House of Lords: Size

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the many already expressed to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for the Motion he has put before us, and a very sincere thank you to the Government, in particular the Leader of the House and the Government Chief Whip, for granting us the time to debate it. I dislike disagreeing with the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, but the reality is that we would have a higher reputation if people did not think we had 800 people here on any one day, but thought we had something more appropriate, such as the 550 who actually come. Perception is an important ingredient in modern politics, which, somewhat regrettably, tends to be pretty well instantaneous in its reaction to things.

There is a consensus around this House that we could do with fewer Members. It is not the sole problem we have, nor by any means the biggest, but it is one. I share the analogy used by many other speakers: if I came home one night and found the bath overflowing, the first thing I would make sure is that the taps are turned off. Any settlement we put forward has to be conditional on agreement from the Prime Minister and likely Prime Ministers of the future that they will moderate their appointments to fit in with the overall cap. That in turn depends on everyone reaching agreement on what a fair allocation of seats would be. The only point of consensus seems to be that everyone, with perhaps one exception, thinks 20% for the Cross Benches is a very good idea. I echo that.

Beyond that, it is easy to see where the problem comes. Successive Prime Ministers have sought to replicate the effects on the House of Commons of MPs leaving by simply increasing the numbers in the House of Lords. That inevitably, mathematically certainly, leads to more and more Peers coming each day because there is not a system for removing them. That is what we want the Select Committee to look at.

What system we go for to bring about the cull that will bring us down to a more reasonable number is very much a matter for the Select Committee. I just urge people to beware of solutions that look to be simple and attractive. A year ago, I freely confess, I endorsed the idea put forward by the Labour group of a retirement age of 80. I then realised it would further increase the disproportionately high representation of the Liberal Democrats, which is one of the problems this House faces. It is an embarrassment to defeat the Government at the moment because it is mathematically too easy. If Labour and the Lib Dems line up, the Government are defeated. It is as simple as that. There is a great sense of achievement in defeating the Government of the day—not just the present one—if you do it with the support of the Cross Benches and feel you have won a moral victory. There is no sense of achievement in defeating it by sheer force of inflated numbers.

We have to find a formula. The noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, put forward one. The noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, made a sensible suggestion that it should be the average of not just one election, because the electoral pendulum can swing quite violently, particularly at the moment, but maybe the previous three elections. Surely the role of the House of Lords should be to temper and modulate excessive swings of public opinion rather than exaggerate and amplify them. We could go back to what ancient Athens did and do it all by lot. That might give us a result that is not totally unattractive, particularly if you had a manual override where, if somebody clearly had lost out in the raffle, they could be appointed by a committee to ensure that their contribution was not lost.

That would at least stop people electioneering, and that is the great problem about what was referred to as the democratic deficit—there is also the democratic dynamic. That is, if I stand for election, I make promises to people to secure their votes and I will then demand the powers to deliver on those promises. If that conflicts with the House of Commons, so be it. You would end up with gridlock, as you have in quite a lot of other situations.

Above all, the important thing is to leave it to a Select Committee. A Select Committee will command the support of the House, which will be a vital ingredient when we are persuading rather a lot of turkeys to vote for Christmas.

Strathclyde Review

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

My Lords, the fact that the report by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, was commissioned as part of a somewhat hysterical overreaction to the defeat that the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, just referred to should not blind us to the fact that it is none the less a very good report. I congratulate him on the speed with which it was produced, its brevity and the contribution of his expert advisers.

The report is a very good start to a debate that needs to commence very quickly because of abuse of SIs not by this Chamber, but by successive Governments dating back over a number of years. The quotation that we heard from the forthcoming Scotland Bill is simply one indication of what the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, earlier referred to as a Christmas tree on which to hang baubles all over the place. The way legislation moves through is a joke. When I came here there was a statutory instrument in a field to which I was vaguely related that required a small amendment. The Chief Whip told me, “Sorry, we don’t do that. We can either vote to veto it or not at all”. That is ludicrous. If statutory instruments are part of the legislative process, they should be subject to the same rules. We must move in that direction. I am quite happy to lose vetoes. Vetoes do not matter. They are, in fact, equivalent to a nuclear option: they are an inhibiting factor rather than an encouragement to proper dissent.

On page 6 of the report, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, states that,

“I believe it would be appropriate for the Government to take steps to ensure that Bills contain an appropriate level of detail and that too much is not left for implementation by statutory instrument”.

