House of Lords Reform

I do not accept that. Polls upon polls have shown the public to believe that the upper House is doing a far better job than this House. It has far better poll ratings than our House. If people do not want an elected senate, ““democracy for its own sake”” becomes rather an unconvincing argument. I refer to polls merely to demonstrate the fact that there are polls and polls. I am confident that if any proposal for electing peers were to be decided by a referendum, the more the voters thought it, the more likely they would be to vote against it. Everyone thought that the Australians would vote against the monarchy, until they considered the alternatives. The Government thought that the north-east would vote for an elected assembly, until the people of the north-east counted the cost of more elections and more elected politicians. There is no public clamour for this change. The most superficially alluring reason for supporting elections is to rebalance the constitution. People say that the House of Commons is too powerful, and needs a more powerful elected upper House to hold it in check. I am impressed by the number of Members here who have raised that question, but it is the Executive who have gained far too much power, not this House. The glorious revolution of 1688 represented a settlement between the Crown and Parliament designed to ensure that Parliament controlled the law, that the judges would be impartial and that the machinery of government would be subject to the law. That arrangement has been subverted. Today’s Prime Minister is immeasurably more powerful than the monarchy that was overthrown by Parliament in the civil war. Charles I never exercised a fraction of the power over supply and legislation that is enjoyed by modern Prime Ministers. Even when Lord Hailsham coined the phrase ““elective dictatorship””, he can never have imagined a House of Commons as cowed by the Executive as the House of Commons today. The real problem is the Executive’s grip on the Commons timetable, under which every Bill in this House is subject to a guillotine. It will be interesting to see whether that applies to this Bill, should it actually begin its progress. That grip is reinforced by whipping on almost every matter, by the promise of high office in return for obedience—an interest that we do not have to include in the Register of Members’ Interests—and by the threat of deselection under the terms now applied by the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. As has been pointed out, we are little more than an electoral college for the office of Prime Minister. Whatever happened to the ideal that we should sit here in accordance with the Burkean tradition as representatives of our constituents exercising our judgment, rather than as delegates of centralised political parties? Ironically, if we implement a system for elections to the upper House, we will be implementing the same vice-like control of party over entry into that upper House. An appointed House can deal with that only through a proper appointments commission, and not by party-driven elections.