House of Lords Reform

It seems to me that this is quite simple. I have unconventional views about devolution, and I warned that it would be a slippery slope and that the legislation that we passed would not be the end of the story. I feel very much the same about this matter. It is inevitable that whatever the proportion at which we start, the House of Lords will eventually become fully elected, which brings us to the constitutional conundrum that was raised earlier. Once the House of Lords is fully elected, what will happen when one party has a majority in this House and another party has a majority in the other House? As politicians, it is ludicrous for us to think that there will not be manifestos for such elections. An election will be a political event, rather than an election to a social club, so there will be manifestos; one House could thus be in political conflict with the other House. Such a situation would raise the interesting question of which House, if both were elected, would reflect the view of the electorate. Who would judge which House was prime? One might say that that would be the House with the most recent mandate, but that would not be satisfactory. I suspect that when there is a fully elected House of Lords, there will be a challenge, initially on key issues, to this House. The other House has muscle; it just does not use it. This is not a matter of giving it muscle, because all it has to do is to scrap the conventions and use the Parliament Act to gridlock the House of Commons. An Opposition party in the other House could oppose Bill after Bill to the extent allowed by the Parliament Act. If I had been a Member of the other House back in the Thatcher years, I would have done anything in my power to block some of that Government’s legislation, and it is unreasonable to think that other politicians will not try to do the same. If we go down such a route, we will, at some time—this will be a long time away, and I will be dead and buried when it happens—be stuck in constitutional deadlock. How would we deal with that? Have the Government given us any indication of their plans for coping with a situation in which the House of Lords adopted a policy of non-co-operation that would leave us absolutely stuck? Some hon. Members might say that that is fanciful, but I draw their attention to paragraph 61 of the report that was agreed unanimously by the Joint Committee on Conventions, which states:"““If the Lords acquired an electoral mandate, then in our view their role as the revising chamber, and their relationship with the Commons, would inevitably be called into question, codified or not.””" That is why I am making my brief speech. If we start down this path, as I am horribly afraid that we might, it will put us in peril. We do not need to strengthen the House of Lords—it does a good job as it is. If we start down this route, we cannot be sure where it will end. However, I do not think it will end without a degree of political chaos.