That is a very polite way of agreeing with what the Hansard Society says today: that the distinction between the two has long since been abused by successive Governments and we need to start doing something about it.

Option 1 cannot really be a serious option; it is a bit of a joke. Meg Russell very kindly said that it is probably there to make the other two options look attractive. That is perhaps a legitimate objective. Option 2 is essentially staying the way we are, which I do not think works. I would go for option 3, with some amendments, which would be as follows. First, we should be capable of amending secondary legislation, because in many cases it simply needs a tweak, not a rejection. Secondly, we should have a specific time limit for the Government to respond. Thirdly, this should be decided not by statute but by a further Joint Committee on Conventions.

The statutory option worries me more than somewhat. If Option 3 is delivered by statute, what a temptation there is for a future Government to say, “Look, this worked for this statutory instrument stuff, why don’t we stop them doing that with primary legislation as well?”, and we will end up with legislation preventing us offering more than token opposition to anything the House of Commons puts through. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell: the enemy here is not the House of Commons but the Government—the Executive. The Hansard Society pointed that out in its document published this morning. The noble Lord quoted the reference in that document to a “flawed process” becoming a total farce. The next sentence in that document stated that such a process would neuter the House of Lords. The enemy is not the House of Commons but the Government. They are the only people who would benefit from our being neutered in this manner.

I come to my final point. I am trying to save time to allow those noble Lords who are still trying to get something to eat to do so. It was not our vote that changed the stance on the tax credits issue; it was the fact that it struck a chord within the Conservative Party, some of whose members realised that this was a ghastly mistake and they had better get out of it very quickly. They at least had the sense to change their minds. As has already been pointed out, had the Government wanted to introduce such a measure, there are thousands of ways in which they could have done it. In fact, they dropped the whole idea altogether despite all their claims that it was an election pledge and we could not possibly vote against it because they believed in it so firmly. Nevertheless, they ditched it very quickly in the Budget.

The important thing that we do is focus attention on something and MPs then ask themselves, “My God, I didn’t vote for that, did I?”. Then they realise the mistake they have made and they change their minds. It is the fact that they change their minds that matters and it is that power that we need to retain. Vetoes are unnecessary. I am quite happy to have time limits reduced from a year to six months; it does not worry me at all provided that you give MPs enough pause to have a chance to think again.

Channel 4

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

What we are doing is looking at the options in an objective way, engaging with Channel 4, and in the fullness of time—in due course, as they say—we will reach conclusions.

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

Even if one takes the Minister’s reply at face value and is reassured by it, she surely must recognise that if Channel 4 were to be privatised, that capital would have to be serviced, either by dividends paid to investors or interest paid to those who provided loans. That would represent money that would otherwise have gone to creative programming—surely an undesirable outcome.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I can understand the noble Lord’s comments but we have to look objectively at all the options in the light of the changing media market and the needs of Channel 4 and its viewers.

Proposed Changes to the Standing Orders of the House of Commons

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Tuesday 21st July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, we are one Parliament but two Houses. That is symbolised in the Messages that go forth between green and red ribbon. As the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, said, comity between the two Houses may sound arcane but it is actually an extremely important principle of the way in which we conduct ourselves.

I believe that we should confine ourselves to looking at the Motion that is before us. I may agree with some of the things that are said about the underlying policy, but the Motion before us is that we should seek to set up a Joint Committee that would presume to report on what the House of Commons should do in its Standing Orders.

It would be a move which was not invited by the House of Commons nor sought by the Joint Committee on Conventions for your Lordships to say that we in this House presume to say to the House of Commons how it should conduct its internal affairs. Questions on House of Commons matters are by convention not permitted in this Chamber; we do not ask them. It is a principle that we do not seek to construe the internal matters of the House of Commons.

Standing Orders are quite important. A very important principle in parliamentary law is the provision that prevents tacking. Tacking was the abuse by the House of Commons of financial measures to add things to them that the House of Lords could not amend because of financial privilege. It is not in any statute; it started as a Motion passed by your Lordships’ House and it now sits as a Standing Order in this House that the House of Commons should not do that. The House of Commons has respected that for 300 years—it is just a Standing Order in this House. It is an example of the importance of preserving. We may have a wider interest in preserving the principle that one House does not presume to construe the internal proceedings of another. We can have all the consideration in the Constitution Committee; we can have debates; we can have discussions. But for us to vote to set up a committee which presumes to tell the House of Commons what its Standing Orders should be—

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

When the noble Lord makes that statement, I think he fails to take account of the wording of the Motion and the opening remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, which are expressly that it is expedient that a Joint Committee be set up—not that this House sets one up, simply that it is expedient that it be set up. That is surely rather important.

