Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

I hope my noble friend will excuse me if I say that he has never been a particularly modest man, so he probably saw it as a little bit of sainthood flying across the Chamber. It takes one to know one. I thank the Minister for the spirit in which she responded to this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, suggested that I might have shown three qualities—eloquence, wit and seduction. I will not say which one I failed on this afternoon but plainly it is at least one of them although not, I hope, all three. As a Liberal—I use that term with a capital L and without any suffixes—I regret that the Labour Party still appears wedded to a form of democracy that I find strange; what I call the democratic principle of appointment. I do not believe there is anything in the argument that people who are directly elected will perform less independently than those who have been appointed. One of the things that elected people experience, as all my noble friends who were Members of another place know, is a great deal of pressure from their electorates. That applies to the Minister, too, who was a distinguished Member of the other place. I am dubious about that argument. As to the likelihood of electing a mere slate of party hacks, I simply ask the noble Lord—this might not be a commendation but just a fact—to look at Middlesbrough, Hartlepool and Doncaster. He will see that elections are not always as predictable as you think if they involve a specific issue. I simply and kindly remind my much admired friend the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, that in the days when he was a Labour MP for a West Wales seat, the appointment of Labour councillors to police authorities had about as much to do with democracy as the popping of a champagne cork and was seen as something of a scandal from time to time throughout Wales. I therefore do not accept that the tripartite principle of which he spoke has always been an illustration of good practice. However, I recognise when I have lost a case. I can see that it would be unhelpful to the House to press this amendment to a Division. Some valuable issues have been raised and I beg leave, on that basis, to withdraw my amendment. Amendment 1 withdrawn. Amendment 1A Moved by