| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
7.15 pm
Mr. Andrew Tyrie (Chichester): I was surprised that the Labour party put reform of the Lords in its manifesto, because history tells us that it becomes a bed of nails in the end. I fear that that will also be the case this time round. Now that the Government have decided to reform Parliament, we must all decide what we want for the upper House.
The first matter to be clear about is whether we really want a second Chamber. I believe that it is right to have some check on the almost untrammelled power wielded by the Executive in this House. Many Labour Members disagree, but they have not said so tonight--although I think I noticed the hon. Member for Liverpool, Garston (Maria Eagle) nodding in favour. Three times this century, Labour has been committed to abolishing the upper House completely--most recently in 1983. Indeed, it was one of the founding thoughts of the Labour movement.
The Conservative party accepts the need for a constitutional check on the Executive's powers in this place. The trouble is that their power is becoming untrammelled. The restraint on that power has traditionally come from independent Back Benchers, but their numbers have been in decline for many years, and under new Labour they are an endangered species. I expect that they will shortly be extinct--there will then be only a few dinosaurs left, such as the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner), who usually sits just below the Gangway.
I do not want a weak Executive; I want a strong Executive, but an Executive who remain accountable to Parliament. Everywhere we see Labour circumventing Parliament, and slipping out of accountability to this place. By carrying on in that way, the Labour party has made the strongest possible case for bicameralism.
Mr. Lansley:
Does my hon. Friend agree that, far from the debate on closed lists being a cause of war, as the right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Mr. Maclennan) suggested, it has shown that, although independent-minded Labour Back Benchers may have spoken against closed lists, none of them voted against them? It took the House of Lords to provide a check on the Executive's desires.
Mr. Tyrie:
That is an excellent point. We have scarcely seen any independence or preparedness to speak out. As I said, the independent Labour Back Bencher is an endangered species.
The second matter we have to decide is how best to make an upper House effective. I believe that only with an element of democratic legitimacy can a second Chamber perform its job effectively in the 21st century. Without it, the Lords will rarely have the confidence to ask the Executive in this place to think again. We must go down the democratic route in reforming the second Chamber.
The third major issue we have to decide is the powers of the second Chamber and the balance between the two Houses. If the risk of constitutional gridlock is to be avoided, one House should have the last word, and it must be this House. The role of the second Chamber should not be to replicate what the Commons does, but to give the Executive time to think again on contentious issues, and to act as a constitutional long stop.
The Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949, and the precedents that have grown up around them, form a sensible basis for the division of powers between the two Houses. None the less, there is a case for some change. The Lords have an absolute veto on only one issue: a Bill to prolong the life of a Parliament. Perhaps that absolute veto should be extended to cover other constitutional issues.
I have mentioned three issues on which I think it is important for the House to come to a view. Has the Prime Minister been thinking about the need to bolster accountability or for a balanced constitution? I do not think that he has for a moment. I do not think that he has any intention of improving parliamentary democracy, or of making the second Chamber more effective. That is why we are having reform in two stages, and why the manifesto said that stage one should be a
I have never heard the Prime Minister put the case for a revising body, or for a constitutional long stop. All that I have heard from him, from time to time, is the language of class politics, some of which I have found nauseating. I am not convinced that the Prime Minister even believes that there is a case for an effective second Chamber: he has never given us any evidence to support the view that he has such a belief.
Mr. Gerald Howarth:
What about this Chamber?
Mr. Tyrie:
My hon. Friend makes a valid point. I sometimes am not sure whether the Prime Minister even believes in parliamentary democracy here: he is scarcely ever present. [Interruption.] The Prime Minister should come here more often if he wants us to believe that he takes the place seriously. That is what all previous Prime Ministers have done. His voting and attendance records must be worse than those of any other Prime Minister in British history. I have not checked that, but I shall be surprised if I am not right. Winston Churchill, after his stroke, may have rivalled the present Prime Minister's record, but, if so, his is the only case after 1953.
