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Mr. Ian Bruce: I can see that the right hon. Gentleman is nearing the end of his speech. I am following his argument closely and wonder whether he has concluded that he would prefer the total abolition of the second Chamber.
Mr. Sheldon: The main reason for keeping the other Chamber is the quinquennial Act. Under that Act, Parliament sits for five years and this House--this House alone, were the House of Lords to be abolished--can overturn that Act at a throw, if it so desires. There has to be some method of providing for that eventuality. As far as the principle of abolition is concerned, if the House of Commons behaved as a proper House of Commons and acted where it thought fit, the need for that second Chamber would be greatly reduced.
Mr. Benn: I have followed my right hon. Friend's argument and agree with it. However, he spoke about the dangers of new-found legitimacy in the transitional House of Lords: would he go so far as to argue, as I would, that the one point where the Lords are likely use that legitimacy is to frustrate the second stage, for if the second stage were to be at all radical, they would be committing suicide by accepting it? With their new-found legitimacy, would they not frustrate the second stage to save life peers, the remaining hereditary peers and everyone else in that Chamber?
Mr. Sheldon: In my idle moments, I have pictured some of the matters on which the transitional House of Lords might use its powers, and the one that my right hon. Friend suggests is undoubtedly one that has occurred to me. It would be easier for the Lords to use those powers on the not infrequent occasions where there was some support for their position.
Mr. David Winnick (Walsall, North): My right hon. Friend is being extremely generous in giving way. It is true that, in stage 1 when the hereditary Lords--other than the 91 remaining--have gone, the Lords might have a feeling of greater legitimacy, but surely, if stage 2 were to produce an entirely directly elected House, such action to frustrate it would be a direct challenge to the House of Commons?
Mr. Sheldon: There is no doubt about that, but I am not currently concerned with stage 2. Lord Cranborne might yet see his dream come true, and that is what frightens me.
Once we start to alter the balance of the two Houses, we must not think that the long-standing conventions will continue to apply. Once change begins, we cannot know the use to which such reform will be put. What we can be sure of is that, even without changes to the Lords' powers, far greater use will be made of them. In addition, the 91 hereditaries might come into their own. When my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House said, in answer to me, that the powers would remain unaltered, she did so on the basis that stage 1 would last for only a limited time. The longer stage 1 remains, the more problems will be caused to this Parliament and the next. That has to be dealt with during the Committee stage of the Bill before us.
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Before I call the next hon. Member, I remind the House that time is getting on and many hon. Members have been in the Chamber all day yesterday and all day today. It is only fair to point out that, if speeches are shorter, some of those hon. Members will be called.
8 pm
Mr. Peter Brooke (Cities of London and Westminster): The right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon) and I once travelled together to China. He will remember the Yeats poem "Lapis Lazuli":
- "Two Chinamen, behind them a third . . .
Above them flies a long-legged bird
The symbol of longevity".
The debate yesterday, almost all of which I attended, was perfectly relevant to the topic and therefore worthy of it. However, the response of the House to the Government's intentions could have risen higher and been more worthy of the great history of the other place if the Government had not been so preoccupied to descry it and so little to praise it.
I do not blame the Government for using statistics to make their points, although, in his account of the popular vote for the two major parties at the previous general election, the hon. Member for Gillingham (Mr. Clark) was more accurate in the last Back-Bench speech made for the Government last night in column 684 of yesterday's Hansard than was the Leader of the House in the first Front-Bench speech in column 613. I appreciate that I myself am more literate than numerate, but I can plead to having done advanced applied statistics at postgraduate level at Harvard, so my criticism of the Government for a high concentration on the numerical and a compensating aversion to the verbal is not the product of statistical unfamiliarity but due to a preference of taste.
