Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, one of my noble friends earlier referred to dinosaurs. I am a dinosaur. I think that it is about time one of us spoke. Some form of social Darwinism may in due course make us extinct but until then we should be allowed to speak—at least in your Lordships’ House. The dinosaurs used to be conservatives but clearly the use of the word has changed. One of our problems with language and terminology at the moment is that it is perfectly clear that the Prime Minister is not a conservative—in the sense of appealing to us dinosaurs—and, as far as I can see, many of his Cabinet are not conservatives either. As a dinosaur, I see no urgent need—and I underline the word, urgent—to change your Lordships’ House, to change the other place or to change the electoral system. I am not opposed to change as I will point out in a moment but is it urgent? No. One of my problems with the alternative vote, over which a great many of us have a hang-up, is that, when I look at the Benches opposite and I think of my many Tory friends, I cannot find a single one who supports the alternative vote. They get through the day by biting their lips and pretending that none of this is happening. I must tell them that it is. I am grievously sorry that the Labour Government who have just gone did not accept the so-called Steel Bill, which would have tidied your Lordships’ House in a most desirable way and would have given us a great deal of time on which to produce a more rational way of moving forward. Bygones are bygones. I echo my noble friend Lord Puttnam. I do not meet anybody from what I will call—for want of a better phrase—the real world, who is remotely interested in this legislation. I repeat an old joke. I guess that 1 per cent of the electorate favour the Bill, 1 per cent are against the Bill and 98 per cent have not the faintest idea of what we are up to and, more to the point, have no wish to know. I care about your Lordships’ House. My time is running out. However, I have broadly enjoyed every minute of the 24 years I have spent here. Although I was doubtful when I first got here, I do not believe that I have wasted my time in coming here—quite the contrary. Even in the bad old years that the noble Lord, Lord Lester, refers to, when we had hereditaries, we did a pretty good job. I do not know if the noble Lord, Lord Lester, remembers, but we had all-night sessions. We did not filibuster then and I do not regard myself as filibustering now. I regard my duty as trying to persuade the Leader of the House to think about this rationally and to go away and come back with a much better way of doing things. This is what this is all about. I am not much of an optimist but I have at least a faint hope that maybe something sensible might yet emerge. In my dinosaur role, I say again that the atmosphere of this House in the past few weeks has changed dreadfully for the worse. The cause of this is the Bill. The beginning and end of everything going wrong is not the fact that we have a lot of new Peers taking time to understand our ways and to fit in. It is nothing other than this Bill and the refusal to approach rationally what is in the Bill. That means of course that what has gone wrong with this House is the Government’s fault. They suggest remotely, via the Government’s friends in the right-wing press, that the Opposition are the cause of all the problems. However, this is not our Bill. I have heard my noble friends come up with lots of entirely acceptable suggestions for amending it and the Government clearly have a bit of paper that they have all had printed for them, saying, ““Agree to nothing””. That is what is going on here. We should not pretend that that is not what is going on. Coming to my final remarks, most horrifying of all was the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, from the Government Front Bench a couple of hours ago. I hope that I am mistaken but he appeared to say—indeed he appeared to threaten us—that the Government were willing, because of this Bill, to end self-regulation in your Lordships’ House. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, has every opportunity—he can get up now if he wants—to pledge that it is not remotely in the Government’s mind to end the era of self-regulation, and maybe even introduce a guillotine in your Lordships’ House. I did not hear the noble Lord, Lord McNally, say that that was not in his mind. Would the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, like me to sit down so that he can tell us that the thought has never entered his mind? No, he is not even looking in my direction. He dare not look in my direction. What pretty pass have we come to as a result of this, when someone on the Government Front Bench, albeit a Liberal Democrat, can even raise the subject of ending self-regulation and possibly introducing a guillotine?