[Lord True]

My Lords, if it is simply a question of expediency, one can make a declaratory statement in a debate. This Motion is intended to send a message to the House of Commons and there is no question about it. The committee is invited in the Motion to report specifically on the proposals for changes in the Standing Orders of another place.

We would not care for it very much if we heard from the House of Commons that they had had a debate and were sending us some suggestions as to how we should change the internal proceedings of your Lordships’ House, or if we should be told by people from the House of Commons who might vote on a particular measure.

House of Lords

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Tuesday 6th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

My Lords, like other Peers, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Williams on securing this debate. I suppose it is also relevant to congratulate the Government on making time available for it. If I could recall exactly what the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said, I know I would be much better off simply repeating it because it was a lot more elegant than giving vent to the slight vein of paranoia I have that there might be a conspiracy among the three major parties to create a stitch-up here to try to rush something through before the election. I agree with my noble friend Lord Clark. In this matter, any attempt to do something before the election would be doomed to failure.

Having congratulated my noble friend Lord Williams, I will say that I disagree with him on both his target of 400 and his methodology in reaching it. Why 400? It is quite interesting that he referred to the last time we had 400, which was in 2008-09. We had an average daily attendance of 400, but at that point we had an actual membership of 704. If we are going to achieve it with a membership of 400 this time, it implies having a different sort of Peer. It implies having full-time Peers who do not have the current experience that the noble Lord, Lord Blair, referred to but are full time, as politicians in the House of Commons have become, and the House of Lords would become a much poorer place. With the greatest respect to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, and the committee chaired by Lord Grenfell, I also disagree with the Labour suggestion of 450. I see no logic whatever in the House of Lords being smaller than the House of Commons. There is nothing magic about it.

If the House of Lords is part-time, as in my view it should be, arguably it could be demonstrated mathematically that it should be a larger House than the House of Commons. There is a case for having active people rotating depending on their interest in the subject. My noble friend Lord Clark referred to medical debates. We do not see interested Members here every day. They would not have any medical experience if they were here every day, because in medicine as in everything else, the shelf life of knowledge is very short. I am fully aware that I am of less use to the House now than I was 10 years ago—not because I am 10 years older but because I am 10 years further on from having an active job where I had direct experience of some of the subjects I talk about. At that point, I came in here feeling that I had the answer to most of the world’s problems; now I am not even sure what the world’s problems are, let alone the answers.

The other point about a full-time requirement in any sense is that it will further restrict membership to those within the M25. Last time we debated this, I was inelegant enough to refer to the expenses system. I challenge anyone to defend a system where you pay somebody from Chelsea the same allowance that you pay somebody from Orkney. It is manifestly ludicrous and unfair, and I bitterly regret withdrawing an amendment I had at the time which would have made it £250 and £350, depending on residence, which I would now alter to £225 and £375 because of the cost of living in London. The fact, to which my noble friend Lord Clark alluded, is that people who come from outside London bear a huge personal expense, which is much less for people who live in London.

It is also important that all noble Lords have referred to a degree of urgency. The reason for that urgency is an increase in the intake, yet nobody has suggested that we do something about the intake. I am not suggesting that we freeze it; that would be unrealistic. However, surely even to reduce our numbers we need to know the maximum number of Peers which a Prime Minister of the day can appoint—otherwise, frankly, it is a recipe for the entire House to be wiped out and replaced in its entirety by new Peers. What Prime Minister would resist the temptation? Let us be quite clear: we have to do something about the intake. You cannot curb a Prime Minister’s power totally, but you could put some limit on it. I do not care how high the figure is, but we need to know what we are dealing with.

There is also another way around it—and again, one must acknowledge that some people accept a peerage for the title and regard coming to this House as an unfortunate concomitant duty, while others genuinely come for the job and wear the title rather lightly. We could easily distinguish between these two and create a class of Peers who are not entitled to sit in Parliament. They would not miss it because they do not want to do it. That would still leave the Prime Minister free to award peerages that did not carry implications for the size of this House.

