House of Lords Reform

Lord Denham Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Denham]

My Lords, having been a Member of your Lordships’ House for an inordinate length of time, I have often had it said to me that I must have seen a lot of changes in the House over the years. I always give the same reply, that what amazes me is not how much the House has changed, but how much it has remained the same.

It has survived the advent of the life Peers. It has survived eight Labour Governments, each bent on its destruction. It has survived Select Committees, Joint Select Committees and Royal Commissions, all hoping to improve it. It has even survived the culling of 90 per cent of the hereditary Peers, carried out though it was by the Administration of that time in an unnecessarily callous way. And the House still retains the quiet and unassuming sense of purpose with which it carries out its duties that I first found here 60 years ago. But I must tell your Lordships that I have the gravest of doubts if it will survive being turned into a wholly, or even a predominantly elected House.

One of the principal virtues that your Lordships’ House has retained is the fact that if you win the argument, more often than not, you will win the vote—which is invaluable in a reforming Chamber, frowned on though it would undoubtedly be in another place.

When the animal lobby and the whole Green movement first came to the fore in the 1980s, I discovered that there had not been a vet—veterinary surgeon—sitting in either House of Parliament in the whole of that or the previous century. And I was able to send an urgent message down the Corridor to my right honourable friend the patronage secretary, seeking to remedy this omission. That is how and why we have had the advantage of advice on such matters as these from my noble friend Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior to this day.

There is a small but select number of what I would call key Peers who are generally acknowledged, irrespective of party, to be experts in their own particular subjects and who, when that subject comes up, are immensely useful, to their own side, certainly, but beyond that to the House as a whole. Each of your Lordships would be able to draw up your own such list. I do not want to embarrass them, but my list would certainly include my noble friend Lord Plumb on agriculture, the noble Lords, Lord Bragg and Lord Puttnam, on the arts, and, more recently, the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, on business know-how.

Beyond that again, each of the parties has provided themselves on their Back Benches with their own experts on such diverse subjects as the law, defence, economics, employment, foreign affairs, the Commonwealth, crime, health, sport and the machinery of politics itself. The right reverend Prelates bring with them an extraordinary knowledge of the individual characteristics and needs of every parish in England. And the contribution of Cross-Bench Peers to all of this speaks for itself.

We would indeed be lucky if any conceivable form of election were able to throw up a tenth of the combined skills and experience that are present in your Lordships’ House today.

I would like to end with a story that I have told your Lordships on two similar occasions, both of them a long time ago. It is the story of Sir Isaac Newton’s mathematical bridge at Cambridge. The story is probably apocryphal but, as Sir Winston Churchill once wrote about another legend, “If it isn’t true it ought to be”. Newton, so the fable goes, designed a wooden bridge over the River Cam with such ingenuity and mathematical precision that its component pieces of wood, once they had been laid in place, held together without the aid of nails, bolts or any other form of fastening. This confounded all the greatest brains in the Cambridge of the day. They could think of no good reason why a bridge constructed in this way should work. They could think of a number of very good reasons why a bridge constructed in this way should not work. But the one thing that was abundantly clear for everyone to see was that the bridge did work and carried out admirably the purpose for which it was intended.

Such was Newton’s prestige in the Cambridge of the day that, while he lived, no one dared to tamper with his bridge; but as soon as the old man died, their curiosity got the better of them and his contemporaries could resist it no longer. They took the bridge to pieces to find out how it worked. From this piece of vandalism they learnt only two things. The first was that by taking the bridge to pieces, they could get no further forward in discovering how and why it had worked; and the second was that, having taken the bridge to pieces, they could not put it together again.