Examination of Witness (Questions 234
- 239)
THURSDAY 17 JANUARY 2002
THE RT
HON LORD
STRATHCLYDE
Chairman
234. Can I welcome our next witness, Lord Strathclyde
who is the Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords. It
is very kind of you to come along and assist us with our inquiry
into the Government's proposals on the House of Lords reform.
I do not know if you have something to say to us. We have seen
the proposals from your party. Would you like to make just a short
statement?
(Lord Strathclyde) First of all, can I thank you very
much indeed for asking me along. I know you have had a long afternoon
of taking evidence so I will not weary you with being lengthy
at this stage of the evening. The reason why I congratulate you
is I think this is the only forum that there has been for inter-House
discussions about the future of the second chamber, which is,
of course, our main objection to what is being done by the Government,
this idea that they can bulldoze through a piece of legislation
on the House of Lords when we are entirely committed to this being
explored through a Joint Committee of both Houses and for one
very good reason. The differences that exist on the future of
the second chamber exist not just between parties and between
the Houses but within the parties. Therefore, it strikes me that
the best way of resolving them is not for the parties to slang
it out but to try and find a different mechanism, namely a Joint
Committee or a Speakers Conference, call it what you will if the
Government is so appalled at the idea of a Joint Committee, to
try and resolve those differences before coming forward with a
plan that has a chance of getting through. That is the basis of
our view. I have, as you know I think, issued a brief document
about proposals which the Conservative Party and Ian Duncan-Smith
outlined in the Sunday Telegraph last weekend. We will
be following this up with a full response to the White Paper in
due course but I thought it might be helpful to the Committee
to just have a very brief view of the proposal that we would put
to a Joint Committee if any was ever set up.
235. Thank you very much for that. Let me just
try to set the scene a bit by asking one or two questions. When
Lord Wakeham came to see us last week he said that in retrospect
he realised that it was not his word a master stroke but something
like a master stroke on the part of the Government to do a stage
one of Lords' reforms. He said he sees now that in fact without
that, that would not have got the thing moving at all. Is that
now on reflection your view?
(Lord Strathclyde) No, it is not. It was a master
stroke by the Government to remove the political imbalance in
the House of Lords and of course to remove what they hated most
which was the hereditary peerage. What it was not though was a
master stroke to get a lasting reform to the second chamber. Our
argument, which we argued strongly at the time, which was 1998
and 1999, was there should be no stage one without stage two because
the only real incentive to create a long lasting reform was the
illegitimacy of the hereditary peerage. Once you have removed
that the argument for further reform would gradually fall by the
wayside. So while I agree with many things that Lord Wakeham says
I disagree with that.
236. Let us move on a little bit then to where
we are now. What perplexed me a little bit was why now, having
arrived at this position you have arrived at in the last few days,
this was not the position which you sought to take to the Royal
Commission which was set up a couple of years ago. When did this
conversion experience take place?
(Lord Strathclyde) The Conservative Party has changed
its position, there is no question of that. I think the Conservative
Party when it looks at constitutional change is slow to come forward
with radical views. We tend to want to work within existing boundaries,
to use the mechanisms which are in place, to make sure that they
are as effective as possible and also, quite frankly, to concentrate
on many of the other issues which affect the nation, affect the
people of this country. Constitutional change has never been a
great banner particularly in the party for the last 50 years or
so, so when it came to all the radical changes which have taken
place over the last four years on devolution or the Human Rights
Act or the independence of the Bank of England, setting up the
Greater London Assembly and the reform of the House of Lords,
we have on the whole been on the "do you not think they should
be more fully thought through" side of the argument than
"go ahead and see what happens next". That has now changed
vis a vis the House of Lords for one simple reason and
that is that we have always said that we are keen on seeing a
second stage and the ideas that we have come forward with are
firmly based on democracy, on direct elections away from the party
choice of closed lists, they are radical, they are for a smaller
House, they include more powers for a second chamber and I think
that they end up with a chamber which is better than that we currently
have which, to me, is the only reason for going forward for a
further reform.
237. People will find it a little perplexing
to have moved from, as it were, defending the hereditary principle
one moment to then not putting proposals like this at all before
a Royal Commission set up to examine the issue and then to come
forward with these proposals now, indeed to come forward with
them a day after rather than a day before a debate in the House
of Commons on them. It all looks a bit odd, does it not?
(Lord Strathclyde) I am not aware that we ever defended
the hereditary principle. Throughout the 1999 Act our complaint
was that further reform was insufficiently thought through and
it was on that basis that we opposed the 1999 Act. As for the
Royal Commission, I think one of the problems that the Royal Commission
had was that they were viewing the situation, first of all without
the opportunity of having seen how the new House would operate
and secondly, and most importantly, there was at that stage none
of this massive new influx of peers which means that a third of
the current House of Lords has been nominated by one man, the
Prime Minister, and 60 per cent of the Labour Party owes its place
to Tony Blair. It may be—I cannot possibly tell—that
if the Royal Commission were re-examining things now they might
come up with different conclusions.
238. Yes. There has been a feeling, and indeed
a charge, and I must say I have I suppose echoed it in a way,
a doubt that the Conservative Party has been entirely serious
about this issue in terms of a substantive issue, and I am talking
not just about recent times, I am talking about going back into
the last Parliament and indeed when I was rather closer to the
issue in some ways than now. It seemed to me there were moments
when if the Conservative Party had been serious about engaging
with the issue we could have had a settlement a long time ago.
(Lord Strathclyde) In 1998/1999 William Hague asked
James Mackay the great Lord Chancellor to chair an internal party
commission on the future of the House of Lords. He came up with
two options, one for a wholly elected, one for an overwhelmingly
elected. The proposal that we now have is very firmly rooted in
those ideas. The thought that we have suddenly woken up to this
idea is a false one, these have been within the Conservative Party
for a number of years. What is true is that at the time of the
Royal Commission I do not think the Conservative Party was in
a position to put forward these views. I should remind you though
that this radical reforming Government had no clue what its second
stage should be until November of last year when it published
its proposals in the White Paper. Not even at the General Election
in June in their manifesto could they explain what their policy
was going to be except in the broadest possible terms.
239. Let us get to the heart of this then. If
there is this charge with some evidence to it, and indeed you
have confirmed some of it in terms of the history, that there
has not been an entire consistency of approach on the part of
the Conservative Party to this matter, and a feeling that probably
they were not therefore going to be terribly helpful in moving
towards an agreed solution, I think what would be very nice to
hear is that there is now an absolute determination on the part
of the Conservative Party to seriously engage in discussions about
coming forward with an agreed solution and the kind of latitude
that you heard Robin Cook describe just now, that is the Government
does not have a fixed position, it is prepared to move, there
is a wide area in which negotiation can take place, that is the
spirit in which the Conservative Party will approach this too.
(Lord Strathclyde) I will not follow you down this
road of inconsistency. We were opposed to the 1999 Act, rightly
in my mind. If the Government had come forward with a desire for
a genuine reform at that stage I am convinced that the Conservative
Party at that time would have joined the other political parties
in coming forward with an acceptable long term solution. However,
that opportunity was never offered by the Government and it was
only when we accepted into the Cranborne compromise that ultimately
we got a Bill which could go through the second chamber. As to
your second question, you have asked me to agree with the Government.
We have been asking the Government to set up a Joint Committee
so we can precisely have these kinds of discussions for two years.
In the summer of last year, I think in July, Lord Williams of
Mostyn said that there would not be a joint Committee, it having
been promised in the past by Lady Jay and Lord Falkender and we
understood it was going to happen immediately after the last General
Election and Lord Williams effectively shut that door in our face.
If the Government do wish now to do something in this way then
I would be the first to wish to co-operate. Our thoughts are in
a proposal, a proposal that we would put to the Joint Committee.
As I say it is firmly rooted in democracy, I think it is in the
mainstream of public opinion. Certainly it has support from the
Liberal Democrats, not in every aspect of it but on the main principle
of democracy though I think they would probably like to see proportional
representation rather than first past the post but that is the
kind of issue that could be discussed, perhaps there could be
a deal on that and on many other issues. I think that has to come
in a joint committee rather than in secret back door deals in
the Houses of Parliament.
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