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Mr. Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe): As I follow the speech of the hon. Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay), with whom I largely agreed on some points, I shall begin by agreeing with him about the extremely unsatisfactory way in which this matter has been debated. This serious subject has had to be considered at this late stage, in a debate on a Lords amendment, because the House has not previously been able to address it.
The reform of the upper House is in danger of producing a so-called transitional House that has even more elements of Gilbert and Sullivan that the one that it will replace. This has been a complete dog's breakfast from beginning to end. The Bill was introduced by a Government who want simply to abolish hereditaries and replace the upper House with a wholly nominated House within prime ministerial patronage. To move on from that, they are now, without having clear views about their objectives, putting everything in the hands of a commission that will make recommendations. We are discussing a key feature of an interim reform that may last for many years.
I echo the hon. Member for Thurrock's point that we are talking about how large numbers of people will become Members of Parliament. We are discussing the appointment of legislators, not health authority chairmen or magistrates, although they are important. We are talking about people who will play a role in the government of this country.
It is only by accident that we are able even to debate how the upper House should be nominated, because the Bill was so tightly drawn that the matter could not be debated in the House when the Bill was first considered. Because the upper House passed this amendment--which, for the lack of anything else, I approve of--we are now able to discuss the matter in an interesting debate, but, it has to be said, in a perfunctory manner, at the last moment, at the end of a Session. Obviously, everyone assumes that the Government will trundle through, giving themselves a free hand in how to proceed, and that they will come back to us later and tell us what arrangements they will put in place for the nomination of Cross-Bench peers.
I agree with most of those who have spoken so far. I agree with the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mr. Fisher) that the amendment is, in any event, second best. I am in favour of a wholly elected upper House, but we face, in the interim, an upper House that will now be dominated by patronage, which I regard as second best.
Their lordships have given us the opportunity to say that at least a small part of that patronage should be free of prime ministerial control and partisan or party political control. Unlike the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central, I think that we should grasp at that, because it would be nice to have some Members of the upper House going at least some way towards independence, which would give them a little more legitimacy as legislators than those who simply come through the party machines that will nominate all the other peers. I therefore support the amendment.
What astonishes me is why, given that the House has got round to discussing this matter, the Government want to remove the proposals for ensuring the independence of the nomination of Cross-Bench peers. I understood that the proposals were made by the Government. Their lordships have taken the Government at face value and done them the courtesy of including the Government's proposals in the Bill. However, the unfortunate Minister is, with the greatest respect, left doing his manful best to persuade us, without giving us any serious reason whatever, to remove from the Bill, at the Government's behest, their only proposals--and what I thought, until this evening, was their preferred route for producing Cross-Bench peers.
It would be ridiculous to withdraw the proposals, which, faute de mieux, are the best that we have. The House should not lightly dismiss the proposals and wait to see what the Government come up with next. We should not say, "Let's leave it to the Government. We do not want the House to have any legislative say in the process."
I have already dealt with my response to the speech by the right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Mr. Maclennan), who, I think, agreed with some of my criticisms. The idea that it does not matter whether the commission is statutory, because one can compare it with the Nolan committee or the scrutiny of the honours list, falls, because we are talking about how Members of Parliament should be nominated.
I turn to the feebleness of the Minister's arguments. I respect the Minister, who represents a constituency that borders my own, and I know him to be an able man, but the poor man was equipped with no arguments whatever in favour of the proposition that he was instructed to tell us we should support. As I recall, he deployed only two arguments; I shall deal with them briefly.
The first argument was that we should trust the Prime Minister. I do. Not even the Prime Minister could easily go back on his word and say that he had changed his mind and that he would, after all, nominate all the Members of the other place. However, I should like to hear a little more detail before I am asked to trust a Prime Minister. The Minister shot himself in the foot when he made it clear that he would not trust a Conservative Prime Minister. He made a few partisan remarks about what might happen if our present, noble and trustworthy Prime Minister were to be replaced by someone from the Conservative side of the House--there might be changes.
The answer is clear: if one has suspicions of any kind, one puts the preference of the House into legislative form. In that case, any subsequent Prime Minister--eventhe present Prime Minister--must at least introduce substantial legislation to change the proposals. Why should it be a matter of trust in the Prime Minister? In this case, we could include provisions in the Bill that reflect what the Prime Minister appears to have endorsed in the past. As far as I am aware, these are the only proposals that the Government have ever produced on this subject--they have not been changed since they were introduced.
However, I suspect that there may have been changes. The Minister's second argument was that the noble Lords made a terrible error when they included the Government's proposals in the Bill, because that meant that the Government had to stop working on their proposals. Apparently, once the proposals were put in statutory form, the work that was already under way to prepare the arrangements for nominations for Cross- Bench peers had to stop. The Minister produced the extraordinary argument that it would have somehow been an affront to the other place or to Parliament to carry on spending money on preparing the arrangements.
The Minister said that the work was halted and that that had caused delay. Plans were being made to have everything in place by 1 January 2001, but the upper House passed the amendment and the work had to stop. I do not understand that argument, especially if the work in hand was in line with the Government's only announced proposals, which are the ones before us. If the Government were preparing proposals for a commission to nominate Cross-Bench peers, and the other place passed an amendment to give them a statutory form, why did the work have to stop?
It sounds as though the work that was in hand did not match these proposals. The Government had work in hand--with Treasury approval--for some other system of nominating Cross-Bench peers, but they stopped it because the upper House put their proposals into statutory form. If work was in hand, why cannot the Minister tell
us on what it was based? How did it differ from the measure before us? If he tells us that it was not different, why did it have to be stopped just because the other place passed an amendment?
The whole argument is a complete non sequitur. The Minister seems to be arguing against what he was really aiming at. He wants the Government to be given a completely free hand to devise whatever system they want. They do not want to be tied to their first proposals, or to the current proposals. Even when the Minister was pressed to tell us which feature he found objectionable or otiose, and what he might have to remove, he could not think of anything. The best he could come up with--he received a little support from the hon. Member for Thurrock--was that currently the measure requires that every member of the commission should be a Privy Councillor. That is apparently a shocking suggestion--although not because the Minister is against the members being Privy Councillors; he did not say that they would not all be Privy Councillors. He produced an amazing precedent, which someone in the Cabinet Office must have dug out for him, to the effect that no one has ever mentioned Privy Councillors in a Bill. This is a moving moment; for the first time, we are mentioning Privy Councillors in a Bill. However, for the life of me, I cannot see why that is fatal to the whole proposal.
If the Government do not like the present Privy Councillors--I declare an interest; I am a Privy Councillor--they could easily appoint others when they put them on the commission. So it is no great shakes whether Privy Councillors are mentioned or not. That was the one and only feature of the Lords amendment which the Minister could think he might not want to follow in practice.
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