The country can learn something by watching the way in which the Prime Minister has treated his own party. Before the election, we were told that it was safe to vote Labour, because the Prime Minister had the party under his control. Well, the hon. Members for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone) and for Falkirk, West (Mr. Canavan), and, in particular, the hon. Member for Cardiff, West (Mr. Morgan)--who is quite a moderate man, as I have got to know--can testify to what the Prime Minister's control over the party really means. It is a type of control that the British constitution can do without. It uses the language of modernisation to disguise a ruthless centralisation of power at No. 10 Downing street.
We are already seeing that centralisation in the discussion about the House of Lords. We do not have to wait to find out; we do not have to guess what the Prime Minister is going to do with an appointed quango; we can see what he is doing now. He has appointed 105 peers so far, at an annual rate of 67. That is three times the average annual rate of the past 40 years, and almost three times the rate achieved by his predecessor. [Interruption.] Labour Members are making some very banal remarks.
In fact, the Prime Minister has appointed more peers since coming to power than have been appointed at any comparable time during this century. Harold Wilson's second Administration--even boosted by the "lavender list"--only got the annual average up to 38. What is more, the Prime Minister's appointments are blatantly partisan. Fifty-four per cent. of those appointees are taking the Labour Whip. I have been able to check back only as far as 1958, but in that time, no Prime Minister has let the number in his party rise above 50 per cent.
Incidentally, the figures for new peers exclude a number of Cross Benchers who are listed as having donated more than £5,000 to the Labour party--and then there is the Islington mafia. No wonder the accusation of cronyism will stick.
Maria Eagle:
Is the hon. Gentleman aware of the record of previous Prime Ministers from his party? Lady Thatcher created 205 peers, of whom 98 were Conservative, and the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major) created 160, of whom 75 were Conservative. We are talking about a percentage of about 50. The current Prime Minister's appointment of 54 per cent. of peers from the Labour party in the first year of the Labour Government goes nowhere towards redressing the 3:1 majority of the Conservative party in the House of Lords. Is the hon. Gentleman really suggesting that the number of Labour peers has made much difference?
Mr. Tyrie:
Lady Jay has made it clear that, following the removal of hereditary peers, there will be a rough balance in the upper House, and, therefore, the Labour appointments can be explained only on a partisan basis. The figures that the hon. Lady gave make my point for me. I think that she will find that they are 47 per cent. respectively for the two most recent Conservative premierships--although I may be slightly out, because I made the calculations in my head while I listened to her. As for the 54 per cent. figure, which I calculated beforehand, this is a sharp increase on figures in the mid 40 per cent. range.
We are moving into an era of Blairite patronage: an era in which packing the House of Lords will be the norm. We are beginning to witness an unacceptable exhibition of prime ministerial power, which the country will start to notice. So far, people have not noticed it at all.
The Prime Minister says that there is no need to worry, because he will hand responsibility for all the appointments that we have been debating to an independent committee; but what confidence can we have in such a committee? We know from the Jenkins commission that it is possible to rig an outcome by appointing people who hold only one view. Why should we believe that there will be any more independence in
the new committee than there is in the existing honours committee? We have been given no explanation to that effect.
The Prime Minister has breached all precedents, in regard to both the scale of his appointments to the House of Lords in the past 18 months and the proportion of Labour supporters whom he is putting there. He is breaching other precedents as well--for example, on consultation.
There is a long-standing precedent for consultation on House of Lords reform. On each occasion during this century when a Government proposed comprehensive reform--in 1910, 1948 and 1968--they invited the major parties beforehand to consult on the future of a second Chamber, but that has not happened this time. It is outrageous that this Government should proceed with fundamental reform of the House of Lords without at least trying to establish agreement with the major parties first.
The Bill threatens to eradicate all remaining independence of the second Chamber. That has stirred even a friendly press against the Prime Minister: even Alastair Campbell could not control it. So we have been offered a sop--and what is it? It is the sop of a royal commission to look at stage two reform. What confidence can we have in that? Labour will not even tell us its terms of reference; it certainly has not done so today. Will those terms of reference be to work up proposals for a largely democratic upper House, or would a wholly appointed Chamber do? Unless Labour rules out a wholly appointed House, the royal commission may merely decide to rubber-stamp the existing stage one proposal.
"self-contained reform, not dependent on further reform in the future".
That is why the manifesto is virtually silent about stage two. Labour was never serious about that.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |