The extent of party unity influences parliament’s effectiveness as it is key to understanding the relationship between government and parliament. As party unity has grown since the end of the 19th century, parliament has declined. The government can always rely on loyal voters in the House of Commons to approve legislative policies, maintaining power as well as creating an elective dictatorship. However, notable examples of party disunity can be seen under a labour government in ’74-’79 as 45% of Labour MPs voted against the government at some stage. Similarly, under John Major ’92-’97, Eurosceptic backbenchers and the withdrawal of the whip from 8 eurosceptic rebels clash with the Major government opitomized the divisions within the Conservative Party. Party unity decline is the result of two things, one being the fact that most are now better educated than they were in ‘50s and ‘60s and therefore are thinking more independently and critical, but also because they are ‘career politicians’ who have more time and resources to take political issues more seriously.
When a party has a smaller majority, this leaves room for more room for backbenchers to become more powerful. Thus, a larger majority weakens them. During the Labour Government of ’74-’49, their majority was at most 4. This lead to an increase of defeats in the House of Commons (at least 41 times) but contradicts the landslide majorities of ’97 and ’01 as Labour were not defeated by the Commons at all in its first two terms.
The House of Lords, as part of Parliament, and its impact to parliamentary effectiveness can be determined in different ways. Party unity is much more relaxed in the Lords, for example with peers not aligning themselves to specific parties necessarily and so the government has less ability to discipline peers and so ‘enforce’ whips. Since before 2000 there was a Conservative-dominated Lords, the checking power was used in a highly partisan way. This has led to discussion over a reformed house of Lords, and Labour has started this through the removal of hereditary peers from 777 to 92. Now there is generally a balance between Labour and Conservative representation in the Lords and therefore no majority party. In order for legislation to pass, all parties must seek support from other parties, including crossbenchers. A more assertive Lords has lead to them being more willing to challenge the government over controversial proposals and legislature in particular. Though essentially the Commons can overrule the Lords, as it is time-consuming and creates ‘parliamentary ping-pong’ governments are more likely to try and reach a compromise with the Lords. In this way, the impact of the Lords can affect overall parliamentary effectiveness as the approval of the Lords is valuable to the Commons.
As the House of Commons generally does dominate Parliament, the Lords have remained a subordinate chamber. Whether this results in parliamentary effectiveness being lost or not, they remain as a second chamber ensuring checks on the government and their approval is sill important. Party unity has, however declined which has resulted in politicians focussing more on politics as their career so they have also become more active in their constituencies, and thus parliament therefore acts more favourably to the public, though the size of a majority determines how effective the Commons is in relation to the Lords.
