Strathclyde Review

My Lords, I am always most worried when the House is congratulating itself on how wise it has been. I was a member of the Cunningham committee, and if there is a paragraph in its report of which I claim authorship and in which I take pride, it is the one that repeats the assertion by Lord Simon that this House must retain the right to say no. What makes this House work, faced with the Government’s oft-repeated threats to clip its wings, is its grim determination to retain that right to say no. The warning, and the danger, is that if we ever gave away the right to say no—sparingly as it is used—the dynamics of this House would change. We would become a debating society, because Governments would know that whatever process they adopted—option 3 was just a single example—they could bypass this House. This House is here for a special reason, and it is the right to say no that protects its authority and makes Governments think twice.