| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Howarth: My hon. Friend is absolutely right about Baroness Wharton. She has undertaken sterling work in the other place. One reason why she is able to do that is that she is not answerable to a constituency. She is a Cross Bencher and she is independent; she is also independent minded. Hereditary peers, in not having constituencies, do not feel constrained to pursue a line that might be in the interests of their constituency, but not necessarily in the interests of the country. Hereditary peers are able to take a broader view in the national interest.
Angela Smith: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Howarth: As soon as I have finished my point I shall, of course, give way to the hon. Lady. I am sorry, but she will have to listen to me for just a little longer.
Hereditary peers do not have constituency correspondence. That is a huge advantage. It means that they are not burdened with that aspect of parliamentary life. They are able to devote themselves to whatever
cause, like the baroness to whom my hon. Friend the Member for Thanet, North (Mr. Gale) referred. They can take up the issues that they feel are important.
Angela Smith:
Are we to take it that these interesting encomiums of individual Members of the House of Lords indicate that other Members of that place are not held in equally high regard by Conservative Members, or is the debate to be punctuated by our going through the entire 759 Members one by one and recording their individual worth?
Mr. Howarth:
The debate could be punctuated by their contributions. That would make for an extremely interesting debate, but I know that you, Mr. Martin, would not particularly approve of that. You might find that that caused the debate to stray.
Mr. Swayne:
The hon. Member for Basildon (Ms Smith) can table an amendment.
Mr. Howarth:
As my hon. Friend says from a sedentary position, the hon. Lady is perfectly free to table an amendment to that effect. We look forward to seeing it on the amendment paper tomorrow.
The hon. Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay) or the hon. Member for Battersea asked what was the difference between hereditary peers and a lottery. If someone comes from the think tank Demos, the answer is not a lot. Demos has proposed that, instead of hereditary peers, we should have a lottery in which ordinary people are picked at random. The remarks of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe were not so wide of the truth. It appears that a lottery is proposed to choose who sits in the Lords.
The First Deputy Chairman:
Order. Perhaps I can help the hon. Gentleman again. He is wide of the amendment.
Mr. Howarth:
I was making the point that, to a certain extent, the hereditaries are something of a lottery and, therefore, we do not need an alternative proposal.
My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe said that, if the amendment were passed and hereditaries were able to sit and speak in the other place, there would be no threat to the House of Lords from that. I disagree with him. If the Government were to support the amendment, they would find that the hereditaries who participated, albeit not in a voting fashion, would have something to contribute and would expose the flawed nature of the Government's proposal. Therefore, it is unlikely that the Government will accept the amendment, but they are exposing the flaw in the Bill by opposing it. They are also exposing the spite and animosity that they feel towards people who have, as many of my hon. Friends have pointed out, made a constructive and public-spirited contribution to our national life. I shall support the amendment.
Mr. Benn:
I had not intended to speak, but I want to put on record the fact that the debate, and the speeches made by Conservative Members, ought to be made compulsory reading for every schoolchild in this country.
Those arguments have appeared time and again. I read the debate on Second Reading of the Reform Bill; it was warned that parliamentary democracy would disappear if the franchise were extended. I point out to the right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Mr. Maclennan), who is the leader or deputy leader or former leader--whatever he is--of the Liberal Democrats, that Mr. Asquith said that parliamentary democracy would be undermined if women got the vote. Today, we have had a complete rerun of the whole history of the argument for making this place democratic. Now, Conservative Members are trying to prevent that in the Lords.
The other aspect of the debate that has interested me very much is the total ignorance of Conservative Members of the real flexibility of the so-called hereditary system. As I said a couple of weeks ago, when the peers were first appointed, they were not hereditary at all. The Salisburys have had a wonderful way of using writs of acceleration: "Get there before you have inherited." I had a very amusing correspondence with Lord Salisbury--"Bobbity", as he was called--who wrote me an angry letter about what I was doing. I replied, "Dear Lord Salisbury, I only want a writ of deceleration." The Salisburys could do what they liked.
Someone talked about noblesse oblige; my problem was noblesse obligatoire, which was a slightly different complaint. I have no objection to hereditary peers at all; they are ordinary people, but they happen to be law makers, without any entitlement to be so. On the other question about a hereditary system, I wonder how many Conservative Members know that, in the old days, treason was hereditary for those convicted of it. The corruption of the blood went from generation to generation. I do not know whether Conservative Members are in favour of hereditary traitors, but they existed for a long time, until that was changed.
