Well, I am grateful for that intervention.
There is another Bill that solves about half of these problems. I mentioned it in an earlier intervention. It is Lord Steel’s Bill. He is a Liberal Lord, and his Bill give peers the opportunity to retire if they want, which will reduce the numbers. If they do not turn up, they get disqualified. On the criminals issue, the bad guys would be disqualified, too. That Bill therefore deals with at least a third of the problems with this Bill.
I say to those who are dissatisfied with the way in which we get our peers that I personally do not object to former senior politicians going to the Lords, as I think they make an important contribution. If the regional balance is wrong, we do not have to turn the Lords upside down; we could have regional commissions, perhaps, or a debate about allocating peers.
As for the insulting notion that the experts in the Lords are not important, anyone who has attended a debate on health issues in which peers such as Lord Winston or Lord Walton participated will have listened in awe—and the same applies to those with military experience, as has been said. Listening to a Lords debate can be an awesome experience.
We are being told that because Lords reform was in the parties’ manifestos, this Bill has to go through, but we barely touched on the issue in our manifesto. It merely said that we must find some form of consensus. The Steel Bill presents the ideal way to achieve consensus, and therefore to get us out of this corner.
Many years ago, I served on the Anglo-Irish parliamentary forum. I remember talking, in County Tipperary or somewhere else, to Irish Members who suffered two-Member constituencies. Did they like it? They hated it, because they were always campaigning against each other through the whole term. Nothing got done and constituency interests were not paramount.
Let me say a few words about the veiled threat from my new-found Liberal hon. Friends, who occupy what used to be our other Front Bench before it was taken over by them. I forget after which election that happened, but perhaps we will get that Bench back at some point
in the future. I say to them, “Please don’t threaten us over the boundary changes that we need. We gave you the AV referendum and it was a straight fight.”
Finally, we must think about the new constituencies—with seven Members and larger than a country, as a colleague put it. Do we really want to superimpose that in our areas? I do not think so. We already have MEPs covering similarly vast areas.
As a party loyalist, I hate doing this—I really do—but I cannot support this Bill. I do not think it is in our national interest or Parliament’s interests, and it is certainly not in my party’s interests.
8.44 pm