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The House of Lords
Tweet Share on Facebook December 6, 2005 CommentSunday newspapers are typically filled with evergreen stories, many of which have sat on the in-type list for weeks or even months, that editors hope will prove interesting to readers even though they don't advance the news. Such a story, I suspect, was Mary Jordan's piece, datelined London, on the House of Lords in last Sunday's Washington Post. It's well written and full of the kind of ornate detail about ye olde England that many readers, like many tourists, love.
Unfortunately, it misses entirely the big story about the House of Lords in the past few years. In 1999 Tony Blair's New Labor Party, with its typical distaste for tradition, revoked the voting rights of all but 92 of the hereditary peers; those lords were allowed to elect from their number 92 who would continue to have voting rights. This was part of a compromise between Blair and Lord Cranborne (now the Marquis of Salisbury), then the Conservative leader of the House of Lords. I interviewed Cranborne at the time these reforms were pending, and he readily conceded that the existing character of the House of Lords was indefensible. When all the hereditary peers had a vote, the Lords had a permanent Conservative Party majority. While the Lords cannot veto legislation, they can delay it. As Cranborne admitted, it was inherently unfair to allow one party the power to delay legislation—a power that can amount to a veto late in a parliamentary session. But he also made the point, which others in Britain corroborated, that the unreformed House of Lords rarely exercised that power. That's because peers understood that their power was unfair and did not want to be seen exercising it except in the most dire of cases.
Blair's reforms meant that the 92 hereditary peers with a vote can easily be outvoted by the life peers, whose titles are not hereditary. Life peers are nominated by all three of the political parties—Labor, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats—and others without party ties are nominated as well. They tend to be people who have won distinction in many walks of life—a pretty impressive bunch, actually. Also, in the reformed House of Lords, no party has a majority, and probably no party ever will. There are enough Conservative and Lib Dem peers now to outvote the Laborites, and a substantial number of peers are "cross-benchers," which means that they accept the discipline of no party.
The result is that the House of Lords now takes a more active role on legislation and votes against measures passed in the House of Commons far more frequently than it did when there was a perpetual Conservative majority. Peers tend not to feel inhibited from voting down legislation approved by the Commons, since no party unfairly has a majority and since it's widely recognized that the voting peers are a group of able and public-spirited citizens. Also, the willingness of the Lords to vote against provisions of legislation have enabled Conservatives in the House of Commons to get the government to withdraw such provisions in the Commons, lest the Lords delay the legislation altogether. The House of Lords is thus much less of a rubber stamp and more of a serious legislative body than it was before 1999.
Whether this is a good thing in policy terms one could debate. The Lords tend to be more civil-liberties-minded than the Commons under Blair, and they tend toward the prejudices of educated elites—after all, they are an educated elite by definition. Interestingly, among those named life peers are politically active lords who also hold hereditary titles: Salisbury votes as a life baron and leaves the 92 seats reserved for hereditary peers to others.
The Post story makes much of advocates of an elected House of Lords. But no one in Britain expects that the body will be made elective. The reason is simple: An elected House of Lords would be even more willing to vote against the Commons, and the House of Commons is not likely to create such a serious rival. Moreover, how would you elect lords—from what districts? By proportional representation? By party? Who would nominate them? No one seems willing to sort through those issues—a point Salisbury made to me before the 1999 reforms. The current House of Lords, with greater practical power than before 1999 but still without enormous power, is a tolerable institution—the sort of muddle with which the British have been able to live for many years. But you wouldn't know any of this if you had to rely solely on the Post's story, lavishly illustrated with pictures of famous Lords in their robes.
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The Wal-Mart controversy
Tweet Share on Facebook December 5, 2005 CommentThe Wall Street Journal ran an editorial in its Saturday edition on the various controversies over Wal-Mart. It makes the point that the attacks on Wal-Mart are led by union leaders who are frustrated that Wal-Mart employees have refused to vote for union representation. The editorial makes some interesting factual points. "Wal-Mart's average starting wage is already nearly double the national minimum of $5.15 an hour. . . . [F]or many workers those wages are only a start. Some 70 percent of Wal-Mart's executives have worked their way up from the company's front lines. . . .The company has also recently increased its healthcare options for employees on the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder. Starting in January, one of those options will be a high-deductible health savings account."
