House of Lords Reform

It is a delight to follow the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Mr. Wareing), who spoke, as always, with great candour and honesty. I cannot say that I agreed with everything he said, but, as I look around at the fairly empty Benches and count the number of Members on the Government Benches, I am bound to say that there is something rotten in the state of Parliament. It behoves us all to do something about that. In a way, it is putting the proverbial cart before the horse for us to be talking at inordinate length about the composition of the other place when this place is in need of such manifest reform. We need a Government who will have the courage to tackle the problems that face the House of Commons. Is it right that any constitutional Bill should pass without a two-thirds majority, for instance? We should be looking at things such as that in this place. Tonight, however, we are debating the House of Lords and it seems to me that there are only two—three if one counts the unicameral position—honest positions to take on the future of the House of Lords. One is that we move towards a written constitution, a redistribution of powers and two elected Houses. There is an impeccable logic in favour of that and I respect those who hold to that point of view. I disagree with them, but I respect them. I disagree with them not because of any fundamental error in their argument—because if I were starting with a new country and a blank sheet of paper, that system is probably what I would wish to devise—but because we are, in those famous and hackneyed words, where we are. In this country, we have an elected Chamber that enjoys both primacy and supremacy, to quote two words that have been bandied around in the debate, and a second Chamber that has a greater accumulation of expertise, experience and wisdom than any other Chamber anywhere in the world. That Chamber is an accident of history. It is not legitimate in the sense of being elected. But, because the Members of that House are not encumbered by constituency and other duties, it has the opportunity more critically to scrutinise and examine legislation that—the hon. Gentleman is quite right—often leaves this House in a less than tidy state. That is not a criticism of this Government, although the situation has got far worse under this Government with the automatic programme motion; it is a criticism of successive Governments over the past two or three decades—the time that I have been in the House and longer. We should accept tonight that we are being asked by the Leader of the House to pass a motion that would mean the abolition of the House of Lords as we know it and its replacement by a different sort of second Chamber. The Leader of the House is not advocating a wholly elected second Chamber. As I have said, supporting a wholly elected second Chamber is a position that I respect. I am not seeking to score cheap points, but it was noticeable that on neither side were the speeches of the Leader of the House or the shadow Leader of the House accepted with any degree of acclamation in what was at the time a fairly full House. The Leader of the House advocates a hybrid House. That is the worst of all worlds. I accept as irrefutable the logic advanced in a short but persuasive speech by the Father of the House. The point was taken up by the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso). Arguing from different points of view, they both said that if we once had a substantial elected element, inexorably we would move towards a fully elected second Chamber. We would move towards it not in the way that I would accept as respectable, but in a way that would, like Topsy, grow. We have to look at some of the points that have been made in today’s debate. First, there is the point about the settled constitutional position and the report on the conventions. There is no settled constitutional position. If we move towards a substantially elected second Chamber, all the conventions will be up for grabs. Even the Parliament Act itself, which applies to the House of Lords, not to a differently constituted second Chamber, would be open to question. We would inevitably be building into our system a move towards constitutional gridlock, at a time when we have not properly sorted out our priorities in a way that enables us to hold the Executive truly and properly to account. People talk about one party never having a majority in the second Chamber, but if we have a Chamber that is 50 per cent. elected, and we move on from there, how can we bind the electorate to ensure that they will not give a majority to a particular party? How can one, in any sense, argue that the electorate will inevitably return to Parliament a large number of independents? That proposition was advanced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May). The electorate will elect whom they want to elect. If we are going to have the elections on the day of the European elections, or the Scottish and Welsh elections, as has been suggested, they will probably come mid-way through a Parliament and could certainly upset the constitutional balance of Parliament. We are talking about something that we would not have planned for if we sat down and drew up a written constitution; it would be something that we drifted into, without proper thought for the sort of people who would sit in the second Chamber. If we are going to try to devise a Chamber that has no more powers than exist at the moment, it could be asked whether that would attract that right calibre of man and woman. In that context, if the second Chamber used the powers that it currently has but, by self-imposed restraint and convention, does not use, that in itself would be a prescription for clash after clash with this Chamber. I believe that the proposition advanced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead has a fundamentally flawed logic. I am incredulous that the Conservative party—perhaps, initially, for opportunistic reasons, because it understandably wanted to embarrass the Government—should have come up four years ago with this crackpot 80:20 idea. The idea is not based on any true parliamentary logic. I say to hon. Members on both sides of the House: let us reform the existing House of Lords and do away with the absurd anomaly of the ridiculous by-elections.