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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. The hon. Member has now made sufficient allusion to proceedings in this House by reference to the Bill and he must now return to the Bill itself.

Mr. Tyrie: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It is the inadequacy of this place that leads me to want a Bill other than the one that we are discussing tonight.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman is entitled to put that argument and he is now putting it for a second time, but he cannot use it as a bridge to discuss in some detail proceedings in this House.

Mr. Tyrie: Many accept the argument for a second Chamber, but none the less feel that we need go only as far as the Bill provides. Perhaps with only some modest changes further down the road, those people would be happy with that state of affairs. However, it is extremely unlikely that the Executive will be scrutinised effectively if this House stays as it is and the other House is reformed and kept broadly as an interim Chamber, as the Bill suggests .

The risk is that the interim Chamber created by the Bill will feel even less legitimate, even less capable of holding the Executive to account than the existing House. The reason for that is fairly obvious. The interim House created by the Bill will have a perfectly understandable and overwhelming objective, a desire for survival, as anything called interim usually does. It will be vulnerable to threats from the Executive. It will all too easily be reduced to supine subservience in the hope of lasting a few more years. The biggest threat of all would be a whiff of a stage 2 with substance.

The odds must be that, when it matters, an interim House will toe the Executive line. The fear must be that a strong coalition could easily build up to prevent a stage 2 of substance ever coming before the House--a coalition between the Members of the interim House created by the Bill and the Executive.

Many on both sides of the House have also alluded to the power of patronage which the Executive will wield in the interim House. We debated that in Committee, and that remains a serious concern about the interim Chamber.

It is becoming clear that the Executive do not want to create a second Chamber that could ever cause them too much trouble. That is why stage 1 has been described as a stand-alone change, not dependent on further reform. The Government would clearly rather stop here. The last thing that the Executive want to do is to give the second Chamber any legitimacy.

I may be wrong and the interim House might push hard for a more legitimate and democratic replacement of itself, but it is asking an enormous amount of a group of men and women to plead for an opportunity to go to the gallows, and that is what we would be asking the interim House to do.

Mr. Alan Clark: The guillotine.

Mr. Tyrie: They will go to the guillotine, as my right hon. Friend says. That is exactly what will happen to

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Members of the interim House if they embrace, orpush for, a democratic alternative to themselves. For democracy is as much a threat to the lifers as the Bill is to the hereditaries.

We have heard that the movers of the Weatherill amendment would not mind stopping at stage 1--they have already formed that coalition. Lord Weatherill himself gave the game away when he said:

"The government has got something"--

from this deal--

"if its business is not disrupted . . . I'm saying to my friends I believe if this works, as I hope it will work, it's within the bounds of possibility that the Royal Commission may say this has been working well--let's leave it alone. That would preserve continuity . . . Surely a consummation devoutly to be wished!"

Those are the words of Lord Weatherill on his amendment.

Dr. Ladyman: I am finding it difficult to accept the hon. Gentleman's argument. Surely it is ultimately up to this House to decide whether the interim Chamber should be replaced. Labour Members have said that they are determined that there will be a further reform, as have the Liberals. I understand from what the Conservatives are now saying that they are also determined that there will be a further reform. What possible political upheaval could stop a further reform?

Mr. Tyrie: The overwhelming power of the Executive to avoid creating something that might in any way interfere with their legislative plans and their plans to run the country. As Labour Members have pointed out, that has been a major obstacle to all reform of the House of Lords for so many decades after the passing of the1911 Act. Only the Lords getting in the way of the Executive in 1911 resulted in any reform being pushed through.

I have read the White Paper carefully and I am afraid that I do not trust the Government's pledge to introduce a democratic alternative. Those are weasel words. The commitment in the White Paper is basically to reduce the powers of the second Chamber, not to increase them. The commitment to democracy is wafer thin and scarcely visible. It comes as an afterthought, framed with reference to opposition to the hereditary principle, rather than as a principle in itself.

Mr. Maclennan: Is not the hon. Gentleman rather underestimating the strength of his own arguments which, if deployed to the country, could make an all-appointed House that was anything other than an interim Chamber appear to be a constitutional monstrosity? Surely he is not alone in thinking in such a way and the Government are sufficiently politically astute to be aware of the power of his arguments.

Mr. Tyrie: The right hon. Gentleman sits in Cabinet Committees with the Labour Government and I am sure that he has been persuaded of their conviction that they intend to introduce stage 2 legislation of substance and content, but I am a little less convinced of that than he. I gratefully take on board the idea that my arguments might

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have some strength and merit, and I hope that they resonate somewhat. Towards the end of my speech, I want to discuss how they might resonate more effectively.

The most likely outcome of a coalition between the interim House and the Executive, which might be created as a result of the Bill, could be a damp squib of a stage 2--an unappealing damp squib, which would be quite the opposite of what the right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Mr. Maclennan) suggested a moment ago. Such a stage 2 would be little better than stage 1 and, at worst, could amount to little more than a retirement home for ex-politicians and civil servants with a few industrialists, trade unionists and the great and good thrown in, perhaps with a few elected Members from the new Parliaments--all bedded down on a reduction in the powers of the second Chamber, as set out in the White Paper. Such a Chamber could scarcely be expected to play an effective bicameral role. The risk is that, by then, we would be living in a virtually unicameral constitution--a one-Chamber Parliament in all but name.

I believe that only democracy can save the bicameral system in Britain. The only way to give the second Chamber legitimacy is to grant it a mandate from the people. Many Members of the House of Commons are uneasy about that idea. Would not such a system dilute our own legitimacy? Would not such a second Chamber encroach on our turf? Those are legitimate concerns, although I think that they are largely misplaced. This Chamber should, and can, remain supreme. I shall not develop that argument now, but I hope to do so when we debate the White Paper. In any event, the argument is more germane to the White Paper than to the Bill.

The Government have not been prepared to tell us where the Bill will lead. At no point have they been prepared to say what the end result will be. During our most recent debate, we have been presented with no evidence suggesting that we can rely on the Executive to secure and preserve a genuine bicameralism; nor, as I have said, can we rely on those who are likely to survive in the interim House to push through such a change.

One group, however, can make a major contribution when the Bill goes to the House of Lords. I refer to the hereditary peers. It is with those who are already condemned to death by the Bill that the best hope lies for a democratic and effective second Chamber. There is some irony in that, but I believe it to be the case. The hereditary peers can make that contribution because, quite simply, they have little to lose. It is the Conservative and Cross-Bench backwoodsmen who can play one last role on the constitutional stage, by making amendments to the Bill that can force the Executive back down the road of bicameralism. Unlike us, they can force the Government to deliver a stage 2 of real substance.

I urge peers to consider three amendments. First, they can and should add a "sunset clause": they can force the Government to present proposals for reform to secure an effective second Chamber, or to accept--after, say, three years--the reconvening of the existing House of Lords. Secondly, better still, careful redrafting of the Bill should enable them to add a clause specifying what they would reconvene to achieve. They should add a clause stating that, say, within 12 months of reconvening, they would send a Bill to the House of Commons providing for the replacement of the other place by an elected second

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Chamber. That would enable us to debate the option of such a Chamber when the Bill returned to the Commons--a debate that we have been denied so far.

As for the third possible amendment, the House of Lords could reform the Bill to ensure that a referendum took place. The Lords should demand that, whatever the content of stage 2 and whether it is framed by the second Chamber itself or by the Executive, the Government should put it to the country in a referendum.

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