Recognising, however, that you cannot do it all by controlling the intake, we have to achieve some kind of cull. I am tempted to say that perhaps those who do not believe in an appointed House should perhaps leave it. That would not produce a great stampede and reduce our numbers greatly, and it would also mean losing people such as my noble friend Lord Richard, which I do not want to happen. However, one could get rid of non-attendees. I accept the caution that it is not a simple question of attendance, and that that could be refined, but if we have to achieve some reduction in numbers—and most noble Lords seem to feel that we need that—let us at least try it. Let us get rid of noble Lords who do not come and do not want to come. I accept that it would not affect daily attendance, because they do not come here, but it would affect the numbers and would get rid of the jibes that we have a bigger membership than the Chinese National People’s Congress.

One of the reasons for my paranoia about the leadership of the three parties, whom I do not trust as far as I could throw them on this issue, is that quite a lot of press articles over the Christmas Recess were distinctly unhelpful to this House and came from absolutely nowhere. I begin to think that somebody is softening up the electorate before they say, “Let’s finally deal with the problem of the House of Lords—after all, we all had it in our manifestos”. The fact is that the electorate rejected the manifestos—but we do not pay any attention to that. If we put it in the manifestos, it must happen.

The attendance figure of 60%, which the Labour group under my noble friend Lady Taylor recommended, is a very high bar, particularly for people who come from outside London, which would reduce the number of people with practical, daily, hands-on experience and weaken the composition of the House. However, it is a reasonable figure. Fifty per cent would be more justifiable—but, if necessary, I would go along with 60%.

My final point—and I speak against my own interest in this, because I will reach this figure all too quickly—is that age is the least-bad cull mechanism we have. To go for retirement at the end of the Parliament at which you attain the age of 80 is not defensible logically—I accept all the criticisms of ageism—but it is better than the other schemes that have been suggested, and for that reason I commend it.

Broadcasting: Digital Radio

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

My Lords, in television it takes only 80 transmitters to reach 90% of the population but it takes more than 1,000 transmitters to reach the remaining 10%. We are now at the point in radio where it is a test of our resolve on public service broadcasting because it is frankly uneconomic. Is the Minister confident that the funding is in place to roll out coverage so that we reach something like 97% or 98% of the population?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, there is a distinction between what I would call the national network and the local digital network. Just recently the BBC, the Government and commercial radio have agreed to put in £7 million each—£21 million in all—to ensure that the local DAB network is extended so that a further 200 sites will be in place by the time the programme is completed, which I hope will be in 2016. That will enable another 4 million homes to benefit from digital.

Scotland

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

I entirely agree with my noble friend. This is extremely well understood by politicians on both sides of the border. The Electoral Commission has an absolute mandate to do precisely as he suggested—to report and to lay that report in the Scottish Parliament, and of course it will be available here as well.

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane]

Does the noble Lord agree that independence is a moving feast, as reflected in the concern shown on all sides of the House about the question? I regard Scotland as an independent country at the moment but I am happy to renew my marriage vows with England. The key question is: does Scotland want to leave the UK? The matter must be closely focused on that single issue. Otherwise it will be lost in a mass of spin from Alex Salmond.

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, we have up to two years of debate before we get to a referendum and I am sure that many people and organisations will make the point that the noble Lord has raised. Independence is not for Christmas; it is for life. Of course, the benefits of the United Kingdom need to be well understood before we get to a referendum.

House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane]

My Lords, I join those who have congratulated the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, and his committee on an excellent report. Perhaps I may couple that with my apologies for not having submitted written evidence. It would normally have been my practice to do so. The honest truth is that I found the subject such a wide one that the task I found too daunting. All the greater, therefore, is my admiration for the comprehensive nature of the committee’s report. Frankly, I have been surprised at how wide it is and how radical some of the solutions proposed have been. I do not think that we shall see all of them, but I hope that we will see most of them, and very quickly.

Perhaps I may open up and unfortunately disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Reay, on the issue of the Lord Speaker. All that we are talking of here is removing the artificial constraints that we have put on the role. Going back in time, I think that this can be dated to the House still smarting from the cack-handed attempts made by Tony Blair to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor and subsequently to remove it from the House of Lords and put it into the House of Commons. For that reason, we probably had a feeling that we did not want to give the newly created post of Lord Speaker too much power. I am against giving it too much power, but it is ridiculous, and particularly unfair to Government and Liberal Democrat Benches, that somebody on the Front Bench—unless they have eyes in the back of their head, which most politicians should have—cannot see who is clamouring to speak. The sensible way to do it is to leave it to the Lord Speaker.

