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Mr. Maclennan: It is entirely open to this Chamber to participate in the debate on the amendment at a later stage if, in the upper House, it becomes apparent that it is an acceptable proposition that will be agreed consensually as a step on the way to full reform of the upper House. That remains to be seen. Nothing has come from the other place yet--nor could it have done, as the matter has not been debated--that gives us any certainty that the so-called deal will stick. It apparently enjoyed the support of Lord Cranborne and a number of his friends. Evidently, it did not enjoy the support of the Leader of the Opposition, who promptly sacked Lord Cranborne for having agreed to the deal.
Mrs. Laing: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way and for his kind remarks earlier. Is it not for the Prime Minister to give a lead to the country? If the amendment is going to be accepted and become Government policy, should not the amendment have been tabled by the Government and not by me, as an Opposition Back Bencher?
Mr. Maclennan: It could not have been made clearer that this is not the Government's policy. The matter has been set out in transparent language in the White Paper and the Leader of the House has spelt the position out. The proposal cannot become law without being debated on the Floor of the House. If an amendment is carried in another place, it will come back here for our consideration. Any talk of this Chamber being bypassed is wide of the mark.
As for prejudging what may be decided in another place, I do not know what the attitude will be. It is clear from the White Paper that the Government do not regard the amendment as the best policy. It is an incremental change that would remove approximately nine tenths of the hereditaries. The Government regard it as a step towards the fulfilment of their manifesto commitment to remove all the hereditary peers. It is not a satisfactory step and I should not dream of defending it as such. It is a most unfortunate step back from the manifesto commitment and I hope that it may not commend itself in another place as the way ahead, because it will create many anomalies. Perhaps the best advantage of the amendment for those of us who want a truly legitimate upper House is that the situation will be so patently anomalous that the process of bringing forward stage 2 will be accelerated.
Stage 2 is in the Government's mind. That is not hidden from the public; it is set out in the White Paper. They have made it plain that that is why they have asked the royal commission to report early--by the end of this year. They want to bring the measures for the reform of the upper House before the country before the next election.
Mr. Grieve:
I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman is familiar with the Minister's comments on Second Reading that the Government only hoped that proposals might be before this Chamber by the next general election.
Mr. Maclennan:
It is not possible at this stage to do more than offer a hope. The Government have generously put the possible shape of the second phase of the reformed House into the hands of a Conservative former Minister, as chairman of the royal commission. I have the greatest respect for him and I am sure that he will do his best, but we cannot do more than hope that his best will be good enough, that the rest of the commission will accept it or that it will produce a consensus around which this Chamber will be prepared to unite.
Those are matters for the future. The amendment has been tabled not to bridge a gulf or to open new lines of communication between the two sides, but to dig deeper trenches. That is an inappropriate way to approach the reform of the upper House. We need to look for common ground and build on it. The Government have signalled that by their willingness to listen to Lord Cranborne's proposal. There is nothing cynical about that approach. It is straightforward and open. For that reason, it should be welcomed.
Dr. Starkey:
As I have listened to this debate, I have come to the view that Conservative Members are increasingly losing their grip on reality. We reached the positive nadir--it might be the acme--when the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing) declared with passion that it was absolutely vital for our constitution that
Mrs. Laing:
Let me correct the impression that the hon. Lady has just given. Of course I did not say that that was vital. I said that it was vital that we should have a chance to discuss the amendment. I know what is in
Dr. Starkey:
I have quoted from the amendment, and it is for others to take a view. I want to take the charitable view--that the amendment has some logic behind it and was not tabled simply to play party games. I want to try to dissect that logic.
Through days of listening to Conservative Members on Second Reading and now in Committee, I understand that their argument is that the value of the House of Lords as a revising Chamber resides in its independence and in its representativeness. The latter concept is difficult to sustain, but I will take it as read. The next step of logic is that the hereditary peers are the key contributors to that independence and that representativeness, so the proposed transitional Chamber would be worse than the current Chamber.
