Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Bishop of Chester Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, not for the first time the noble lord, Lord Grocott, has entertained the House with some good, robust constitutional common sense. I would just gently rebuke him. I am glad he has decided not to press Amendment 23, because he above all people must realise that the phrase “elected House of Lords” is a contradiction in terms. One cannot have an elected House of Lords; what the Government are, I believe, about to propose—and our suspense will be at an end tomorrow, I am told—is the abolition of the House of Lords and its replacement by a totally different sort of second Chamber. It behoves all of us in this place to recognise that reality and then to debate it on its merits or, as I believe, lack of them. We cannot allow ourselves to be deluded into talking about House of Lords reform when in fact we are going to debate House of Lords abolition. I am glad, therefore, that he is not going to move that amendment.

As to the amendment that he has moved, I am not sure how he could expect the Deputy Prime Minister to make a statement on the referendum. It is very difficult to make a statement when your face is covered in egg, and very difficult for the Prime Minister to make a statement when all he could do was echo a predecessor and say, “Rejoice, rejoice”. We know why there was no statement, but we are all glad at the result.

The noble Lord has placed before your Lordships’ House one very important question which it is important that my noble friend the Minister should seek to answer and which, for all his sensitivity, charm and many other qualities—and I do not say that in any sense facetiously—he has failed adequately to address until now. What are the criteria to determine a referendum? It cannot merely be what Parliament decides, because that means what is convenient for the Government of the day. Do not let us again delude ourselves into believing all the fine rhetoric surrounding this Bill. The Executive in our country are drawn from the legislature, and I do not object to that at all; I never have. It is the Executive who are the driving machine in all this. I personally do not like referenda, but they are in the system now. If our constitution, of which the noble Lord has spoken both eloquently and accurately, is to be safeguarded for future generations, it is important that we establish a principle that on major constitutional issues such as devolution, our continued membership in 1975 of the Common Market, as it then was, or the future of either or both of our Houses of Parliament, there should be the opportunity for the people, untrammelled by other considerations that inevitably crowd upon them during a general election, to be able to decide.

I hope that all those in government at the moment will reflect on that as we approach detailed debates in coming days, weeks, months and, I trust, years and determine what at the end of all that debate should happen. It is very important that we have a clear and coherent answer to that. It is unreasonable for us to suggest that my noble friend the Minister could give a comprehensive answer this evening. Of course he cannot—he has to consult his ministerial colleagues and superiors—but he can at least tell us that he has heard the words of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and that he recognises that there has to be an intellectually defensible set of criteria that determines what a major constitutional issue is and what it is not, and when there should be a referendum and when there should not.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, I am not implying that there should be a referendum on the Bill now before us, but I congratulate him on ingeniously using this opportunity to bring up a very important issue that gives us all a chance to reflect on it as we move towards an issue that truly will affect not only the future of this House but the future balance and stability of our constitution as a whole: the constitution about which the noble Lord spoke with such quiet passion and eloquence. Let us see what my noble and learned friend has to say before we end the Report stage of what is not the most glorious constitutional measure this House has been asked to consider.

[The Lord Bishop of Chester]

My Lords, briefly, I support the noble Lord on his amendment. I do not think that the constitution, or even our politics, is broken, but a certain amount of damage has been done. In my lifetime I have seen a tendency for participation rates in voting to fall, along with an increasing sense of weariness with modern politics and disrespect for politicians. I am on the record as saying, when the Constitution Committee published a report on referendums last year, that there is a place for them in building confidence. Interestingly, the participation rate in the recent referendum was really rather encouraging. It was higher than we thought it would be in the lead-up to it. A cautious but proper rediscovery of the place for referendums has a part in rebuilding political life in this country.

More substantially, I should like to try a thought experiment on your Lordships. Let us imagine that we had a Bill before us that proposed to extend the life of a Parliament from a normal term of five years to six years. Would we think that that required a referendum? We would probably think that it did because it would extend the maximum term from five years to six, but in practice we are going to extend the length of Parliaments by an average of about a year. Why is this not an issue on which there should be a referendum?

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, I agree entirely with those who have just spoken that it would be helpful to the House—indeed, I think it is a necessity—that some clear principles should be articulated as to when a referendum would be appropriate. I understand the case for referenda on major constitutional issues. After all, the constitution is the property of the people and not of us as parliamentarians. If significant aspects of it are to be changed, there is a strong case for saying that they should be changed only with the permission of the people. However, I invite the House to consider the proposition that every significant constitutional change that we have seen over the last several decades has diminished the centrality of Parliament in our constitution. Whether it has been accession to the European Union, devolution or the development of the practice of holding referenda, we can see in all these instances that the capacity of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to take the major decisions that the people of the United Kingdom elected it to take has diminished. So before we express enthusiasm for the proliferation of referenda—perhaps no noble Lord wants to see their proliferation, although we should note that the European Union Bill seems to offer the scope for at least 57 varieties of them—we should consider what this may mean for the centrality and the character of Parliament in our national life.