I support the committee’s proposal to transfer the power presently residing with the Leader or Government Whips to the Lord Speaker rather than the idea which found most favour among members; that is, the Lord Speaker calling Members. I do not like that. In a funny kind of way, in the House of Commons, it always strikes me as “Who has done the deal beforehand?” It all looks to be more like a stitch-up. I would be much happier with the Lord Speaker simply adjudicating between the rival claims of the different sides of the House. I agree with my noble friend Lord Brooke that we have to face up to the issue and make it clear to all sides of the House whether we are dealing with one party on the other side of the House or two parties, because a lot of the fundamental problem stems from that.

I warmly welcome the idea of taking Statements as read. It really is a waste of time to have a Minister reading them out. The only point on which I would disagree with the report is relegating a second or third Statement to the Moses Room. Frankly, if a Statement is important enough to warrant repeating in this House, it should be before the whole House. Let us take today’s Statement as an example. The idea of a defence Statement being made in the Moses Room is just not right.

I warmly welcome also pre-legislative scrutiny. I make a plea that this be done by Joint Committees of both Houses. That is good for Parliament; it gets both Houses together when there is very little opportunity for them so to do. It would also be very good for the public and for the interests affected by legislation. The great problem is that White Papers nowadays are so glossy that they are like election manifestos. People do not get excited until they realise that Clause 4(2)(c) of a Bill could effectively put them out of business. Then they get to work and start lobbying people. Pre-legislative scrutiny would give us the chance to harness the lobbying industry to the service of Parliament rather than the other way round. I would also give the committees the power to take evidence. Post-legislative scrutiny, too, is long overdue. If cars need an MOT, so does legislation.

On taking Committee stages in the Moses Room, I am not particularly uptight about that. I realise that there would be a loss of the power to call Divisions, but that still exists on Report. I find the atmosphere of a smaller room more conducive to constructive committee work rather than adversarial committee work, which I hope we could avoid. However, I am in profound disagreement with the committee’s suggestion that its working hours should be 10.30 am to 12.30 pm, and then 2.30 pm to 6.30 pm. Most of us here have solved the problem of bilocation, but trilocation is one step too far. The fact is that a lot of people are involved in Select Committees, particularly in the morning. It is quite wrong that you should miss out on something you might be interested in, simply because you are doing your duty as a member of a Select Committee. I would rather have the Moses Room sitting from 3 pm till 10 pm, for example,. With an hour’s break for dinner that still gives you six working hours; that is exactly the same as the committee’s proposal, and I think it would be a more helpful solution.

For all that it sounds good—that the Commons will flag up issues that it has not discussed—it will find a way of giving the impression that it has discussed everything. We are talking about issues it has not really debated, which will be quite difficult to define. Broadly, however, this is a very good report, and I hope that we will see some action on it.

House of Lords: Reform

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane]

My Lords, it was on 17 May that the Government published their White Paper and draft Bill and, by happy coincidence, that was also my 75th birthday. I have always regarded this document as some sort of unintended, but none the less welcome, birthday present. I genuinely congratulate the Government on at least producing this Bill which, as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord McNally, will say tonight, Labour signally failed to do. Mind you, when I see the Government’s Bill, I am very glad that Labour did not produce one. I have no doubt that the Labour Bill would have been better than the Conservative one, but if it was based on the Jack Straw 2008 White Paper, I would certainly have voted against it because it would suffer from the same problem as the Government now suffer from. With smoke and mirrors and weasel words, you can pretend to be all things to all men in a White Paper. You can pretend that somehow you can devise a system of election that will be both accountable and yet in no way threaten the primacy of the House of Commons. Once you come down to legislation, you have to make a choice and spell out specifically what you are doing.

The Government have given themselves a life raft, if you like, by publishing, somewhat unusually, a White Paper alongside the Bill. You are meant to have made up your mind what is in a Bill before you publish it, but innovation is always a good thing. They have the life raft there because they recognise that once you go into detail, support for election, which is a wonderful slogan, disaggregates like snow off a dyke. The fact is that the Opposition and Cross Benches could take the day off, and this Bill, put to a secret ballot of the government Benches, would be defeated overwhelmingly in this House, and the Government know it. I am not asking for a secret ballot—that would be unreasonable—but it is at least reasonable to expect that the Government will give their membership a free vote. Let me say, and I mean no disrespect to our Whips, that if they do not give us a free vote, I am taking one, and I will be voting against the Bill. There have also been rumours that the Parliament Act might be used. Frankly, I think the Government would be well advised to dissociate themselves from that position very quickly. It smacks very much of an elective tyranny, and it would be wholly inappropriate for a constitutional Bill.