Conservative Members argue either that we should stick with the House of Lords as it is or, as in the amendment, that we should have a halfway House between the present arrangements and the transitional Chamber that retains a considerable number, but not all, of those independent and representative hereditary peers. That, as I have divined it, is the logic behind the amendment.
Mr. Swayne:
As the hon. Lady describes the amendment, it is clearly remiss in a number of respects and is not very persuasive. Can she tell me, then, whether she will vote for it tonight and whether she will vote for it when it comes back from the Lords?
Dr. Starkey:
Let me put the hon. Gentleman out of his misery. I will not vote for it tonight, because I want the House of Lords to be replaced in the first instance by a transitional Chamber, and I hope that, if the Members of the House of Lords are as independent as we have repeatedly been assured by Conservative Members, they will also see the value of the Government's arguments and back us up by going for a transitional Chamber.
If, however, the peers insist on protecting their interests and table another amendment, I and other hon. Members will have to take a pragmatic decision. Frankly, although I would like to go the whole hog, I would prefer, if the choice is between going part way or not at all, to move towards the reform of the House of Lords and go part way. I am astonished that Conservative Members find that such a difficult line to follow, especially when most people outside the Committee would regard it as an intensely sensible and pragmatic way forward.
As I have been so kind as to set out the logic behind the amendment, I will now try to demolish it. The independence argument is clearly ridiculous. The hon. Member for Epping Forest tried on Second Reading to extend the notion even further by saying that peers were made all the more independent by the fact that they were free to change their party allegiance. I have news for the hon. Lady--all Members of this Chamber have the freedom to change their party allegiance. Of course, at the next general election, they would not be selected by the party that originally selected them, but as the hon. Lady knows, at least one Member of this place was
elected as a member of one party and is now,very sensibly, sitting as a member of another party. Is he independent or is he now a member of the parliamentary Labour party?
Mrs. Laing:
Does the hon. Lady not appreciate the big difference between Members of the House of Lords, who have never given a promise to people who elected them about which party they represent, and Members of the Commons, who go before the electorate as representatives and upholders of the principles of one party or another, and then cross the Floor? There is a difference in duty and in honesty.
Dr. Starkey:
Precisely--there is a difference in duty. The hon. Lady has just made my point for me.
The other point about hereditary peers that is always rehearsed is that huge numbers of them are independent, and Conservative peers are somehow included among them. However, most people outside Parliament would understand only Cross-Bench peers to be independent. I concede that there are a considerable number of Cross-Bench peers in the present House of Lords, but the hon. Member for Epping Forest knows perfectly well that at least 23 per cent. of Members of the transitional House will be Cross Benchers. If additional appointments are made, that percentage will be a minimum, not a maximum. Those Cross Benchers will be in the hands of the Appointments Commission, rather than remaining in the hands of the Prime Minister. The hon. Lady's argument that the transitional House will be less independent than the current House is, therefore, entirely fallacious.
The Conservatives appear to be rather recent converts to the notion of preserving the independence of the House of Lords because, even though the previous two Conservative Governments had a considerable majority in the Lords, they obviously did not feel that it was big enough, so they created more Conservative peers than they created Liberal or Labour peers. I shall take no lessons from the hon. Member for Epping Forest and her colleagues about their commitment to independence.
The second part of the Conservatives' logical argument is that the hereditary peers are more representative than other Members of the House of Lords and that removing them would reduce the representative nature of that House. Those arguments have been rehearsed endlessly in the debate, and I shall not repeat the figures, but simply point out that hereditary peers are extraordinarily unrepresentative. They are the most unrepresentative part of the House of Lords. Removing the huge superfluity of people representing the Tory party and land management and farming interests, ipso facto, makes the transitional House more representative. That is not to mention, of course, the hereditary peers' rather large gender imbalance.
"the Lord Great Chamberlain and the Earl Marshal shall be members of the House of Lords",
as the amendment says. If that is not losing grip on the reality outside Parliament, I do not know what is.
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