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Angela Smith: If the hereditary peerage has such a wonderful social balance and gives such impressive service, could we not argue for a hereditary House of Commons as well?
Mr. Nicholls: Even by the hon. Lady's standards, that was a singularly unintelligent point. I apologise for speaking too fast and overly flattering Labour Members.
My point is that we have to look at the totality of parliamentary institutions to see whether they deliver a democratic outcome.
Mr. Nicholls: I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman in a moment, if only because the debate needs some light relief.
My point is that two of the parliamentary estates are subject to the hereditary process, and if that was the case for all three of the estates, there would be no democracy.
Mr. Savidge: The hon. Gentleman said that the glory of the hereditary peerage is that it is illogical; may I pay the same compliment to his speech?
Mr. Nicholls: That is just about the right comment on the point made by the hon. Gentleman.
As the hon. Member for Corby said, the case for the hereditary peerage was never made, and now it passes into history. Now we have the Wakeham report. To begin with, I thought that I would have to be terribly polite about the report, and I pay tribute to the amount of work that has gone into it. However, the more I read of it, the more troubled I became. I expected that, in the way of these things, it would turn out to be, at best, a curate's egg, but it is a complete dog's breakfast.
I can see all the people on the commission sitting around, saying, "Well, we have to come up with something, but I'm not sure what. What about some of that Committee of the Regions stuff? That's a good idea. Let's have some regional representation." They came up with other ideas, saying, "Well, we'd better have the bishops because some of them are nice old chaps and several of them believe in God, so we'd better keep them in. What about other people? We'll have the Buddhists and the Muslims in there, but isn't that a bit judgmental? Why don't we include communities of faith?" I can almost hear that being said; so many of them speak like that. That was not written by Monty Python; it is in the report. I ask you, what is wrong with being a pagan in this day and age? What is wrong with having no faith? Why should faithless people be deprived of parliamentary representation in the new, marvellous Chamber? Such people are not in there, but everyone else is. The idea seems to be that people can sit around in a peculiar way and fashion a wholly representative institution, almost by drawing lots.
The hon. Member for Corby says that the second Chamber must have a better balance of gender, so it had better be half and half right away. It must not be all white, so it will have black and white, but what about brown? What about the Chinese and the sub-divisions of Asians? All that must be included as well. He means that sincerely, so I do not mock him for it. People have tried completely mechanistically to devise a wholly representational Chamber, but that is a total farce because a totally representative Chamber is already available; it is called the House of Commons.
The people vote for their representatives. If they do not exercise their vote, they should not complain. We cannot pretend that we include an example of every group, but we are literally representative because we have been elected by the adult electors of this country. It is far more
optimistic and intelligent to face up to that fact, rather than to tell others that they are not truly representative because they do not include enough young, old, black or brown people, or whatever. How much more honest to say that the glory of this country's constitution is that we have largely been able to produce a democratic outcome at a general election for a great deal longer than virtually every other nation on earth.I am wholly in favour of having an upper Chamber, but what is it supposed to do? I am almost more concerned about what it should do than about who should do it. It should have a degree of legitimacy. For the reasons that I have given, the hereditary peerage had a certain legitimacy simply because it was honoured by time if not by logic. That has now gone. The nearest system that might carry some vestige of that legitimacy would be one that was sufficiently close to that which it had replaced to look reasonably familiar to the people of the country as a whole.
The upper House should look reasonably familiar and have some sort of logic, but that cannot be devised on a piece of paper, as Wakeham has tried to do. It should be able to delay, and only delay. I have been a Minister, and I never wanted to change my mind when a policy for which I was responsible was being, as I saw it, messed around by the House of Lords. That is tough--it is just the way of things. We need to be able to delay the Government of the day. That has to be done for a purpose; not so much to give the Government time to think and change their mind, but to embarrass them into doing what they ought to do. If they will not change their mind, they should be told that sufficient pressure will be applied and their actions will be taken in the full light of day. That is what the current House of Lords is remarkably good at doing, as was the previous House of Lords.
I shall not play constitutional ping-pong with Labour Members because they are not equipped to deal with it, as their interventions have shown. They will have to take my word for it, and perhaps look it up in the Library, that the House of Lords, as presently constituted, has given the Government no harder a time than the old House of Lords gave the Conservative Government. That strikes me as being perfectly right. Those who try to counter that argument by suggesting that we must strengthen the upper Chamber so that it can hold the Government to account are not right.
I am worried when my hon. Friends talk about wanting the Government to be more accountable. We use that language in opposition. Although that is slightly unwise, we do so because we have only 160 seats, but that is not a good reason for constitutional change. The idea that we need an accountable system of government in which we can defeat the Government between general elections is profoundly wrong. I do not expect to defeat the Labour Government this side of the next general election.
Mr. Savidge: The hon. Gentleman will not do so.
Mr. Nicholls: The hon. Gentleman makes a subtle and cunning point; he realises that we will not defeat the Government in a Division, but that does not mean that they are not accountable. Indeed, the fact that the Government have such a big majority means that they are absolutely
accountable because they cannot put the blame on coalition politics. We hold the Government to account every week. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition does so stunningly effectively every Wednesday, not by winning a Division, but by winning the moral argument. That is what Government accountability should be about.I am not in the business of trying to devise a system that rejigs the rules to try to make it easier to have a go at the Government when they have been elected democratically with a huge majority. I am in the business of being able to debate and win the moral argument, by having a Chamber up the road that is capable of making it crystal clear that we shall embarrass the Government when they have got it wrong. I am not in the business of ultimately strengthening that Chamber's powers and allowing it to go further than that.
I have said what I want to see in the upper Chamber. I want it to look reasonably familiar and reasonably logical, but I see nothing in the Wakeham report that would enable that to happen. I want the upper Chamber to have the power to delay and embarrass; I do not want it to have electoral authority. That is the point that the hon. Member for Corby made in his speech, and I do not want that to happen. This House, not the other House, is supposed to have the authority. That can be done by having a largely appointed House. The commission is a complete, tawdry fig leaf.
I have enough confidence in my country's constitutional procedures, which have grown up over hundreds of years, to say that those who go to the upper Chamber as life peers should be appointed on the recommendation of the Queen's First Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. That is why I think that the Wakeham proposals are profoundly misguided.
8.7 pm
Tony Wright (Cannock Chase): Listening to the previous speech--entertaining, elegant and absurd, with its glorious eulogy for the hereditary peerage--I finally realised that the danger of this debate, but I hope not its intention, is that it might show such a diversity of views in the House that the Government could conclude that, because there is no settled opinion on such matters, no action is required and no further progress is necessary. Lest that should happen, I hope to make a modestly helpful contribution.
I shall deal with what I take to be the story so far, the key principles, aspects of the Wakeham proposals and the next bit of the story. On the story so far, we promised simply that we would remove the hereditary peers. In fact, we have not removed them. We have not completed stage 1; 92 hereditary peers remain and an absurd process is being created so that they can renew themselves through by-elections. We have not yet done what we said we would do. We are not sure about what to do next; we are of uncertain mind.
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