Here, I would contrast Wal-Mart with the currently beleaguered General Motors, where workers have been represented by a powerful and aggressive union, the United Auto Workers, since 1937. The UAW has imposed on General Motors what other unions would like to impose on Wal-Mart: a one-size-fits-all wage and benefit structure. General Motors' starting wages are much higher; but there are many fewer entry-level jobs. General Motors provides uniform healthcare and pension benefits to all its workers; but those benefits are now jeopardized because the company may not be fiscally able to finance those benefits when they go to more retirees than current workers. At General Motors, there is an impenetrable barrier between management and labor. Nobody moves from the assembly line to management positions. The union represents workers in adversarial bargaining and grievance procedures. No one can cross the line.
The adversarial labor-management arrangements were arguably justified in 1937. Management micromanaged workers according to the work-study principles of Frederick W. Taylor, who saw workers as mechanical cogs who should have zero initiative and instead should perform their jobs in the way that time-study experts determined was most efficient. (On Taylor, see the excellent biography by Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency.) Workers and union representatives argued, plausibly, that these experts were demanding too much work per hour or minute. The workers, union leaders argued, again plausibly, needed someone to represent their interests against the demands of the efficiency experts.
But as Wal-Mart executives might argue, Toto, we're not in Taylorite America anymore. Wal-Mart certainly isn't. Wal-Mart does a superb job of keeping track of inventory and sales and putting on its shelves products consumers want. But it also encourages employees to go out of their way to help customers—to show initiative in their work. Those who do a good job can hope to get management jobs.
Wal-Mart critics look back to post-World War II America and express nostalgia for what they call the family wage. It was assumed that all workers were men who were the heads of families, who needed and wanted a job that would pay enough to raise their families, who sought to retire as soon as possible (remember, workers hated those Taylorite jobs) on a decent pension. A much smaller percentage of working-age Americans were in the labor force in those days, and very few of them were women. At the same time, the divorce rate was much lower, and so there were very few women in need of a job to support their families. Also, much lower percentages of those above 65 worked or wanted to work. There were many more jobs involving hard physical labor, and many men were physically worn out even before reaching 65.
We live in a different America today. Many men in their older years and many women of all ages want part-time work; Wal-Mart has jobs for them. Many adults have not done particularly well in our schools but still want a chance to rise in their jobs; Wal-Mart has opportunities for them. Many workers don't need expensive health insurance, because their spouses have it, or because they're eligible for Medicare; Wal-Mart doesn't force them to forgo wages in order to pay for an expensive healthcare package.
So the Wal-Mart flexible model is more responsive to the needs and desires of the work force than the one-size-fits-all General Motors model. Certainly, Wal-Mart provides a lot more jobs than General Motors does. And, of course, Wal-Mart has done yeoman work of providing low prices for consumers—and especially for low-income consumers. You may not like Wal-Mart—and, remember, no one can force anyone to shop there—but it does seem more in sync with the way America works today than does General Motors.
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The war against boys
Tweet Share on Facebook December 5, 2005 CommentA fascinating article by education consultant Michael Gurian in the Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section on the fact that boys are not learning as well as girls. It's been an untold secret for a long time that the majority of college students and increasing percentage of students in graduate schools are female. This, despite continued moaning and groaning from feminist groups about the supposed disadvantages girls encounter in schools. The author of this article makes the obvious point that it is boys who are more likely to encounter disadvantages, and he sketches out what some of those may be. On this subject, I look also to Christina Hoff Summers's The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.
