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Mr. Grieve: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Shona McIsaac: Okay, just the once now.
Mr. Grieve: I seem to have heard a great deal in the Chamber during this Parliament about the hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Bell). It has been suggested that he was
elected because of the rejection of another candidate who was standing for his party, which would not otherwise have been rejected.
Shona McIsaac: I was talking generally--and after all, the other parties withdrew from that election. The hon. Gentleman could have got the hon. Member for Aldershot, who is behind him, very worked up with the mention of the word Tatton.
I was elected 18 months ago because the majority of people in this country wanted a Labour Government. It was not Shona McIsaac they were voting for.
The people of this country thought that they had got rid of the Tories last May. They did not. The Tories are alive and well, sitting on their red Benches next door and waiting for their sons--it is largely sons--to inherit. I cannot accept them lording it over us in that fashion. It is undemocratic that 600 families can rule by accident of birth alone over 60 million people. It is out of date.
The hereditary peers are hardly representative either. It has already been said tonight that there are only 16 women among the hereditary peers and two from the ethnic minorities. Looking a little deeper, they are all from one social class. We do not see them down at Kwik Save or putting a fiver on the lottery. We are far more likely to see them falling off their horse at a local hunt. They do not scrutinise legislation, they block. It is simple: Labour has a majority in the House of Commons; the Tories have a majority in the House of Lords. So, they are going to block, because they believe that it is their right--indeed, their hereditary privilege--to block anything that us oiks, Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minxes and Dennis the Menaces do in this Chamber.
Labour has been accused of class war. Some of the worst examples of that that I have come across have been from those defending the hereditary principle. I got a strange little pamphlet in the post today called "In Defence of Hereditary Peers". Here is the class war clincher from that document. It describes the voters of this country as
Various opinion polls have also been mentioned suggesting that people did not want to get rid of the hereditary principle. I tested the waters in Cleethorpes--not literally; I did not jump off the pier or anything like that--asking people what they thought. Almost 70 per cent. said that they wanted to scrap the voting rights of the hereditary peers. That is a higher percentage than the Labour and Liberal Democrat votes combined, so there must be a few Tories who want the measure, too. We must get a few things clear. There are more than just Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters who want the change. Plenty of Tories have said that we have to get rid of the principle.
A lot has been made of Labour's policies. Getting rid of the voting rights is just a first step. That is made perfectly clear in our manifesto. The detailed reform will come later. We also made it clear that there will still be a second Chamber to act as a check on the Executive and
the Commons. We are not getting rid of the House of Lords; we are just getting rid of the voting rights of the hereditary peers.
Our policies also state that no party will have an overall majority in the House of Lords. Surely that is fairer. When the House of Lords voted against the previous Government, it was because coalitions were formed with other parties. At the moment, the Tories in the House of Lords have nobody but themselves to convince when they want to vote down Government legislation. I cannot accept that. Some of our detractors parrot the line that we have not said what would replace the hereditary peers, but we do not need to replace them. If we scrapped the hereditary peers, the House of Lords with about 500 Members, would still be one of the biggest second chambers in the world. Surely we can work with that.
Mr. John Wilkinson (Ruislip-Northwood):
Hearing the admirable speeches of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) made me remember what an excellent vintage 1970 was in parliamentary terms. Their speeches reminded me of a delicious auslese--only when the grapes have been nipped by the first frost of political winter does their true savour come out. It did in full measure and how privileged we were to experience it.
Madam Speaker's selection of the loyal Opposition's amendment was particularly wise. The Liberal amendment, rather like the speech of the right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Mr. Maclennan), was prolix in the extreme. Our amendment focused on the three key constitutional issues at the heart of the Queen's Speech: first, the voting system for the European parliamentary elections; secondly, the nature of the House of Lords and the Government's determination to press ahead with the abolition of voting rights for the hereditary element before the House or the country have agreed on what is to replace them; and thirdly, the rules for the conduct of referendums--a subject on which my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) is a particular expert. I am glad to see him on the Front Bench.
I shall take as my point of departure not the speech by the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Shona McIsaac)--the quicker we move on from that the better--but the observations of the Home Secretary. He said that the justification for the proposed radical constitutional changes was that they would strengthen the nature of citizenship and involve people more closely in the determination of the decisions that affect their lives.
In respect of reforming the House of Lords, I do not see how that can possibly be the case, at least in the interim, if we are optimistic; for very much longer, if we are pessimistic, we shall have to endure an upper House of placepersons. Is that what the public want?
I have never encountered in any general election campaign--and I have fought a few--any elector calling for reform of the upper House. People have called for
better living standards and improved health services. My electors have just signed a petition, with 80,000 signatures, against the dismemberment of their local hospital. People have called for better pensions and improved standards of education, but I have never detected the call for class warfare that was so odiously expounded by the hon. Member for Cleethorpes, who so rapidly made her departure from the Chamber.
Mr. Grieve:
Does my hon. Friend agree that the electorate have also called for a better standard in the drafting of legislation--a matter that has not been brought before the House?
Mr. Wilkinson:
My hon. Friend is right about that, as he is about so much. He exemplifies the need for an effective second chamber that has the authority of the people's support behind its composition.
Helen Jones:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
The pernicious element in our political system is patronage, not primogeniture. It is certainly not the class system which is an irrelevance. We have only to walk along the Royal Gallery or look up at the west window of Westminster Hall to realise how irrelevant class is. We are all mortal and we all face the same dangers in combat as the many people from the other place who laid down their lives, but we have a common duty to serve our fellow citizens better. That should be the test. I am not at all convinced that an upper House of appointees would do the job better--far from it. I would advocate a senate in which 100 per cent. were elected on a different franchise from ours and for fixed terms. Such a model might also find favour with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe.
The worst of all political motivations is jealousy, which is corrosive. The democratic process is about mutual respect--respect for those in office and, among those who hold office, respect for those who put them there. Those who put them there should do so freely through a franchise and a ballot system of which they approve and which maximises individual choice and accountability. That is why the closed list system that the Liberal Democrats love so much is so deplorable. How deplorable it is that they should have sold their independent soul to the Labour party and that a once-great party that governed this country for decade after decade should have capitulated root and branch to the socialists.
Moving on to the growing importance in our constitution of referendums, I shall highlight one way in which contemporary circumstances demonstrate why we need a proper code of conduct for referendums. Right hon. and hon. Members will recall that in the last Session we considered the Greater London Authority (Referendum) Bill. The referendum was flawed because there was a single ballot paper with two questions:
We are seeing a diminution rather than a deepening of democracy. I revert to the theme that is, I believe, central to the thoughts of us all, especially about the conduct of European affairs--we need a deepening of democracy. We look, perhaps rather pathetically, to the European Parliament better to control the European Union. We know that our hopes are vain and that the European Parliament is probably more interested in its perquisites than in doing a proper job.
"an uninformed and ill-educated electorate."
If that is not class war, I do not know what is. It is saying that the Lord Snooties next door can lord it over us "uninformed and ill-educated"--that probably just means that we did not go to Eton--Bash Street Kids in the House of Commons. We should know our place and should not forget it.
"Do you approve of a directly elected mayor?"
and,
"Do you approve of a directly elected assembly?"
The issues should have been separated, but they were not. We argued that to put such a question in advance of the legislation and before we knew what would be the role and functions of the authority was dishonest, and so it has
proved. We heard today that one of the central responsibilities of the mayor--to control London Transport--has been taken away from him. So the electorate of London were voting on spurious grounds. That is why the recommendation of the Neill committee should have been encapsulated in the legislative programme and enacted in this Parliament.
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