UK Parliament / Open data

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, uncharacteristically, the noble Lord, Lord Lester, cannot have checked on the progress of Bills under the previous Government. I have the figures in front of me. I am happy to present them in the Library, should that be necessary. I shall mention just one—the Marine and Coastal Access Bill, which took 19 days to go through the House. In no way am I minimising the importance of that Bill, but I think that a constitutional Bill should involve at least as much time as that. I recognise and understand the problems faced by the business managers on the Front Bench. It must be much more difficult in some respects when there is a coalition. It is a difficult job managing government business—I can certainly testify to that—but, certainly during the six years when I was responsible, I can find only one occasion on which we considered the same Bill on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. That was overwhelmingly because of consideration of the needs and demands of those on the opposition Front Bench, who find it extremely difficult—understandably because they are part-timers—to do the necessary revision for three days in succession in detail on a difficult Bill. On only two or three occasions did we go through the night. On all those exceptional occasions, it was because there was the imperative of dates. Usually, the imperative is the Queen’s Speech at the end of a Session. Of course, one cannot notify the Palace a fortnight before the Queen’s Speech is due and say, ““Sorry, because Report on a Bill is taking a long time, could you put the date back a week?””. That date is imperative. Alternatively, as happened quite often under the previous Government, the imperatives for Northern Ireland legislation were unarguable. They were clear and demonstrable. I concede totally to the Government that there is an imperative in this Bill, and we are conceding that publicly today. The imperative is not one I like, and the House knows my views on various forms of electoral systems, but the imperative for the Government is to get the Bill completed by 16 February so that there can be a referendum on 5 May. I acknowledge that imperative and it has been conceded. However, I put it to the Government and to the House that there is absolutely no imperative whatsoever about Part 2 of the Bill. But before I move on from Part 1, I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, as my noble friend has said, that if he thinks six days on the Committee stage of a Bill that potentially fulfils the Lib Dems’ dreams of a change to the electoral system is filibustering, he does not know what a filibuster is. I say to the Government with some envy that there is no imperative on Part 2 principally because they decided—I am not quite sure how it happened because it was like a rabbit out of a hat—that this should be a two-year Session of Parliament. I would have thought it was my birthday and Christmas rolled into one if, when I was responsible for government legislation, someone had said that we could have a two-year Session in which to put Bills through. The nightmare every year was finishing Bills in time for the Queen’s Speech. There is ample time for proper scrutiny of Part 2, so again I put it specifically to the Government that it is an accident of the timing of this debate that today, or most probably tonight, we will be discussing the not inconsiderable proposition that the number of Members of the other House should be culled by 50. We shall be doing that at two or three in the morning when many Members of your Lordships’ House—sadly I do not think that they will include me—may well be asleep. I put it to noble Lords that if the situation was reversed so that the House of Commons was about to cull substantial numbers of this House and decided to do it at two or three in the morning when hardly anyone was around, we would have a word or two to say about it, and rightly so. Finally, I want simply to make this point. We are in uncharted territory. The reason for that, which we are all learning, is that we have a coalition Government. I acknowledge that. We do not know quite what the rules of play are in a coalition Government but what I do know is that this House, under a coalition Government, has an advantage that Chief Whips may have dreamed about but never envisaged. They have 40 per cent of the votes in this House. I have included the Cross-Benchers in that calculation; I would not be presumptuous enough to suggest that they would ever vote as a block, as they never do. The actual majority the Government have over the Opposition, if it is reckoned simply in terms of people with party allegiances and subject to a party whip, is very substantial. It is perfectly within the power of this coalition Government, if they want to, to drive through legislation against the wishes of the minority in the House. They can do that. They can schedule constitutional business in the middle of the night if they want to do that. I end with this observation. There are three constitutional Bills coming through this House of which this is the first, described by Nick Clegg as the most important since 1832. The third of three Bills is about the reform of this House. I simply put it to those Members of the House who may not be too concerned about this Bill but are very concerned indeed about the fundamental changes involved in a move from an appointed House to an elected House—which I am certainly very concerned about—that if the Government were now to set a precedent that a major constitutional Bill will be driven through in the middle of the night, and that anyone who criticises that is guilty of a filibuster, that is a very bad precedent indeed. The offer is clear. It is not my offer because it is for the Front Benches opposite. The Government have a way out of this: take the referendum part of the Bill out and agree on a sensible schedule for considering Part 2. We do not like the House to get into the position it is in at the moment; I certainly do not like it. But that is an offer on the table which I think any reasonable person would accept.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
724 c16-8 
Session
2010-12
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
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