| Cabinet meetings outside London are
rare and reluctant things. Harold Wilson held one in Brighton in 1966, but only
because the Labour Party was already there for its annual conference. In 1921
David Lloyd George summoned the Liberals to Inverness because he didn't want to
cut short his holiday. Gordon Brown's decision to hold his first cabinet meeting
after the summer break in Birmingham, on September 8th, was born of a nobler
desire to show the almost nine tenths of Britons who live outside London that
they are not ignored. He will have to do better: constitutionally, they are more
sidelined now than ever. Many legislatures use their second chamber to strengthen the representation of sparsely populated areas (every American state, from Wyoming to California, gets two votes in the Senate, for example). Britain's House of Lords, most of whose members are appointed supposedly on merit, has the opposite bias. A survey by the New Local Government Network (NLGN), a think-tank, finds that London and two of its neighbouring regions are home to more peers than the rest of Britain combined; even Birmingham, the country's second-largest city, has just one. Oddly, this distortion is partly thanks to reforms that were supposed to make the Lords more representative. By throwing out most of the hereditary peers in 1999, Labour paved the way for a second chamber that was less posh, less white and less male than before. But in booting out the landed gentry, it also ditched many of those who came from the provinces. The Duke of Northumberland (270th in the Sunday Times's " Rich List") may not be a member of a downtrodden minority. But Alnwick Castle, his family pile, is in the North-east region, home to just 2% of the Lords' members now. Geographically speaking, the duke and his fellow toffs were champions of diversity. The government now wants to reintroduce some geographical fairness, but minus dukes. Long-incubated plans to reform the Lords would see it converted during the next parliament into a body that is mainly or entirely elected. A white paper in July outlined various electoral systems, all based on regional or sub-regional constituencies. Some would like to see the seat of government prised out of the capital altogether, though in the past this has normally required a civil war or a plague. Southerners whisper that no one would show up if Parliament were based in a backwater such as Manchester. But many don't now. The NLGN found that peers resident in Northern Ireland vote least often. But next from the bottom are the London-dwellers, who show up for less than a third of the votes on their doorstep. Even the eight who live abroad are more assiduous. The north may seem an awfully long way away, but apparently so is Westminster. |