| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mrs. Laing: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If the Government were honest in their approach to the Bill,and if they were dealing with the Committee straightforwardly, the substance of amendment No. 2 would appear in the Bill, as it should. I appreciate that not every hon. Member will agree with my arguments in favour of the amendment, and that is fair enough. Of course, Labour Members will have a different point of view, but surely there can be no hon. Member who does not believe that we, as the elected representatives of the people, should be discussing this matter. It is not only the right but the duty of the House of Commons to scrutinise the proposal. Had my hon. Friends and I not tabled the amendment, the matter that we are about to discuss would not have come before a Committee of the whole House. We are not alone in that opinion.
Charter 88, which campaigns for democracy, said in its recent brief:
It would be preposterous if such an important part of the Bill were never scrutinised in Committee by this elected House of Commons. Every week provides more evidence of the Government's attempt to take power away from the House of Commons, and so from the people who elected us, and to give more power to the Executive. That is the Bill's underlying intention and it explains why the Government do not want to allow us to discuss the matter.
Dr. Fox:
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is not preposterous, but perverse, for the Government to ask Labour Members to reject the amendment in the Chamber that they claim has democratic legitimacy and to tell their supporters to accept it in another place, which they claim has no democratic legitimacy?
Mrs. Laing:
It is preposterous, perverse and a string of other things that you would stop me saying if I tried, Mr. Lord. As my hon. Friend said, it is anti-democratic. I have never seen a more blatant disregard for the House of Commons than that which the Government have shown in relation to this amendment.
Paragraph 11 of chapter 5 of the White Paper "Modernising Parliament--Reforming the House of Lords" states:
Mr. Peter Bottomley (Worthing, West):
She will not look at you.
Mrs. Laing:
As my hon. Friend says, the right hon. Lady will not look at me; she merely listens. She has every opportunity to signal her Government's intention of accepting the amendment now; she said only two weeks ago in this House that they had every intention of doing so. Will she answer my point? No, she will not.
Mrs. Beckett:
I do not know why the hon. Lady is wasting the Committee's time with this nonsense.
Mrs. Laing:
How dare the right hon. Lady say that I am wasting my time or anyone else's in discussing this vital amendment? I am not wasting the Committee's time. She is wasting it and treating the House of Commons and Parliament with contempt with that answer. I do not know the Government's position, because she has never made it clear.
Dr. Starkey:
Will the hon. Lady give way?
Mrs. Laing:
I shall give way to the hon. Lady later.
It is no surprise that the Leader of the House refuses to take my point. Having said what she said on 20 January, on 1 February in the debate on Second Reading, in reply to questions on this subject from the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) and my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir P. Cormack), she said:
This is a vital constitutional Bill; it is not some little measure which does not matter very much. The Leader of the House still sits, reading her notes, not paying the least attention, after saying, with utter smugness, that we know the Government's position. We do not. Her position, and the way in which she explains what the Government intend to do, may be clever, but it is not consistent and, frankly, it is not honest. But, then, the Government's whole approach to the Bill has been all about expediency, and nothing whatever to do with principle.
During previous speeches on the matter, the Leader of the House explained the relevance of this apparent duplicity to the working of the Parliament Acts, but the purpose of the Parliament Acts has never been to stop this House debating a fundamental change to our constitution; nor has it been to stop Members of Parliament scrutinising a vital part of a Bill. We have the opportunity to do so now only because my hon. Friends and I brought the matter before the Committee. The Government do not want it to be discussed.
It should not be up to me and my hon. Friends to table an amendment of such fundamental effect to a Bill as important as this. We are but humble Opposition Back Benchers, but we know that we were sent here by the people who elected us to represent their interests and to stand up for the democratic process. This Bill is the most significant piece of constitutional reform for well over a century.