I share one view with Conservative Members. I am very disappointed that my colleagues have not come up with a simple alternative, which is to elect a second Chamber. Most civilised countries in the world do that. I do not know what would happen if new Labour got its hands on the Senate--heaven knows how the Senate would be appointed in the United States--so I agree with Conservative Members who complain about our opposition to that idea, but please do not try to persuade me that the Lords are the final safeguard against extending Parliament.
I remember when the Lords voted to extend the Parliament. There should have been an election in 1940, but a Tory House of Lords extended the Parliament to 1945. Why? Because everybody said, "We don't want an election in the middle of a war." If we really believe that the final safeguard of democracy in Britain is hereditary peers then, my God, democracy is not very safe. The hereditary peers are not based on democracy, they do not believe in democracy and they do not practise democracy, but we are told by the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Sir N. Lyell), a former Attorney-General, that they are our final safeguard against democracy disappearing.
The Committee would be well advised to settle this matter by a vote. We could then discuss the next group of amendments, which is much more interesting. We will be told to vote against Lord Weatherill's amendment, but, when it comes back from the Lords, we will be told to vote for it. We are going through the hoop in a way that
no parliamentary party of which I have been a member has ever had to. Let us get on to that amendment, but, please, preserve the debate. It is a supreme example of the Conservative party at its best, and nobody has reflected that better than the hon. Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth).
Sir Nicholas Lyell:
It is a real pleasure to speak after the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) who has been kind enough to mention me. I recall that, when the great Reform Bill went through in 1832, the Duke of Wellington held back his troops in the House of Lords and prevented them from voting against it. In consequence, it went through. There is another story--about one very fat peer being counted as 10, which also helped to carry the Bill through--but that would prove the right hon. Gentleman's version of democracy too well.
The point about the debate is that it does not concern the question whether the House of Lords should be reformed. Our great complaint, which I share with the right hon. Gentleman, and the country's great complaint against the Labour party, who have had 18 years to think about this, is that the Government have come forward with a proposition that will destroy what we have at present without telling us what they will put in its place. That will hang round the Government's neck at every stage of the consideration of the Bill, but that is not what we are debating.
We are debating what will be put in place at the interim stage. I share the reflective cynicism of some hon. Members. I hope that the interim stage will be extremely brief, that the Leader of the House will be as good as her word and that proposals will be introduced by 2000 so that we can get on with proper reform. However, I have no great confidence in that and we must consider carefully what we shall put in place in the interim.
I have said not that the House of Lords is in itself the foundation of democracy, but that it is our constitutional anchor. It gives the opportunity for the House of Commons to think again. It can hold up proceedings for long enough to force us to think once again about whether a proposal is what we want and what the country wants. That gives the country an opportunity to focus on what is the issue. The House of Lords can develop the argument, sort out the details and generally broaden the public debate. It is essential that that can continue during the interim period.
I support the amendment faute de mieux, although there is mieux available. The next group of amendments contains my own suggestions for what to do in the interim, but the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir P. Cormack) is valuable in that it would enable the upper House to continue to contribute. Hereditary peers who contribute in practice would be able to continue to contribute their voices--and, thus, their wisdom--to debate and to influence the peers who will, after all, be almost entirely appointed and left as the substantial rump.
Once one gets into the question of legitimacy, the exact legitimacy of an appointed placeman, as opposed to that of the son of a hereditary placeman, is difficult to identify. I share the view of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) that at least a significant proportion of the upper House--I do not go so far as to say the whole of it--should be elected. I also
share the view of the hon. Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay), who provides an example of independence in a sea of conformity, that, in so far as it is elected, the upper House should be elected on a rolling basis. That would provide the constitutional anchor and the stability.
We are deciding whether Members of the House of Lords who, by definition, play an active part because they speak in debates, should be able to continue to speak. I have done a little research, with the assistance of the Library, to find out how often such people speak. We are considering all this in the context of the figure of 91 hereditary peers which has been suggested by the Government, although they will not allow us to push that figure upwards because they fear that they may be defeated in the upper House.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |