European Parliament (House of Lords Disqualification) Regulations 2008

My Lords, that was a completely unrehearsed intervention by my noble friend. There is a simple solution to this problem. All that your Lordships need to do is alter our Standing Orders, whereby any of your Lordships, whether in origin life or in origin hereditary, could stand down for five years. That would have exactly the effect that the regulations have but would at the same time incorporate the hereditary Peers. My understanding is that the Government are opposed to the Standing Order procedure because they say that Standing Orders of your Lordships’ House are not law and could be changed by the House, although most of them have not been changed for several centuries. Moreover, your Lordships could give a commitment in the Standing Order not to change it for five years. The philosophy that lies behind the Government’s objection is even stranger. Our constitutional freedoms are based, not on laws, but on constitutional conventions. If only the law of the constitution were considered, we would still be a crown dictatorship. It is only constitutional conventions, such as ministerial responsibility, that make this country and this legislature democratic. If you stripped away the conventions, we would be a country that could not possibly successfully apply to be a member of the European Community or remain one if we were already a member. At least the Standing Orders have the merit of being written down. None of the constitutional conventions is written down anywhere. The Government’s thinking on the inappropriateness of Standing Orders is, frankly, bankrupt. I could dwell on other issues, but your Lordships will be relieved to hear that I shall not. One of them is the non-discrimination clause in Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which refers to differentials in status. The Government have not had to make a statement about the European Convention on Human Rights, as they point out in the Explanatory Notes, because that is not required by the 1998 Act. However, it would be interesting to hear the Government’s view on whether they believe there is a breach of the convention.