the Liberal Party from becoming hopelessly lost amongst the quicksands of the constitutional conference of 1910; and temporary deviations from them were to lead to needless dangers and difficulties.
Campbell-Bannerman had his own opportunity to stand by the simple principle of the supremacy of the Commons and to show his distaste for attempts to solve the problem by institutional innovation. This came in the late spring of 1907, when the Cabinet committee which had been set up early in the year to consider means of adjusting the relationship of the two Houses reported in favour of joint sittings between the Commons and a delegation of a hundred peers, which would take place in the event of disagreement, and the decisions of which would be final. The Prime Minister greatly disliked this scheme, and he attacked it strongly in a memorandum dated May 31,n alternating effectively between high constitutional arguments and practical objections. Where would the joint assembly meet? Who would preside over it? What would its rules of procedure be? And would the House of Commons continue to meet during its sittings? As an alternative he revived the proposals for a suspensory veto which John Bright had put forward in a speech at Leeds in 1883. In the event of disagreement a conference of perhaps five or ten members of each House should be set up. If this body produced a scheme which the Government could accept, no further special procedure was likely to be needed. If it failed to do so, the bill in question, after passing twice more through the Commons, could become law over the heads of the peers. No minimum period of time for this process was laid down; theoretically it could all have been done with a lapse of no more than six months from the first rejection by the peers. Between the bill’s first and second passage through the Commons the Government could make whatever changes it thought fit; but on the third occasion the bill would be required to maintain the form in which it had most recently passed.