Of course I understand why the Government have preferred the statistical route, and I am not gainsaying the particular arguments that they sustain, other than referring to the curious inaccuracy of the Leader of the House. Nor am I criticising the Government for wishing to reverse what they see as a perceived party political disadvantage. I could not blame any Government, let alone one so sensitive to party political advantage as this one, for wanting to redress an honest disadvantage under which they felt they were suffering. I am only sorry that they
should have felt it necessary to overdo the immediate arguments against the hereditary peers to justify their lack of preparedness for comprehensive reform.
The Brookes are a smallish family--they run nowadays to more than 5,000 individuals worldwide but fewer than 10,000--but they spread into eight or 10 county branches in this kingdom. All the branches have a badger as their crest on the grounds that brock equals brooke, and the Gaelic for badger is broc. I have found a badger as far back as 1558 on a tomb in a church in Shropshire, while in Colebrooke in County Fermanagh, in a church of which it has been accurately remarked that most churches are dedicated to the glory of God but Colebrooke is dedicated to the Brookes, there are 18. Despite that longevity, my own county branch, which is in County Cavan via Cheshire, has never produced an hereditary peer under our name, although Holbein's drawing of Brooke Lord Cobham has a distinct look of my father.
I remark in parentheses, and as a declaration of interest, that the County Fermanagh branch in the next-door county produced in the last war Lord Alanbrooke and Lord Brookeborough, whose banners as knights of the garter hang from the beams of Colebrooke church and whose hereditary heirs still sit in the other House. My noble late father was a life peer and, at 91, my noble mother still is a life peer.
In a certain personal respect, I speak for my parents, who served directly in the other place for 36 years between them, which, by coincidence, was precisely the same number of years that they served between them on the old Hampstead borough council. I shall draw on that coincidence in a moment, but, before that, I want to record with pride that, in seven centuries of our parliamentary history, my parents were the first married couple to sit simultaneously on the Front Bench of either House, an achievement that anticipated by a single year the same one in this House when it was accomplished by the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) and Dr. John Dunwoody in the then Government.
The coincidence to which I referred is that both the bodies of which my parents were members for 36 years--Hampstead borough council and the House of Lords--have been the subject of drastic reform. The merger of Hampstead borough council with St. Pancras and Holborn into Camden chronologically followed the Herbert commission, which my late father established in the late 1950s and which in due course gave rise to the subsuming of the London county council into the Greater London council in 1965. It was, in short, the measured product of long deliberation and prudent preparation and in that respect wholly worthy of this great city.
The reform of the House of Lords--an institution at least 10 times older than the LCC and the old London boroughs when they were reformed--is being passed at a breakneck and seemingly unpremeditated pace. The right hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Mandelson) modestly took the credit for the royal commission, but the credit for that happening at all belongs to her Majesty's loyal Opposition for their campaign against the haphazard and ramshackle way in which the Government are handling the reform. Because they took no thought for the morrow, the Government now have to introduce the reform much faster than would have been necessary if there had been greater forethought--a charge that can be laid at the door
of their whole constitutional project. As I remarked at an earlier stage, if you do not know where you are trying to get to, any road will get you there. After more than seven centuries, that is not worthy of this Parliament.
The hon. and learned Member for Medway(Mr. Marshall-Andrews) referred to bricklayers. I have a criticism of the royal commission other than that it has an excessively short life due to the Government's unthinking folly. I served in the Whips Office and the Cabinet with my noble Friend Lord Wakeham. He has a considerable reputation as a fixer in the eyes of political journalists and, although historians will determine its eventual validity, the profession of fixer owes more to the role of a plumber than to that of an architect. Lord Wakeham's principal credential for the chairmanship seems to be that he belongs to the right union. The future House of Lords is in more than a little need of architecture, and in that I am saying more brutally what my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Sir E. Heath) said gently.
The Government may justify their acquiescence in the Weatherill amendment on grounds of pragmatism, but it owes nothing to principle. The House of Lords has a great national past. In 1975, the Brussels Commission confessed that, for the first time, it had been outwitted, defeated and perplexed by a delegation from a national legislature. That was a scientific delegation consisting of Lord Ashby, Lord Hinton and Lord Zuckerman. When representatives of the Commission rang No. 10 the following day, they asked, "Why are you proposing to abolish the House of Lords?" Those were life peers, but the late Launcelot Fleming, who was successively Bishops of Portsmouth and Norwich, was a scientist of sufficient distinction to serve on the royal commission on environmental pollution in his own right.
