House of Lords Reform

Lord Elton Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, I hope that the House will forgive me if I go back briefly to first principles and stand back from the question we are looking at to consider the whole population of the United Kingdom. The first question we then need to ask ourselves is, “What is Parliament for?”, not “What is this House for?”. The short answer is: to enable the British people to choose a Government, to finance them and, essentially, to see that they remain their public’s servant, not their master. The very cornerstone of keeping a Government under democratic control is protecting the individual liberty of the citizens of this country. That is what Parliament is for.

We live in a democracy. Has the democratically elected House of Parliament sufficient power to ensure that Governments remain ultimately under its control? You might think so. It has the power to refuse to supply them with money. That is a nuclear deterrent and is rightly for the Commons alone, but the erosion of liberty is little by little. More appropriate to protect liberty is its power to refuse to give a Government the laws they want or, more commonly, to insist on substantial changes before it will agree to them. With such massive powers available to it, the Commons surely ought to be counted on to protect those liberties—but, my Lords, it cannot be. In 2005, it utterly failed to do so. If the House of Lords had not then acted in their defence, everyone in the United Kingdom would now be liable to summary arrest and detention without either trial or appeal. This and all future Governments would have been able to issue a derogated control order against any individual they decided to label a terrorist threat. With this order they would have been able to detain our citizens without trial, not just for a week or month but for 90 days. Such a weapon belongs in the armoury of a fascist state, not Whitehall, yet the democratically elected House of Commons let it through. It made clear what it thought of it; Mr Blair's majority was cut from 161 to a handful of votes—I think it was 14. I remind your Lordships that this unelected House stopped that happening. We stopped it by constantly refusing inadequate changes to this monstrous proposal. We did so in a sitting that lasted unbroken from 11 am on 10 March 2005 till 7.31 pm on 11 March. We rose only when we had secured just enough judicial involvement to prevent this thing being used unfairly, unnecessarily, or for undemocratic purposes.

Why did the two Houses behave so differently when faced with this same, very simple issue? I have never sat in the Commons and I intend no disrespect, but what I am about to say seems to have been borne out by inference from a lot that I have heard from Members who were there previously. The Commons voting figures seem not just to reveal the strength of some Members’ feelings but to draw our attention to the influence, even the power, of the party Whips on what for many MPs was a matter of conscience. Consider that MPs are elected but cannot be elected without their party's support. They therefore arrive, as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, said, indebted to their party. If they belong to the majority party, they find up to 150 of their fellow Members sitting with them as members of the Government in the same Chamber. Therefore they do not, without effort, think of the Government and party as separate bodies. They also receive substantial salaries. To lose their seat is to lose their livelihood, and party Whips can arrange the deselection of a Member as well as his selection. That means not just that he will not win the next election but that he will not be able even to fight it.

Therefore, in the House of Commons as now constituted, three elements together necessarily diminish its power to keep the Government under the control of the electorate. Its Members are in an elected Chamber, they are paid a substantial salary, and they can become and remain Members only with the consent of their party apparatus. Even if they were all saints, these arrangements must have some effect on how they vote. Their effect is greatest when the number of Members is greatest—in the party of government. I regret to tell my noble friend Lord Caithness—or I would if he were here—that he is entirely wrong in his belief that election to this House would give it greater power.

How strange, how sad and how sinister that our colleagues down the Corridor are now clamouring to introduce precisely these three elements into the Lords—the only Chamber still strong enough to stand up to Governments who have prevented Members of the House of Commons from doing so. Your Lordships should also note that an appointed House does not automatically become the poodle of the appointing body. By March 2005, 45 per cent of the Members of this House had been sent here at the request of the very Prime Minister whose proposal they threw out; 147 among that new entry had taken his party’s Whip. The smallest margin of votes by which his proposals were rejected was 48. The largest margin—to the great credit of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who is now our Lord Speaker—was on her Motion, which was carried by 150 votes. That is no poodle, but a guard dog with teeth. I ask my noble friends on the Front Bench to think about the need for this country to keep Governments under control, even when they are staffed by such benign and intelligent people as my noble friends. I listened to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, with some reservation on that point.

Every Government, when they have been in power for quite a short time, want more power because Parliament is such a damn nuisance. If you are trying to run the country you do not want a lot of other people telling you how to do it better. You want to shut Parliament up. The pressure is from not only the Government and their colleagues, but the huge Civil Service machinery behind them, which wants to go this way, finds that a few people are squeaking in this House, and suddenly has to go that way. This is a matter of the greatest importance and I hope that in the years to come your Lordships will not let it go.