House of Lords (Amendment) Bill [HL]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Avebury epitomises the very best of conscience and reform in his dedicated service to Parliament and in the public interest. He is a great hereditary Peer and a fine former Member of the other House, and I salute him. We on these Benches strongly support the Bill, and we hope—hope dies last—that the new Conservative Official Opposition and the even newer new Labour Government-in-waiting will also do so. This is a very modest Bill. It does not provide for the full-scale reform of this House, as envisaged inthe Parliament Act 1911 and by new Labour’s 1997 election manifesto. It does not provide for this House to be wholly, mainly or partly elected by the people, even though each of the main parties now claims to favour such a reform. It does not seek summarily to remove the remaining hereditary Members from this House, even though that would at last give effect to the agreement reached between the Labour Partyand the Liberal Democrats, known as the Cook-Maclennan agreement, and to the basis on which new Labour was first elected a decade ago. Nor does the Bill go as far as the House of Lords Bill of my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood, which deals with wider proposals for reform. The Bill seeks merely to end the farcical and anomalous procedure that is put into effect when one of the remaining hereditary Members of the House dies, whereby his or her place is filled by another hereditary Peer chosen in a by-election by his or her peers, although unlike Brooks’s, Boodle’s, White’s or the Garrick, without a system of black-balling. It seeks, gradually and by natural causes, to end a pocket borough worthy of the close attention of Plantagenet Palliser. When a life Peer such as me dies, there is no afterlife in this House. His or her place is not automatically filled by a new life Peer. Indeed, there is no prescribed quota of life Peers of any particular party. The Cook-Maclennan agreement on constitutional reform, which I helped to negotiate, promised that the hereditary element would be completely removed. The agreement clearly stated: "““There is an urgent need for radical reform of the Lords. Its current composition is indefensible, in particular the fact that the majority of its members are entitled to take part in the legislative process on a hereditary basis … The two parties””—" that is, Labour and the Liberal Democrats— "““are therefore agreed that there must be legislation to remove the rights of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords””." I am sorry to say that the Government broke faith with their Liberal Democrat allies by making a covert deal with the then Leader of the Official Opposition in this House, the then noble Viscount, Lord Cranborne, to retain some hereditary Peers so as to ease the passage of the House of Lords Bill. We were not consulted on what I have to describe as a sneaky side-deal to which we strongly objected. We explained that at the time and abstained. We on these Benches are not bound by that deal, whether as a matter of honour or otherwise. I hope that I may be forgiven for quoting the Cook-Maclennan agreement again. It stated: "““The removal of the hereditary peers will still leave an imbalance in party representation in the Lords during the interim stage. Following their removal, we should move over the course of the next parliament to a House of Lords where those peers who take a party whip more accurately reflect the proportion of votes received by each party in the previous general election””." As I say, I was directly party to negotiating that with the late Robin Cook and other members of the Labour Party. That was another pledge that was broken by the Government once they had secured our support for the removal of the hereditary element. We were told at the highest level that this was because we couldnot be relied on to support the Government in the Division Lobbies. As a result my party has remained under-represented after the removal of most of the hereditary Peers who took the Liberal Democrat Whip because, unlike the Labour Party, we had a very significant proportion of hereditary Peers. That does not augur well for the next stage in the reform of this House and for wider constitutional reform on which the Government will need cross-party support, but I hope that we shall be able to proceed on the basis of mutual trust and confidence across the parties and with the crucial support of the Cross Benches. My noble friend Lord Goodhart said in the debate on the House of Lords Bill: "““It is now 88 years since the Parliament Act restricted the powers of this House and promised that the House should be reconstituted on a popular, not a hereditary basis. That is nearly a decade longer than the period that separated the Parliament Act from the Great Reform Bill of 1832””." He went on: "““While the whole process of democratic reform of our political system which started with the Great Reform Bill was in all other respects completed with the full enfranchisement of women in 1928, only this last piece of reform, the composition and role of your Lordships' House, was left outstandingand has remained so for decades””.—[Official Report, 29/3/99; col. 180-81.]" Therefore, it is not a matter of ““haste””, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, forthe reasons so clearly expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Rea. No one who has spoken in this debate so far has given any good reason, as a matter of logic, principle or common sense, for enabling the remaining hereditary element to replace itself when one of its number dies. The process of election is a process of selection by a self-perpetuating group of unelected legislators, and it is no more democratic in our modern democracy than the process used to elect a new member of a Pall Mall social club. What I say in no way underestimates the great contribution made in this House and beyond by hereditary Peers. One has only to recall my good friend and colleague, the late lamented Lord Russell, to recognise that contribution. I echo the remarks of another late lamented good friend, Lord Harris of Greenwich, when debating the House of Lords Bill. He said: "““There will be no sneers from these Benches about the contribution made by hereditary Peers. Indeed, it would be remarkable were there to be any given the fact that 24 of our colleagues are hereditary Peers. But the blunt reality is that their day has passed. It is impossible to justify a system which gives male children born in the right bed the right eventually to become members of the legislature””.—[Official Report, 30/3/99; col. 210.]" Life Peers have no greater claim to democratic legitimacy than do hereditary Peers, but at least we are not automatically replaced when we are summoned by the Grim Reaper. As I have said, this process of perpetual renewal does not happen in the case of a life Peer, and it is anomalous and absurd for it to happen when a hereditary Peer dies.