However, let us look at the Bill we have. After all, it has been in germination since 1832 and is the greatest reform Act we have ever seen, so one accepts that the Government have given it their best shot. This is the best that they can do, so what have they come up with? First, let us be quite clear that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, said, they are abolishing the House of Lords, not reforming it. I refer them to page 10, paragraph 1 of the White Paper. Secondly, they have gone for single, 15-year terms with no re-election. Let us recognise that that gives us no accountability whatever, not a scintilla. The reason they did that, I presume, is to try to make the system of election so divorced from that for the Commons that MPs will not feel threatened. Otherwise, they know the Bill will be defeated in the Commons.

The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, made the point yesterday evening that he wants to go further and have recall provisions. If I am elected for Scotland—because I gather that that is one big constituency nowadays for this Bill—I am going to make sure that I am not going to be recalled, so I am going to take steps, and I am going to demand powers to ensure that I am shown in a good light to my electorate. The Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times will have the equivalent of bird-watching cameras trained on the door of the House to make sure that people elected turn up at least once in their 15 years and do not have their cheques sent to some bank account in Barbados.

The fact is that people will be wholly unaccountable. They will certainly be no more accountable than we are. Again, although the noble Lord, Lord McNally, visibly showed dissent about this, I remind the Government about the achievement of the Joint Committee on Conventions. If there is any doubt about it, at page 23, paragraph 61 of its report, it is spelled out, in terms, that this was an agreement based on the existing composition and if an elected element, let alone 80 per cent or 100 per cent, came in here, all bets were off, and it was a new deal. If we really want to clog up Parliament with the sort of nonsense that will go on, I suspect that the reputation of politics, which is already low, will plummet.

I follow the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, who used to be my MP—

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I hope you voted for me.

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane]

I think I may have. I found the Labour Party quite difficult to support in the 1970s and 1980s, as, indeed, did most of the Labour Party.

Let us go back to this campaign. How am I going to fight an election? How am I going to differentiate myself from everybody else who is standing and appear the better candidate? Am I going to promise things? If so, how are people going to know whether I have delivered on the promises? How am I going to deal with the heckler who says, “You say you are going to do that, but do you have the power to do it?”? If I do not have the power, I am quickly going to find a way of getting that power. The fact is that it creates instability in the political system and will eventually create gridlock.

I shall make a quick jibe about the fact that Members are going to be salaried. For a start, it rather intrigues me. I thought salary went with a job and did not depend on the way that you were put into that job. The public might think, “Hold on, if the present House of Lords is not paid, and this new crowd are paid, are they doing more? Have they more powers?”. The impression will certainly be that you have to justify that salary by making more noise than perhaps we currently do. Certainly the impression will be that you have to justify that salary by making more noise than perhaps we currently do.

Let us get rid of a couple of myths. First, there is the great mantra that it was in all three party manifestos. Please remind me which party manifesto was ringingly endorsed by the electorate at the last election? It seems to me that uniquely nobody really got a clean bill of health. I quite genuinely do not want to be unkind to the Liberal Democrats but they are the most associated with House of Lords reform. They have genuine pedigree on it. They did very badly at the election. The next party that did very badly was frankly the Labour Party. It had cottoned on to an elected House somewhat late in the day. Let us say that the view was sincerely held by many people. That party was rejected by the electorate. The only party that did tolerably well was the party that was most lukewarm about House of Lords reform, the Conservative Party. I would not pretend for a minute that the election swung on House of Lords reform but had it gone the other way, all three Front Benches would have been claiming that it was because of House of Lords reform that they were all elected and that they had a mandate. You cannot have it both ways.

Finally, I want to endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, said. The other myth is that this is the settled will of the House of Commons. That is absolute nonsense. In the 2007 vote a majority of Conservative MPs and a majority of Labour MPs voted against 80 per cent election. Indeed, in the 2003 vote the most popular option—all seven options were voted against, by the way, so much for a settled will of the Commons—or the one that was least unattractive was an all-appointed House.

I think we are looking for some political courage here. All three parties have had a go at this and all three have failed. You cannot square the circle. You cannot have an elected House of Lords without diminishing the power of the House of Commons. There might come a time when the electorate wants that but I do not think it is yet. I therefore do not want this kicked into the long grass. I want somebody to get the lawnmower out, clear a circle and give it a decent burial.