On the hereditary side, the noble Earl Russell has all his father's genes and he is not alone among the hereditary peers. There are plenty of hereditary peers who sit as fellows of the Royal Society. Able Ministers from this place who have gone to the other place report that, when they speak in that massively knowledgeable forum, they experience the same nervousness that they experienced as small boys before going out to bat. Of course I acknowledge those who are lightly called working peers, but I see no significantly greater fault in a peer who sits in the other place because his ancestor gave money to Charles I than in one who sits there now because he has given money to the governing party of the day.
I fear that I am more sure that the Bill is not worthy of the Government's constitutional project--perhaps it is--because of the arguments that were deployed yesterday on its behalf. I cannot blame Back Benchers, because a lead is always given by the Front Bench, and I regard it as a trivialisation of what we are about that the Leader of the House spent so much time discussing taxpayer support for the 62 hereditary peers who live abroad when this Government have not even tried to answer the West Lothian question, the fault line of which still lies beneath their constitutional structures.
I am no great believer in focus groups, because I recall Dean Acheson's account in his great post-war book about a wartime episode when Cordell Hull said to President Roosevelt:
Although I am personally glad that the Labour Members are so close to their constituents, I have a different impression. It is contained in a wartime cartoon by Pont of Punch, in a series called "The British Character", in which two or three solid rustics are sitting silently in a public bar where a German radio broadcast is reporting,
I offer the House two verses from the poem thatG. K. Chesterton wrote after F. E. Smith had claimed that the Bill on Welsh disestablishment had shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe. It states:
I do not resist the burial of the hereditary principle, but I insist that we do it decently, properly and honourably, and that we honour the most remarkable contribution made by hereditary peers to our constitution and our law making by the quality of whom we put in their place--more sensibly than the Government have so far started to do.
Professor Cannadine ended his notable book on the decline and fall of the British aristocracy with Lord Peter Wimsey's self-composed epitaph:
"Mr. President, this is not one of those occasions when we have enough time for you to wait while you learn where we want to be led."
2 Feb 1999 : Column 799
It was clear from Labour Members' speeches yesterday that they have gone into the highways and byways of their constituencies--either spontaneously or under bleeper control--to verify opinion on the House of Lords. I cite the speeches of the hon Members for The Wrekin (Mr. Bradley) and for Gillingham. The hon. Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike) referred to his constituents. The hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Mr. Plaskitt) more spaciously told us what people wanted.
"In England the people have been thrown into the wildest panic."
Much has been made of the inactivity in the House of Lords in the 88 years since 1911. I attribute that inactivity, beyond peradventure, to Pont's picture of the public bar and the fact that, over the past nine decades, there has been no public pressure for reform.
"Are they clinging to their crosses, F. E. Smith,
The same perception of people's attitude to the House of Lords applies.
Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses, are they Smith?
Do they, fasting, trembling, breeding,
Wait the news from this our city?
Groaning 'That's the Second Reading!'
Hissing 'There is still Committee!'
If the voice of Cecil falters,
If McKenna's point has pith,
Do they tremble for their altars? Do they Smith?
In the lands where Christians were, F. E. Smith,
In the little lands laid bare, Smith, O Smith,
Where the Turkish bands are busy
And the Tory name is blessed
Since they hailed the Cross of Dizzy
On the banners from the West!
Men don't think it half so hard if
Islam burns their kin and kith,
Since a curate lives in Cardiff saved by Smith."
"Here lies an anachronism in the vague expectation of eternity".
2 Feb 1999 : Column 800
I prefer, filially, to close my speech with another quotation of Lord Peter Wimsey:
"I have a cursed hankering after certain musty old values."
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