Gurian makes the interesting point that the most active crusaders for appropriate education for boys tend to be (as Summers is) the mothers of boys. My own observation in the circles I frequent is that men tend to glide along and assume that their children are getting along pretty well, while women tend to worry that they aren't and work fiercely to improve their chances. So, even if it makes the feminists happy, score 1 for women.
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Canada
Tweet Share on Facebook December 2, 2005 CommentI grew up near Canada, in Detroit and Birmingham, Mich., and can remember traveling there in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In those days, the main Eaton's department store in Toronto proudly hung the Union Jack over the street. Things have changed now. Canada's politics today seems more Belgian than British, at least in its attitudes toward the United States. But it is terra incognita to most of us Americans. The American president, at least since James Madison, who knew most about Canada was Franklin Roosevelt. He contracted polio on his family estate on Campobello Island, which is in New Brunswick, and he made a point of including the rather wacky Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, in the wartime conferences in Quebec in 1943 and 1944. The most recent American politician who knew much about Canada was Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who knew an awful lot about an awful lot of things that most Americans know very little about.
Anyhow, Canada is slated to have a national election soon, because the Liberal government has lost a vote of confidence after a steady bout of scandal. Here's a posting from the redoubtable Ed Morrissey, who has followed the Canadian saga far more closely and acutely than most American mainstream media. As noted, I'm away from my desk now, but I have at home the results, riding by riding (that is, parliamentary constituency by parliamentary constituency), from the last couple of elections, and I intend to spend much of the next several days looking over these wonderful statistics, to see what may come next. It's quite possible that the next Canadian government may be headed by Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper—though conservative doesn't mean in Canada what it does in the United States. Scrolling through Morrissey's postings and through the postings of Canadian native David Frum may help you understand what's happening in Canada, if you care—and you should. Really. Roosevelt and Moynihan did, and they're pretty good examples to follow.
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Princeton conference
Tweet Share on Facebook December 2, 2005 CommentI'm in Princeton, N.J., today for a conference on "The Conservative Movement: Its Past, Present and Future." An interesting phenomenon: an Ivy League conference on conservatism in a town that voted 76 percent to 23 percent for John Kerry and where house prices are probably over $1 million per unit. But such is the Ivy League today.
More on the conference later.
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Harvard Law goes sensible
Tweet Share on Facebook December 1, 2005 CommentHere's an interesting article from the New York Observer on Harvard Law School. . It seems that Dean Elena Kagan has been—gasp!—hiring conservatives as well as liberals to the law school faculty. Even more amazing than that, she has come forward and appeared as an introducer at a Federalist Society event.
I don't know Dean Kagan, but one of my Federalist Society friends told me that they knew her as a law professor and that she was open to conservative as well as liberal arguments. She was nominated for a judgeship on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and her nomination never went forward because Senate Republicans opposed it. Shame on them, I say, and good news for Harvard Law School. At a time when liberals say they want diversity in our universities—when in fact what they want is uniformity in opinions—it seems that Dean Kagan is interested in genuine intellectual diversity and is ready to hear and consider seriously opinions and arguments which may be very different from her own.
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The limits of tolerance
Tweet Share on Facebook December 1, 2005 CommentThe impulse of intellectual elites in Europe, and North America as well, is to show their tolerance by tolerating intolerance of tolerance. If Muslims object to some free expression, then that free expression must be suppressed. This sounds like alarmism to many, but it is a fact of life. Witness: Bruce Bawer, a gifted writer (he used to write wonderful literary essays in the New Criterion) who a few years ago moved to Norway to live with his (male) lover. Bawer has written on gay rights themes, less interestingly in my opinion than his writings on literary subjects. But he has necessarily been alert to suppressions of free expression by concessions to or appeasement of Muslim fundamentalists who insist on suppressing views of those they disagree with and, in some cases, murdering those who express such views. For those who think that we must show our tolerance by allowing the intolerance of those who reject tolerance, Bawer has important lessons to teach. Here are some. Americans who like to think that there is nothing to be lost by appeasing Muslim advocates of intolerance have something to learn here.
