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Dr. Wright: I will not give way again.
I do not want to detain the Committee with things that I did not want to explore, but the fact is that we are dealing with hereditary peers who, as we heard--
Sir Nicholas Lyell:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Dr. Wright:
I just said that I was not going to give way.
Never did we have a better exposition of what has sometimes been called the good chaps theory of government than in the speech of the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir P. Cormack). Those people are good chaps and chapesses, but the point is that they are contaminated by their ancestry and will never escape from that contamination, good chaps though they might be. I call in aid only the first study on the purchase of peerages. It turned on correspondence between the Conservative leader of the time, Lord Salisbury, and the then Conservative Chief Whip, Akers-Douglas. A footnote in that little study says simply:
Without digressing, let me say that there are legitimate arguments about the shape of a reformed Chamber. I say to those who simply advance their nostrums as we go through the debate: reflect on the fact that we now have a royal commission and a chance to test some of those arguments.
Some people say, "The second Chamber has to be elected." We have to avoid two evils. One is to create a rival for the House of Commons, but the other to is create
a clone of the House of Commons. If, through election and a whipped, rigid party-list system, we created a second Chamber on good democratic principles that was simply a clone of the House of Commons, it would be proper to ask whether we had strengthened the checks and balances in our political system or weakened them.
We are at a moment when we are required to have some serious constitutional imagination. Let us put our nostrums to one side. Let us have a year or more of serious investigation, debate and argument, but, meanwhile, ensure that we establish a transitional House that can function and have a certain amount of legitimacy and confidence. The only proviso that I add--it is the point of the amendment that stands in my name--is that we must not have a transitional House that becomes permanent. We must not invent a system in which a certain number of hereditary peers not only stay for a time--which is necessary to ease the transition--but subsequently become permanent. We have to build the Bill around that constraining framework.
It is quite right--although it is a rather unusual procedure--for the Government to ask us to approve a Bill to which an amendment will be tabled in the other place that the Government will be minded to support. We know that that will happen.
Mr. Grieve:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that very point?
Dr. Wright:
No; I am almost finished.
It is quite proper that the House, when it sends the Bill to another place, should want to say: "We want to build a framework around the Bill, to ensure that the generous transitional provisions that we are making will not become permanent ones." That would be the honest thing to do. It is what the House should do. I hope that it is what we do.
Mr. Maclennan:
The hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing), in moving amendment No. 2, was in a sense usurping the position of official Opposition Front Benchers. I make no complaint about that, for she moved, her amendment with some passion which commended itself to the Committee. However, it might be thought that an amendment of such importance--if it is to be treated with great seriousness, as it should be--should have been moved by an official Opposition Front Bencher. After the pleas that we have heard today from Conservative Back Benchers for consensus in reform and for cross-party agreement, it would have been appropriate to have had in the Chamber for this debate the Leader of the Opposition.
Let us be quite clear about it: the obstacle to arriving at consensual reform of the upper House has been the Leader of the Opposition and his predecessors as leader of the Conservative party. The right hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. MacGregor) knows perfectly well that he served in a Government who set their face rigorously against any reform of the upper House. He knows perfectly well also that the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major) had no intention at any time in his premiership of even entering into serious discussions on the matter.
I regard it as the utmost hypocrisy for Conservative Members to suggest that, either before or since the general election, there was ever the remotest chance of getting
any agreement from the Conservative party on reform of the upper House. Indeed, on the very day that it became public knowledge that Lord Cranborne had entered into some consultation with the Prime Minister and his colleagues, it was clear that the Leader of the Opposition was completely at odds with his party in the upper House and was seeking to stir up those in another place into outright opposition to the Government's proclaimed intentions for reform of the second Chamber.
Sir Patrick Cormack:
That is a travesty of what happened. The Leader of the Opposition said only that he would not be party to a deal that would in any way inhibit proper examination and scrutiny of the Bill. We have always made it quite plain that amendment No. 2 would make a very bad Bill marginally better. For that reason, we shall be happy to support it in the Lobby. However, it was not part of a behind-the-stairs deal. The Leader of the Opposition made that plain, and I am happy to make it plain again now.
Mr. Maclennan:
I am absolutely clear about what happened on that occasion. It was quite clear that the Leader of the Opposition was making a very unsuccessful attempt to stir up his colleagues in another place, to treat this measure as a battering ram against the Government's overall programme of constitutional reform and to tie up the upper House in dealing not only with this Bill, but with the rest of its business, thereby stopping proper government and legislation.
Mrs. Dunwoody:
The right hon. Gentleman seems to be enunciating an interesting theory. Is he saying that Members of the House of Commons should not, in common with their colleagues in another place--and irrespective of party--have the right to delay the passage of legislation?
Mr. Maclennan:
No. The power of delay is a well-understood tool of opposition. However, one cannot pretend to be engaged in the proper scrutiny of legislation while making it plain to colleagues in another place that one is intent on destroying the business of the Government. In particular, one cannot pretend to be embarked on an engagement of consensual politics to reform the constitution. No consent was sought, and none would have been given.
Mr. Tyrie:
It would be interesting if the Liberal Democrats, for once, could behave according to their principles. They have a bevy of policy documents that show that they have been in favour of an elected second Chamber for decades. However, they are now acting as if they are part of the Government Front Bench and attacking the Conservative Opposition, who are trying to have a serious discussion of stage 2.
Mr. Maclennan:
Unlike the Conservative party in opposition, we engaged in dialogue with the Labour party about the reform of the constitution because we took the view that there should be cross-party agreement. Any suggestion that we made on that subject to members of the Conservative party was treated with total contempt. They were not interested in doing business, and they
The Liberal Democrats want to get rid of the hereditary peers as part of a move towards a proper, legitimate and democratic second House which exercises real powers over the Executive. The Bill is an important step in that direction. The amendment seeks to pick up on a deal that may be struck in another place, and seeks to embarrass members of the Government by putting them through the hoop of voting against it tonight and perhaps voting for it later. It is a perfectly transparent exercise in party politics and has nothing to do with high-minded principles about consent. It is a squalid little partisan deal.
Mr. Letwin:
The right hon. Gentleman is known to take the constitution seriously and has thought about it a lot. Is he genuinely advancing to the Committee the proposition that it is appropriate for the Government to make a major change to the constitution, in terms of the interim House, depending on their lordships' compliance with the Government's programme?
"At the request of the Marquess of Salisbury I have suppressed the details of a number of transactions in which political services were bartered for honours, lest their revelation should prove offensive to the surviving children of those concerned."
When we have such discussions, we think that we are engaged in just a little tidying up, but we are not. What is extraordinary is that we are having this discussion not in the first year of the century, but in the last, and that we still hear that type of arguments expressed by Conservative Members about why we should not do what any democratic society knows has to be done and should have been done. The question is only whether we can do it in a reasonably civilised, consensual and bipartisan way. That is the Government's approach.
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