| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Maria Eagle: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Can he define what he means by independent? The current composition of the House of Lords suggests that it is Conservative rather than independent.
Sir Peter Lloyd: I believe that the hereditary peers are particularly independent. The fact that--[Interruption.] I know that better than the hon. Lady, because I served in the previous Government and know the number of amendments that we were obliged to take account of and adopt. On the whole they were sensible amendments, and many of them improved Bills, but they were uncomfortable for the then Government to recognise. I believe that the House of Lords as presently constructed has independence as one of its merits, but, as I shall say later, the upper House needs thoroughgoing reform.
The Bill will remind the public continuously what a sensible Government would not, and should not, want to advertise: that they are concentrating on stage one because they seem to have absolutely no idea of what to do for the all-important stage two. I hope that Parliament will resist stage one successfully. If it does not, I fear that the Government will be sufficiently satisfied not to hurry to get round to stage two. We need a fully reformed second Chamber--one that has dealt with the hereditary principle, which, although it introduces valuable people in the upper House, cannot now be defended.
We will not achieve full and workable reform in this piecemeal fashion. I could accept even the Home Secretary's two-stage argument, so long as we knew what stage two would be while we were considering and voting on stage one. We would get full and thoroughgoing reform much more quickly and much more effectively if the Government had the sense to put the two parts together.
No doubt the long-drawn-out struggle on hereditary peers will be a handy excuse for the Government, who look as if they are to renege on their election promise to hold a referendum on the electoral system. The wording in the manifesto was such that it led the right hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Ashdown), his hon. Friends and everyone else to believe that the referendum would be in this Parliament. I am disappointed that the Government seem to be going back on their word, not out of indignation on behalf of the Liberal Democrats, of course--and certainly not because I believe that proportional representation would be an improvement; I do not--but because the matter should be argued out and then settled by the electors in a reasonable time scale. Held over as an ever-present but indefinitely postponed possibility, it will have an unhealthy, distracting and debilitating effect on the work of this House.
Nevertheless, the Government show all the signs of wanting to avoid any such referendum. They know that it would be divisive in the Labour party, and they perhaps fear that they would not win. Above all, they know that the Prime Minister would have less of a hold over the Liberal Democrats once the issue had been decided one way or another. He would no longer have the ever-receding promise to dangle before them.
As the Gracious Speech reminds us, the Government were the reverse of tardy in setting up the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly after conducting referendums, which brings me to a large part of what the hon. Member for Cathcart said. Every Conservative Member hopes that the Government and the hon. Member for Cathcart will be proved right in their belief, not that Scotland and Wales are nations--that has never been in doubt--but that they are nations that can be fulfilled and comfortable in the United Kingdom only if they have their own separate national Assemblies in which their nationhood and distinctiveness can be expressed politically.
Likewise, we hope that the fears of many Conservative Members that this kind of devolution will, on the contrary, point up differences, create new areas of conflict and drive the nations of the United Kingdom further apart will be proved wrong. We shall see.
All Conservatives will want to make the new arrangements work as well as possible now that they are in place, but what the Gracious Speech does not acknowledge is that the West Lothian question remains unanswered. It remains unanswered partly because the referendums were held before legislation had gone through the House, which felt disbarred from altering in legislation what appeared to have been promised and approved in a referendum.
The West Lothian question must be answered at some stage, however, if the United Kingdom is to function harmoniously. It can, no doubt, be left over while the Government have a good majority in England as well as in the United Kingdom as a whole, but there will come a time when a Government who do not have such a majority in England seek to impose a policy on England, in respect of a matter that is devolved in Scotland, which is unacceptable to the majority of MPs representing English constituencies. That will create a crisis which would not be contained without further fundamental constitutional change.
This is very much unfinished business, left by the referendums. It has the capacity to blow this House apart, if it is not faced with timely imagination, but the words that the Government have used in the Gracious Speech give no hint that they recognise that, let alone how they propose to resolve the dilemma. The dilemma remains to be dealt with, partly because the referendums were held before the legislation had been examined by Parliament, and because Parliament undoubtedly felt diminished in its capacity to consider the legislation radically when Bills were presented to it.
Ms Oona King (Bethnal Green and Bow):
It has been enlightening--in popular speech, the word "not" would usually be used after phrases such as that--to hear the attitude of Conservative Members towards House of Lords reform. It goes without saying that there is no justification for the hereditary principle; it also goes without saying that the Tories will defend it until their dying breath.
We know that the Conservative party has a love of the hereditary principle that stretches back a long way. It is interesting--instructive, even--to note that, in the 17th century, the Tories were called the Abhorrers, because they abhorred the Addressers--the Liberals; credit where it is due--who demanded that King Charles II listen to their address of Parliament and give Parliament a whirl. That, naturally, sent the Abhorrers absolutely round the bend. To be frank, they went berserk because they were outraged that anyone could question the principle of hereditary power--and they are still taking the same line 300 years later.
I have to put it to Conservative Members that, if they are ever going to get the hang of this modernisation thing, they had better start now.
Mr. Grieve:
Will the hon. Lady comment on why, leaving aside Conservative Members, 60 per cent. of the electorate do not seem to have got the hang of this modernisation thing in respect of the House of Lords, because they disapprove of the Government introducing the two-stage process without saying what the end product will be?
Ms King:
It is clear that the British public disapprove of Tories having an in-built majority because their ancestors did some favour to some king, queen, duke or whoever 300 years back. I do not believe that that is a reasonable argument.
The Tory amendment mentions how the Government's plans will
I do not expect Conservative Members to take this argument seriously. Look at the Conservative Benches. Does anyone see a woman sitting there? I often look across at those Benches. On these Benches, more than 40 per cent. of the Labour Members present are women, because the Labour party is more democratic.
Mr. Tyrie:
Is the hon. Lady aware that, in his new appointments to the House of Lords, the Prime Minister is making roughly the same proportion of women peers as did the previous Prime Minister? There has been no sizeable increase in the proportion of women being sent to the House of Lords.
Ms King:
What I am aware of is the fact that the Prime Minister will reform the House of Lords, so that the current principles will no longer apply. I also note that Baroness Uddin, the recently appointed peer from my constituency, is the first Bangladeshi woman to be appointed. Unlike the Tories, the Labour party uses its powers to promote representative democracy.
I find the Tory position shameful, and I think that many Conservative Members do, too, and are unable to defend it. Could there be anything more like a closed list than the hereditary principle? When did the seat of Cranborne come up for election? Was there consultation? Who was on the shortlist? The hypocrisy is mind-boggling, and the transparency of the Conservative party's argument is almost indecent.
The closed list is in line with the basic premise of our democracy, which is the party system. The party chooses the candidate. I have never heard Conservative Members rail against that principle, because each and every one of them were elected under that system. Everyone in this Chamber was elected on that principle. The Tories support the hereditary principle for no other reason--except perhaps family attachments--than that it guarantees them an in-built majority.
The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe made a great speech in favour of the status quo. His ancient forebears, the Abhorrers, would be proud of him. It would be funny if it were not so sad. He spoke about the need for legitimacy. How does he justify leaving the Tory hereditary in-built majority in place for the two or three years it will take the royal commission to report?
It is clear that that majority is illegitimate--as the right hon. and learned Member intimated--and it must go. It is also obvious that the Tories will continue to cling to their illegitimate power for as long as they can. That is shameful to us and to most of the country. I have heard my hon. Friends ask, "What more do they want?" It is crystal clear what they want: they want blood--blue blood. They will continue with their spurious arguments as long as they can to keep that unfair, in-built, hereditary majority.
"turn the House of Lords into an enormous quango".
As a journalist said yesterday, better a quango of the living than a quango of the dead. The current quango was put in place in the 12th century. The right hon. and
learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) said that, for some reason, the Government persist in reforming the House of Lords. Let us spell it out: the reason is the minor issue of democracy. That is why the Government are reforming the House of Lords. There are 626 hereditary peers, two of whom are from ethnic minorities and 16 of whom are women, which is less than 3 per cent.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |