Elections Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Grocott

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Monday 21st March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Well, I do not suppose that surprises me. I bet one bit of research they have done and been careful to check on—I cannot be as generous as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, on this—is whether this change will have a serious adverse effect on the number of Conservatives voting at the next election.

We know roughly the demography that is most likely to be affected—and, by the way, it is not being patronising to people on low incomes to say that we know as a matter of fact that, in general terms, the wealthier the area, the higher the turnout. That is not because people in lower-income areas do not understand what is involved. There can be all sorts of practical reasons. If you live in rented accommodation, you may not get your poll card as easily. I know you do not have to have a poll card to vote—you will need a lot more in future—but, if people do not have photo identification, clearly they are more likely to miss out on voting at subsequent elections. If, in proposing this change to the requirements on voters, the noble Lord, Lord True—a lifelong Conservative, as I am lifelong Labour—had found in his research that it was going to really cost his party something, I very much doubt he would be bringing it forward, let alone bringing it forward with such enthusiasm.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for giving way. What he and the Committee are addressing are the potentially very serious but unknown and unquantified ill effects of this reform. Normally when a measure which could have an enormously detrimental social impact of this kind is proposed in these circumstances, the proposal is to pilot it. My noble friend will remember, because we were both in government at the time, that, when this House wrecked the ID card Bill, it did so led by Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, a former Cabinet Secretary, on the grounds that, if such a major piece of legislation was being proposed, even though it was in the Labour Party manifesto, it should be piloted. It was on that basis that we lost a large part of the legislation. Does my noble friend not think that it is highly appropriate and indeed necessary that a change of this magnitude should be piloted to see what the effects are before it becomes the universal law of the land?

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

I absolutely agree. I would add only one point to my noble friend’s observations. If we regard the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust as a reputable research body, it is saying that something like 1.7 million people are without voter ID—I do not have the notes here, but it is a very substantial figure—and they are overwhelmingly people on lower incomes. So there is a lot that we do know, but it would certainly be a lot better to have a pilot study before this kind of change was introduced.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Grocott

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 15th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott]

I know that my noble friend is a very keen tweeter. I have had the pleasure of reading one or two of his tweets, although I am not sure how I acquired them because I am not part of the system. For example, I think he is comparing our present situation to the one Britain faced in the spring of 1940. He is given to hyperbole, but as he tweets—and no doubt the wisdom he is expounding will be tweeted out to a large number of people as soon as he leaves the Chamber—could he please promise me that he will tweet the details of the amendment he will propose later and the arguments for allowing 40 million people to take part in the next hereditary Peer by-election? Will he also please give an estimate as to what the cost of that would be? Finally, could he explain to us how he thinks that would reconnect him with the public?

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, let me be completely frank. If it is a choice between the next election to this House taking place with an electorate of—what is it?

[Lord Grocott]

Forty.

[Lord Adonis]

Or an election by 40 million of our fellow citizens of this country, I believe it should be the 40 million. I believe that they would support that in the pubs of Birmingham, too.

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[Lord Adonis]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord for explaining the amendment. I now understand it and will hold in my mind the complex formula that he has just set out. However, my fundamental point is that it does not matter one whit whether this House has 600, 700 or 800 Members; it will be equally legitimate or illegitimate, whatever your view on how many it should have. Those are still very large numbers. I think it will function more effectively with its existing remit if it has a larger number of Members. That will mean that we have a steady flow of new appointments to the House, rather than drying up the appointments. However, all that is fundamentally beside the point. The current House of Lords is illegitimate. It will be just as illegitimate as the existing House, and arguably more so, if it is wholly nominated. The right thing is not to do any tinkering—either of the sort proposed by my noble friend Lord Grocott or any other variant—but to set up a constitutional convention and get to grips with fundamental reform, which, in the context of Brexit and the governance crisis across the United Kingdom at the moment, is long overdue.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Adonis repeats his arguments on successive amendments, he is getting more and more fluent but that does not make him any more persuasive. As it is now 1.15 pm and we have been going for three hours, it is up to me to say a sentence about what has been happening here today for the benefit of a baffled public, should anyone have been watching.

We have had three days in Committee and a Second Reading, and the Bill has been going for a year and a half. On Report, we have now reached Amendment 13. We have 62 amendments to consider. We have made ridiculously slow progress due to quite deliberate tactics by less than half a dozen Members of this House, of which I am sad to say number one is my noble friend Lord Adonis. Another culprit—I am shocked rather than sad to say—has been the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. The number of amendments is almost entirely the responsibility of Messrs Caithness and Trefgarne—of course, they are noble Lords not Messrs. I know and assert that what has been happening is a clear abuse of the procedures of this House. I do not have to worry about that too much; Members must answer for themselves whether they have been abusing the procedures of the House. But the net result is that Bills with overwhelming support will not reach the statute book. It is a bad position for any assembly to be in, when half a dozen people can thwart the direct wishes of hundreds who have expressed themselves in sundry votes on this issue as well as numerous people who are not here.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Grocott

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 7th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott]

The noble Earl should simply read the title of the Bill: the clue is in the title. The Bill is the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill. That is what it does: nothing more, nothing less. If you oppose the Bill, you support the by-elections: there is no equivocation on that fact.

I must respond on two specific points made that are worthy of emphasis. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, made a point about the assisted places scheme that the Bill addresses. It is worth putting it into figures. If you inherit a title from a hereditary Peer, you have something like a one in 211 chance—that is the number on the list of hereditary Peers able to stand in any by-election—of becoming a Member of Parliament, because this is a House of Parliament. If you are anyone else, like most of us here or the 60 million or however many people it is who are over the age of 18 in Britain, you have something like a one in 70,000 chance of becoming a Member of Parliament. That is the arithmetic, as I make it, so it is a ridiculous assisted places scheme, and all those who speak up to defend it who are hereditary Peers—I know that some are not—need to explain why they should have that massive advantage over all their fellow citizens.

[Lord Adonis]

Can my noble friend tell the House the size of the electorate that made him, and indeed me, a Member of this House?

[Lord Grocott]

I cannot speak for my noble friend, who has spent so much of his life with the Liberal Democrats. I am not sure whether he was a recommendation of the Liberal Democrats or of the Labour Party, but in my case it was on the basis of 60 years’ membership of the Labour Party, of which I am very proud and for which I will continue to do the job here.

I must deal briefly with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, because it needs addressing, which is that somehow we must wait until the Burns report is implemented before we act. I make the very obvious point that the cardinal argument within the Burns report is that we must reduce the size of the House, and the mechanism for doing it would be two out, one in. Since our first debate in Committee, there have been two further by-elections for hereditary Peers. Those two hereditary Peers should have been replaced by one, according to the Burns report, but no, lo and behold, there are two more here. It is essential for anyone who is sincere about wanting to implement the Burns report that we get on and pass my Bill, because it would enable us to reduce the number of hereditary Peers, not precisely arithmetically but in line with the recommendation of the Burns report.

The only consequence of the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, is not to enlighten anyone; it is simply to delay further progress on the Bill. The two principal—I will not call them culprits, because I am sure they are proud of it—Peers who have relentlessly tried to filibuster the Bill are the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne. This time, 55 of the amendments are in their names. We had a similar debate to this before our previous Committee sitting, when there was a long debate on whether to put the Bill into Committee. We are doing that again now, and presumably we will do it again whenever it is next considered in Committee. It is clearly their objective to talk the Bill out.

I simply say this to the two of them: I know that the overwhelming majority of people in this House want the Bill to pass. The exchange of views up to now does not at all proportionately reflect the view in the House because—I am grateful to them for this—the numerous colleagues on all sides of the House who I know support the Bill have not wanted to contribute to the filibuster. A tiny minority is thwarting the clearly expressed view of these Benches, the Liberal Democrat Benches, a large number on the Conservative Benches and the Cross Benches and, in my judgment, a majority of hereditary Peers, any number of whom have come up to me to say that they wish that the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, would desist from what they are doing.

They should know better. Between the two of them, they have had about 100 years’ membership of this House. I repeat that because I could barely believe it when I looked it up: 100 years between them. They ought to be getting the hang of the rules by now, one of which is surely that you know when it is time to call a halt. They should call a halt on this and allow the Bill to proceed, because the only effect of what they are doing at the moment is not to improve the Bill or to stop it—they know they cannot do that, they do not remotely have the numbers; every time we have had a vote on the Bill there has been a majority of about 100. They should desist. I fear we now have only two and a half hours, but we had three and a half hours when we began the discussion. I will gladly give way to the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, because every time he speaks he gives me greater confidence of my position.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Grocott]

Perhaps I may have a word with my noble friend, who I always admire for his psychic powers, which I do not possess. He knows exactly why I do what I am doing at all stages. My noble friend is totally opposed to this Bill. I think he is the only person on these Benches—someone will stop me if I am wrong—or even on the Liberal Democrat Benches who is. I am grateful to him for clarifying his position. Whether he is sitting in the right place or not is only for him to judge.

I say this to my noble friend: I wish that he had made this statement a bit earlier. I had an identical Bill in the previous Parliament which received a Second Reading and a Committee stage. I do not recall seeing him in his place to express his view. He certainly did not take part in the Committee stage of this Bill on 23 March this year. I looked for him in the Division Lobby.

[Lord Adonis]

I was too concerned about filibustering my noble friend’s Bill.

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[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, the incredible thing about the proposal before us is that we would entrench a wholly nominated Chamber of Parliament in perpetuity. My noble friend, whom I hugely respect, says that we support this amendment because it is in line with Labour Party policy. My noble friend Lord Grocott gave me a lecture earlier about how my position was inconsistent with that of the party. The Labour Party’s policy at the last election was:

“Our fundamental belief is that the Second Chamber should be democratically elected”.


I keep inviting my noble friend Lord Grocott to say whether he supports the Labour Party’s policy. Does he support a democratically elected House of Lords?

[Lord Grocott]

I am opposed to it being directly elected. In answer to my noble friend’s question: yes, believe it or not, after 60 years once in a while it may be the case that I do not say that I agree 100% with my party’s policies. Can he remind us how long he has been in the Labour Party and how often he has disagreed with the party manifesto?

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I have been in the Labour Party for 24 years and I have voted against the Whip less often than my noble friend has in recent Divisions on European Union legislation. I do not take any lectures from my noble friend about party loyalty. He said to me earlier that he thought I was sitting in the wrong place in the House because I supported Labour Party policy. My noble friend appears to support an extreme version of the Conservative Party’s policy, which is for a nominated House in perpetuity. Maybe he would wish to cross the Floor. Let us keep this debate in proportion. We are talking about very specific amendments—I am drawing my remarks to a conclusion—to very minor legislation, but which would have a very major impact: it would entrench in perpetuity a nominated House, whereas the right reform is not to tinker with second-order issues of this kind but to engage in a proper democratic reform of the House of Lords, which happens to be the policy of the party which my noble friend Lord Grocott and I support.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, Amendment 35A had an unusual genesis. I sought to table amendments to the Bill to provide for an elected House. As I have now said several times in my fundamental commentary on the Bill, that is the big issue before Parliament and should be addressed sooner rather than later. The clerks said that it was not possible, within the scope of the Bill, to move for elections which involved members of the public being elected. However—wait for it—it was within the scope of the Bill to make it possible for the public to elect hereditary Peers from the register when a vacancy arose. That is why the Committee has before it an amendment providing that, in future, the entire national electorate would vote when hereditary Peer vacancies arose.

I am not proposing this as a serious proposition for the future composition of your Lordships’ House, but I unapologetically move the amendment because it puts into the debate the central issue of moving from a nominated/hereditary House to a democratic one. I have always believed that we should do so. I believed it when I was writing the constitutional reform policies for the Liberal Democrats and when I was advising Tony Blair on constitutional reform. My noble friend Lord Grocott and I disagreed all the time about this fundamental issue.

My noble friend has, as I see it, a very conservative view of the constitution, which is basically that the constitution circa 1950 was jolly good and we should not make any changes. My view is that we should carry on modernising; part of that is more democracy, which means really substantial devolution, a fair voting system and a democratic second Chamber. Those, to my mind, are fairly sensible propositions that, sooner or later, we will have to address as a country. The reason I believe that they have much greater urgency than before is that the whole context in which constitutional reform is now being debated is that of the single biggest constitutional reform this country has undergone in the last half-century, and that is Brexit.

In my travels across the country, which I have been engaged in intensively in recent months, I can tell the House that—as many noble Lords will know from their own communities—there is intense discontent at the state of governance in this country at the moment. It is particularly intense in the Midlands and the north of the country, where there is a great sense of alienation from the centres of power and a significant feeling that parliamentary institutions are not working effectively. There are many things that I believe need to be done to address that. My own view is that we should have significantly more devolution—part of the problem in the Midlands and the north is that we have inadequate devolution. We had good devolution settlements for Scotland, Wales, London and, when it was operating, Northern Ireland, but we have only scratched the surface of devolution in the Midlands and the north and we need to address that seriously.

Reform of Parliament has a part to play in that too. The conclusion that I have reached—though I put this forward tentatively and believe that we should have a constitutional convention to discuss it—is that we should now have a democratic second Chamber, either directly elected or representing the devolved elected institutions of the country. I think an argument can be made either way for a directly elected second Chamber, as in Australia, for example, or an indirectly elected second Chamber, representing what would become a federal structure of the United Kingdom, like the Bundesrat in Germany. There are arguments for and against, but what there is no argument for, in my view, is a perpetuation of a wholly nominated second Chamber, which, by the way, we got by accident.

We got to a wholly nominated second Chamber through a series of incremental reforms to what was a hereditary House. No one at any stage set out to create a wholly nominated Chamber. When Harold Macmillan introduced the then Life Peerages Bill in 1958, it was to complement what was still predominantly a hereditary House. Indeed, ironically, a large part of the reason he introduced the Bill was that members of my party, the Labour Party, were quite rightly not prepared to accept hereditary peerages. Lord Attlee, much sainted in the memory of my party, was one of the very last members of the Labour Party to accept a hereditary peerage; others simply would not do so. As part of a classically Tory attempt to keep the House of Lords going at all, the Life Peerages Act was passed.

We have had a substantial debate on what happened in 1999 and 2000; I know about it intimately because I was advising Tony Blair at that time. We gave firm commitments that the nominated and part-hereditary House that would replace the substantially hereditary House that applied before 1999 would be interim. It was deemed interim in the report of the royal commission chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, which of course recommended a predominantly elected House. For various reasons, not least the strong advice of my noble friend Lord Grocott, who was always passionately against any public elections to this House, those proposals were not taken forward, which I believe was a mistake.

[Lord Grocott]

I can live with a certain amount of total misrepresentation, but there comes a point where it is impossible for me to remain seated. At no stage have I said to the noble Lord in private or in public anything other than the fact that I am opposed to a directly elected House. He is a clever chap who no doubt would be happy in a university; he knows that that does not rule out an indirectly elected House, nor a House that is more representative of important interests across the nation. There are a whole range of other options. My fixed position—this is the only part of his long speech that has been accurate about me—is that I am opposed to a directly elected House for precisely the same reason that my long-standing noble friend Lord Rooker explained to him: it would be a threat to the House of Commons. He has never been elected to the House of Commons, never been an MP or anything of that sort, so he does not understand how fundamentally a directly elected senate would be a threat to the powers of the House of Commons.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I think I have a responsibility to respond, as this is an amendment to a Bill I introduced. I suppose I should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for changing his mind so dramatically in the space of an hour; we are all entitled to change our minds. However, he gave us a little lecture an hour ago about the inadequacy of my Bill, saying it should be opposed because it was pointless and incremental, and he now puts down an amendment providing for the preservation of hereditary peerages, just elected by a different mechanism. I have to agree that it is not merely a frivolous amendment, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, himself has acknowledged; it is a silly amendment, and I hope the House will throw it out.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I do not propose to press the amendment at this hour, given how thin the House is, having thinned out progressively over the last two hours. However, I believe the issue of a democratic second Chamber is the fundamental issue which we need to address in this House, not tinkering reforms of the kind we have been debating over the last few hours. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Grocott

Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 20th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I have made it very clear that I am not giving way to the noble Lord.

It is precisely because of this dangerous new doctrine of government sovereignty trumping parliamentary sovereignty that those of us standing up for parliamentary democracy sought to enshrine these key procedural issues in the Bill. It is a sad day for Parliament that we did not succeed and that we may now be dependent on the Government to observe conventions that they have so far been unwilling to preserve.

I will make one final point on the position of this House. We have been remarkably assiduous on this Bill. I think it is true to say that we have spent longer debating it than any other Bill in our entire 800-year history—and, tellingly, we spent about 50% longer debating it than did the House of Commons. As a long-serving Member of your Lordships’ House, perhaps I may be allowed to say that our besetting weakness in this House is self-congratulation. It is not helped by the fact—I learned this trick as a Minister—that making a great show of congratulating the House on the brilliance of its revision is a seduction technique to minimise the extent of that revision.

In defence of the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, he has not gone in for much seduction, but there has been far too much self-congratulation on the other Benches of this House in the face of the reality of the situation that we face. The reality, as I see it, is this. We are presently on course for a hard Brexit and there is still no provision in statute to prevent such an outcome. On the contrary, the Government, with wafer-thin majorities—but none the less sufficient majorities—in the House of Commons have fought off all attempts at setting new national policy on a sensible and credible course. The truth is that for those of us in both Houses of Parliament who favour a sensible Brexit, and a people’s vote to allow the people to stop Brexit—

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Will my noble friend give way?

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Grocott

Report: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 30th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott]

I am really grateful to my noble friend for pointing out that, if circumstances change, there is a case for a further referendum. During the 41-year gap between the 1975 referendum and the further referendum, the European Union became unrecognisable in comparison with the institution that was voted for in 1975. It went from nine members to 28; it introduced the single market; the powers of the Commission changed beyond all recognition, as did the circumstances in which the European Parliament met. Once again, if there was anyone in this House who during that period said, “Really, things have changed quite dramatically; it is now a different proposition”—to use my noble friend’s expression—“and we ought to have a second referendum now to see whether the people still agree with what they said in 1975”, I did not hear that. It is another speech that I must have missed; I keep missing speeches. There was no acknowledgement, so far as I could see, that, because circumstances changed between 1975 and 2016, there should be a referendum. On the contrary, every time a further referendum was raised, any remainer—if I can describe it in those terms—was vehemently opposed to it. Now we have the irony of people who are opposed to one referendum wanting two.

The argument frequently used—I do not know whether this was what my noble friend was getting at—is that when people voted leave, they did not really know the full details and consequences of what they were voting for. I have had the privilege of representing two parliamentary constituencies, both of them very large. I have spoken to thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of people. I never found anyone in either of those parts of the country who got confused by the meaning of the word “leave”. Yet for some strange reason, in the immediate vicinity of Westminster there are large numbers of able people for whom the meaning of the word tortures them. They go into paroxysms of uncertainty about precisely what is meant by leave.

I know what leave means: at the very least it means you do not have to continue to obey the rules of the organisation you are leaving. I would also argue that if you leave an organisation you do not have to carry on paying the subscription. My noble friend Lord Adonis supports me in the words I am saying: he left the Liberal Democrats and joined the Labour Party—an excellent move; I commend him for that decision—but I very much doubt whether he continues to pay a subscription to the Liberal Democrats. When you leave an organisation, you do not pay the subs and you do not obey the rules; it is pretty simple.

[Lord Adonis]

It is true that I do not pay £39 billion to the Liberal Democrats; that is going to be the cost of exiting under the agreement that Her Majesty’s Government have reached. Would my noble friend refund the voters that £39 billion as part of his arrangement for leaving?

[Lord Grocott]

That £39 billion is a lot less, of course, than the amount we would need to pay in if we remained in for a further 41 years—the figure 41, he may remember, is of particular interest to me.

The other thing I have noticed about so many of these discussions—I have to tie myself down and not jump up every time it is mentioned—is the psychic powers of the remainers, which I am really in awe of. Hardly any remainer I have come across does not know precisely why the leave voters voted the way they did. We keep being told that people definitely did not vote to leave the customs union. People definitely did not vote to leave the single market, we are told. I do not know whether that is true or not—I do not possess these psychic powers—but I can say as a matter of fact that we definitely did not vote to remain in the European Union. That is a certainty as a result of the last referendum.

People say it is not really a second referendum; they are different questions. One question remains on both the referendum we have had and the one that is being proposed. The option to remain is there, so if you did not vote first time to remain, you get a second chance to remain. You do not get a second chance to leave, in a straightforward decision. So I find it increasingly unconvincing that the motives of those seeking a second referendum are an ardent desire to recheck the views of the British public. I think that such an amendment, such an attempt to have a second referendum within two years of the first, is no less than what we all in this House know, remainers and leavers—it is an attempt to reverse the decision of the first referendum. That is unacceptable and we should vote against it.

Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Grocott

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 27th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

I understand what the noble Lord is saying, but it is quite difficult for the state to start making judgments about the philosophical preferences of parents when it comes to home education. The point I seek to make to the Committee is that while there are some forms of home education of which I personally strongly disapprove, I do not believe that is the big social issue facing the country. The major issue is home education that means no education, not home education that means better education. It is about getting at the fundamental problem of home education that means no education and throwing children on to the scrapheap that we have to deal with.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Does my noble friend agree that part of the problem is the weakening of local authorities and their diminishing control over schools in their area? They are unable to take an overview of the needs of the area. That break-up is one of the most significant disadvantages of the development of schools policy in recent years.

[Lord Adonis]

My noble friend and I could debate academies over a good deal of time, and indeed we have done over the years. I do not believe there is any inconsistency between strong and autonomously-led schools and social responsibility. That has always been at the heart of the reforms that I and others have promoted over the past 20 years. Schools should be free to succeed, not free to fail their children. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, made a number of very good points about the important role that Ofsted should play in this process. When it inspects schools, Ofsted should pay much more attention to what is happening to children who are basically off the register and being treated very badly.