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The Minister of State, Lord Chancellor's Department (Mr. Geoffrey Hoon): If the hon. Gentleman accepts the end of the hereditary peerage, why is he opposing the Bill?
Dr. Fox: Because it is a bad Bill. It is incoherent, piecemeal and does not take us clearly from one stage to another. It is fair to say that, in every part of the debates on the Bill, we have never questioned the legitimacy of the Government in carrying out what was clearly in their manifesto, but we have always said that we needed to know what the whole process was going to be.
The Government ask us to accept a fundamental change to the way in which we are governed without telling us what the change will mean. That is unacceptable. We do not know what the end point of the process will be. As with many other things, the Government are starting a process without thinking through how it will finish.
The Government do not seem to know what they want. They do not know when they want it. They do not seem to know where the process will lead and, frankly, they do not seem to care what they get. The Leader of the House has said that anything is better than what we have at present, without us knowing how the new system will work, whether it will be stable or whether it will be effective. That seems utterly ridiculous.
If they want to be credible, the Government will have to come up very soon--they should have done so already--with concrete ideas about how they want to take the process further. Simply to set up commissions and to talk about Joint Committees with no clear steer about what they actually want for the government of the country
is unacceptable. It shows their lack of courage. Perhaps I am being unfair; perhaps it just shows the lack of thought that has gone into the process.
The Leader of the House mocked what I said on Second Reading about requiring the Bill to fit into wider constitutional reform. I said at the outset of my speech that we had to consider the Bill as it fitted into the wider constitutional architecture. I stick by what I said on Second Reading.
Properly thought out reform would decide what Parliament would do. There is a strong case for reforming Parliament. The most important part of that is increasing the powers of Members of the House of Commons against the Executive, but we have to consider--I repeat what the Leader of the House quoted--what we want Parliament to do, and the relationship of a bicameral Parliament as a whole with the Executive. What will the relationship with an ever more politically active judiciary be?
What is to be our relationship with Europe? Given the events of the past 24 hours, it might have been better if the Government had been expending their energies in reforming parts of the European constitutional architecture, rather than trying to tackle the operation of the other place.
Dr. George Turner (North-West Norfolk):
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that it is a matter not of whether, but of when we should consider those issues? If the Government had presented in the Bill a full blueprint for reform, might we not be accused of having misled the electorate in our manifesto, and of trying to make major constitutional changes that we had not presented in our manifesto to the electorate? Moreover, will we not require an election if we cannot reach a consensus on the second Chamber?
Dr. Fox:
I am rather confused by that intervention. However, I do not think that the electorate would have minded being misled on yet one more promise in the Government's manifesto.
A proper debate on the issues would have been welcome. During the Bill's passage, especially in Committee, a cross-party consensus began to emerge, that the House could very usefully concern itself in overall reform of Parliament and its operation. One of our final debates in Committee, on an Opposition amendment, was the most interesting one, in which a genuine cross-party consensus seemed to be developing that the House of Commons was not holding the Executive sufficiently to account. In that debate, we gave the example of Ministers' ability to go to a European Council of Ministers and agree a measure that would become a directive that would, by law, apply to the House of Commons. That is undemocratic.
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. I repeat what was said earlier: the Bill has been quite tightly drafted, and the House must discuss only its contents. References to what may or may not happen in other places and other times are permissible, but are not to be dwelt on in any detail.
Dr. Fox:
I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for that ruling, and for allowing me to finish the paragraph before stopping me.
One of our suspicions about the Bill is that we may never reach a subsequent stage, and that we shall end up, perhaps for a considerable time, with what is called the interim House. In her failure today to give us any clear steer on a time scale, the Leader of the House has merely reconfirmed those specific fears.
The Government have given us no idea of what they want in subsequent stages. Therefore, we have to suspect that they have no plan to reach subsequent stages. That would be a great pity, as hon. Members on both sides of the House think that the imminent interim Chamber will be an unsatisfactory part of Parliament's operation.
What role do Ministers envisage for the second Chamber? What powers do they want it to have? The suspicion must remain that the Government are creating in the Bill a compliant halfway House of yes men who will do the Executive's bidding and fail to bring the Government to account.
Mr. Peter Mandelson (Hartlepool):
When the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) was challenged to say what the Conservative party's own views were on reform of the House of Lords, he summed up very eloquently that party's attitude to the Bill and the subject. What did he say? He seemed to say, "We will bring forward our own proposals when we like, when it suits us, and when it can cause the maximum discomfort and damage to the Government." He said nothing about the wider implications for government in the United Kingdom or the modernisation of Parliament, and expressed no thought on wider United Kingdom constitutional reform. There was not one bit of it.
Conservative Members' whole attitude might be summed up by the single phrase, "What we have, we will hold; thank you very much. Everyone else, and everything else, can go hang." Their protestations about the United Kingdom constitution are completely bogus. We have heard nothing from them but endless pretence about their concern for the democratic operation and underpinning of Parliament.
Three features have characterised our debates on the Bill, through which many of us have sat very enjoyably and constructively. The first feature has been the Government's complete dominance in their arguments for making the changes; there has been a complete lack of any coherent, sustained or well-argued position to the contrary. No well-argued position against the Government's proposals has been articulated by the Opposition, or by anyone else who opposes the proposals--and I know why. Not only do the Government's proposals make eminent sense, but the Government's proposals chime with what the public want us to do.
It is perfectly clear to the public that hereditary peers sitting as of right in the House of Lords have no place in a democratic and modern legislature. It is very clear also that the public should like there to be some erosion of the powers of patronage exercised by the Prime Minister.
I think that the public have it right. The public are not revolutionaries, or at least they were not when I most recently consulted them, either directly or--
Mr. Shepherd:
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Mandelson:
They were not revolutionaries when I consulted them, either directly or using one of those spurious focus groups that the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) continually refers to, right on cue.
Mr. Shepherd:
I am, as always, bemused by the prince of spin. However, his characterisation of one side of the House did not dwell upon some of his own colleagues, who--in our consideration of some of the Bill's clauses--fought and argued coherently against the Bill. I simply refer him to the speech of the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn). One should not think that the House is not trying to wrestle with a great principle of the United Kingdom legislative process, which is important. There is no point in the right hon. Gentleman spinning away like that. He should start telling the truth about why it is a worthwhile Bill.
Mr. Mandelson:
Certain individual hon. Members, the hon. Gentleman included, have very directly addressed some of the substantive issues. I was describing the official position of the Conservative party, and what we have heard from Opposition Front Benchers, whom I clearly distinguish. Nevertheless, if he does not mind, at the end of my speech, I shall return to the subject matter that he sought to introduce.
The Government's arguments have dominated in our proceedings on the Bill because of the very clear, precise and well thought through manner in which the then Opposition Labour party constructed the section of its manifesto on reform of the House of Lords. That section in the manifesto was not casually penned by some toiler down at Millbank, but flowed from the rather expensive fountain pen of a very eminent lawyer, who now occupies a very senior and prominent place in the House of Lords.
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