Unusually, I find myself in agreement with the right hon. Member for Chesterfield--not once, but twice, this sitting. First, he pointed out that, during an earlier debate on constitutional reform, Mr. Asquith said that, if women got the vote, it would undermine parliamentary democracy. The right hon. Gentleman said that Mr. Asquith was wrong, and I am very happy to agree with him. Secondly, he said--I think that I noted his words correctly--that Opposition Members should not try to persuade the Committee that hereditary peers are the final safeguard of democracy. In speaking to this amendment, I certainly do not try to persuade hon. Members of any such thing. It is we, the elected Members of the House of Commons, who have a duty to safeguard democracy.
The Government have acted with almost unbelievable arrogance in trying to prevent us from debating this vital amendment to this extremely important constitutional Bill. I hope that all hon. Members with a conscience, who believe in democracy, will stand up against the Government's arrogance and attempt to pervert the democratic process itself by joining my hon. Friends and me in supporting the amendment.
Mr. Tony Benn (Chesterfield):
I shall vote against the amendment tonight and I shall vote against it when it comes back from the House of Lords. I hope that my hon. Friends have the guts to stick by the Whips' first instructions and not reverse their vote on the second instructions.
As we are discussing an hereditary issue, I want to consider the parentage of the amendment moved by the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing), who spoke with great passion. When I heard her speak, I knew even more that Asquith was wrong. An Opposition Back-Bench Member has made a Government statement. The parentage of the Bill is a strange one: Baroness Jay and Lord Cranborne. They are not even married, but they have produced a proposal--with the support of Jack Weatherill, the former Speaker--and we are told to oppose it now and come back to it later. That is not acceptable. The Leader of the House will discover from these debates that the House of Commons is waking up to its responsibilities and is not prepared just to be told to go through the hoops.
I am absolutely opposed to the hon. Lady's amendment. I shall tell the House what will happen if it goes through. The Government are very clever; they have all sorts of people advising them. The amendment will be defeated tonight. It will go to the Lords, and they will have to make up their mind whether to lose everything under the Parliament Act or to go along with the Cranborne compromise. They will probably go along with it. Then, the Government will be faced with a situation absolutely contrary to our manifesto, whereby 91 hereditary peers will turn up--not with constituencies like Epping Forest, but with a couple of dukes, two marquesses and the odd viscount who wanted them to stay. How will those 91 peers be allowed to stay? They will be allowed to stay by the Prime Minister making those unelected, unaccountable hereditary peers into life peers. He is going to bless them retrospectively.
Not only that, the Government have the problem of five hereditary peers of the first generation. There is poor old Willie Whitelaw. I had a letter from the Leader of the House--it cannot be a secret that he will be offered a
life peerage. Then there is David Eccles--I do not know whether anyone remembers him, but I sat in the House with him. He is to be made a life peer.
"The House of Commons is being asked to scrutinise a Bill which every MP knows will come back from the Lords with a substantial amendment. The Commons will only have limited opportunity to debate the Bill in its final form."
That is right, except that the tabling of amendment No. 2 has given us the opportunity to scrutinise this part of the Bill this evening.
"the Government will act immediately to end the hereditary right to be a member of Parliament . . . But if the cross-bench peers promote an amendment for the interim retention of 1 in 10 of the hereditary peers, 75 out of the existing 750, plus some hereditary office holders, until the second stage of House of Lords reform has taken place, the Government is minded to accept that amendment".
Likewise, introducing the White Paper, the Leader of the House said that if there were such an amendment when the Bill was considered in the House of Lords
"the Government are minded to support such an amendment".--[Official Report, 20 January 1999; Vol. 323, c. 909.]
The effect of this amendment is precisely the same, so can I look forward to the Leader of the House signalling the Government's intention of accepting it now?
"If an amendment is moved in this place, I shall advise my right hon. and hon. Friends to vote against it".--[Official Report, 1 February 1999; Vol. 324, c. 610.]
The right hon. Lady said a moment ago that I know the Government's position. How can I possibly know the Government's position? How can anyone in this House, or anywhere else, know the Government's position, given that, on 20 January, she said clearly, and on the record, that the Government have every intention of accepting the amendment, but, on 1 February, she said that she would advise her right hon. and hon. Friends to vote against any such amendment? How can she possibly expect anyone to know the Government's position?
8.45 pm
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |