Great Britain. Parliament; Great Britain. Parliament -- History; Representative government and representation
Even without actually rejecting Bills the Lords have frequently
opposed the will of the Commons by returning the Bills sent up to them
in so amended and altered a shape as to prove wholly unacceptable; and
an appeal to the country upon every point of difference, or even upon
every Bill wholly rejected, is of course impracticable.
In some such cases the Commons have had recourse to a method of
coercing the Lords, known by the name of "tacking," which depends for
its efficacy upon the acceptation of certain doctrines relating to
Money Bills laid down by the Commons at intervals during the last
three centuries, and in the main acquiesced in by the Lords.
The history of the matter, though of acute interest at the present
time, is too long to go into here. It will be sufficient to mention
that in 1678, as the result of a violent struggle between the two
Houses, the Commons passed Resolutions asserting (not for the first
time) that all Money Bills must have their origin in the Lower House,
and that the Hereditary Chamber is powerless to amend them. And though
the Lords at the time protested against both these conclusions, by
their action through a long course of years they must be taken to have
acquiesced in them. If, then, the Lords were unable to amend a Money
Bill, they might be compelled to accept an obnoxious measure of a
different nature if it were included in such a Bill, the whole of
which they would be loth to throw out. This was the process adopted in
several instances by the Commons, against which the Lords passed, in
1702, a Standing Order declaring the "annexing any foreign matter" to
be "unparliamentary and tending to the destruction of the
Constitution."
In 1770 the Commons brought in a Bill to annul the royal grants of
forfeited property, and, knowing that it would be objectionable to the
Upper House, cunningly tacked it on to a Money Bill. The Lords
returned it, with the foreign matter excised; but it was sent back to
them once more, and, acting on the advice of the Duke of Marlborough
who counselled concession, they eventually swallowed the whole mixture
as gracefully as they could find it in their hearts to do. In 1860,
the two Houses came into collision again on the same subject, when the
Lords threw out the Bill abolishing the duty on paper, which was a
financial question. Gladstone retorted in the following year by
tacking this Bill on to the Budget, and in this shape the Lords passed
it. But their right of rejection--which indeed is involved in the
necessity for their assent to every Bill--was never questioned, either
in 1678 or since, until the Budget Bill was thrown out in December,
1909, when the whole question of the relations between the two Houses
was brought into vital prominence and made the subject of an agitation
not easily to be assuaged.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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