House of Lords (Members’ Taxation Status) Bill [HL]

My Lords, this is a serious issue. It concerns the reputation of this House, and of the Conservative Party in particular. I presume that that is why the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, is here on a Friday. I welcome him; we have missed him here in recent days, and I hope he has not been ill. I look forward to him expanding on the intervention he made at the beginning of this debate when he said that we needed to talk about taking responsibility. That is what the Bill is about: Members of this House taking responsibility. If I may turn around the phrase from the American revolution, ““No taxation without representation””, in the British Parliament there should be no participation in legislation without taxation. We do not want Members of either House of Parliament who are tax evaders. We have heard, if I may say so, one or two flippant speeches. It is clear that the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, intends, so far as possible, to wreck the Bill in Committee. I entirely failed to follow much of his argument. He seemed to suggest at one point that the length of time one has served in this House is completely correlated with the degree of wisdom one has. I am not entirely sure that what I have observed in my nearly 14 years’ membership of this House bears out that suggestion. The reason I did not stand up immediately when the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, finished his speech is that I was totting up the number of years that I and my noble friends Lord Falkland and Lord McNally have spent here, and although it does not quite approach the total of the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, it is quite close. That, among many of his arguments, seems to be rather unclear. I was interested to hear a declaration from someone with a background in international banking who takes the Conservative Whip that they have never given a penny to any political party. I trust that the Conservative Whip will be in touch with them shortly. I assure the noble Lord that on these Benches someone who took the Liberal Democrat Whip who had not given a penny to that party would be in serious trouble very quickly. On the previous occasion when we debated the Bill, the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, confused Luxembourg with Liechtenstein. This time I think I heard the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, tell us that Selsdon was in Scotland. Perhaps there is another Selsdon, in Scotland, that I have missed.