House of Lords Reform

The Leader of the House corrects me. That is not to say that a single person has ever approached me in Treorchy market and said, ““Listen, Chris. The most important thing you have to deal with is the House of Lords.”” Nobody does that, but when people are asked, they say that they prefer election. I know that some hon. Members have pooh-poohed that suggestion and said that it is because the public do not know better, but I think that we should trust the people more than that. The third principle by which people get to sit in the second Chamber is through the reserved seats for the bishops. I am glad that we are not voting on that tomorrow. I would personally prefer to remove the bishops, because I do not think that theocracy is a very good way to run a country, but I am glad that we are not having that vote tomorrow. Instead, we will divide on a set of clear proposals. There are two better principles for determining who sits in the second Chamber. First, many hon. Members have referred to the primacy of the Commons, and I also believe in that. The hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross said that it should be primacy, but not supremacy. I believe that it should be primacy, but not exclusivity. It is vital—and we should enshrine it in statute, not just some gentleman’s agreement as at present—that the Government of this country should be formed only by virtue of its majority in this Chamber and, for that matter, that the Prime Minister, and several other members of the Cabinet, can only be elected Members of this Chamber. That is not presently our constitutional settlement and that is something that we should change. It is important that when we do have elections, we do not have the whole second Chamber elected in one go, because that runs the danger of having the two Chambers at loggerheads because they have different mandates, both clearly established by election. That is why it is important that we have a rolling system of elections to the second Chamber. Many people focus primarily on the revising job and the confrontation that the second Chamber might have with the Government. However, it is often the Government who use the second Chamber to introduce amendments that they have had more time to think about. That is a very important role and one of the reasons why we need a second Chamber. Another is the process of scrutiny in a different environment, away from the rigours of the constituency focus that we have in this House, and that can be done better in a second Chamber. The other principle, which should be our primary principle, is democracy. I was partly brought up in Spain under Franco, and many people from other countries, if they were to listen to British people talk about democracy today, would be bewildered and saddened. They would ask why we are so jaded about democracy. What is wrong that we are able to insist on democracy in Iran, Iraq or elsewhere in the world, but are not prepared to stand by it in this country? Have we been voting for too long? Do we take it for granted? Reform of the House of Lords is part of a steady progress from the end of the absolute monarchy under the Stuarts to the abolition of the rotten boroughs, the introduction of extended and then universal male suffrage, the secret ballot and, finally, votes for women. This will be seen as the next stage in an important process of change in Britain.