Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Graham of Edmonton Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Graham of Edmonton (Lab)]

My Lords, we have sat through the beginning of this debate and have been privileged to do so. This House is unique in many ways. Of course, the topic is very important, but I cannot detect a partisan view in any of the speeches. Strong views have been expressed and the speakers have good experience, but kindness, understanding and tolerance have been shown. So it is a privilege for me to take part in this debate.

When I was having a cup of coffee earlier today, a colleague in the House said to me, “Have you ever seen such a big, long speaking list such as this?”. I said, “Yes, in 1998, when we debated the House of Lords Bill, which was designed to change the House radically—and I was number 184 in a list of 192”. I have good memories of that, which again was a matter of life and death to so many people.

I look across and see my friends the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, who both struck the right note, saying that although they will give the Bill a Second Reading there are many things that they would want to raise in the proper stages—and that is how we should do it.

When I was looking for one or two things to say—and I certainly support the Bill—I was reminded that over another big issue I was able to say to the House of Commons that my constituents, by two to one, were asking me to support the retention of membership of the Common Market. There was a “Hear, hear”, and I said, “Yes, I received three letters, two of them in favour and one against”. On this issue we have had a deluge of correspondence, all of which I have read and replied to. The first avalanche came from those who were in favour of the Bill and the next avalanche, which is still going on, from those opposed to the Bill. Of course, we ought to know our procedure, and it is understandable if they do not, but a Second Reading should provide the House with an opportunity to improve a Bill if it can be done.

As I was driven into the House today by my driver, Lee, he said, “You seem agitated, Ted—you want to get there for 10”. I said, “You’ll get me there for 10, and it may go on until 7 or 8 o’clock tonight”. He asked me what the issue was and I told him, and he said, “My dad had liver complaints and was in agony in hospital, in a disgusting state. More than once, he said to me that he would like to die as soon as possible. Of course, I could not do that”. When I told him what I was going to debate, he said, “If I had anything to do with it, I would take advantage of a Bill like that”.

We have many views and there are many ways in which the legislation can be improved, and I look forward to the next stages.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Graham of Edmonton Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Graham of Edmonton]

My Lords, I will make a brief contribution. The noble Lords, Lord Lyell and Lord Rennard, are here as gatekeepers for their parties. It shows the interest that those on the Benches opposite have in the issue. The relative numbers on both sides are representative of the contributions to the debate. I begin by saying how much I enjoyed the contributions of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayter, Lady Nye and Lady McDonagh. They paid a great deal of attention to the detail of the Bill. I will not do that; my concern is process, especially the process through which major change is taking place against a background of the democratic right of an affected community to complain at a public inquiry not being allowed.

I have not had a lot of experience, but when I was leader of Enfield Council, the London Government Act 1963 came in. I attended the public inquiry and made a contribution on behalf of the council. We were represented by Ashley Bramall, who was well known to London politics. His brother was a Member of this House.

[Lord Bach]

He is a Member.

[Lord Graham of Edmonton]

Yes, he is a Member. It gave me a dramatic feeling of being involved in a major piece of legislation. For the life of me, what we have had, more than once, on this Bill and on others, is a tight timetable. The timetable has been fixed not by Parliament but by the political machinations of the coalition. It ought to be honest enough to say to the public that it is cutting corners because it wants to get the legislation through by a certain date, to benefit not the public but the programme and the timetable that it has set for itself. The public are rumbling the coalition and I hope it will get it its comeuppance.

I have no axe to grind on the alternative vote issue. I fought a number of elections: won some, lost some. The first parliamentary election that I fought was for Enfield West. My opponent was Iain Macleod, whose name is well known in this House. I remember saying to someone at a function, in Iain's presence, “Of course, I fought Iain at the last election”. He said, “Well, Ted, you may have done, but you never laid a finger on me”, which I did not because it was my unwinnable seat. The House has been invited to connive with the machinations on the other side. The noble Lord, Lord Maples, who is in his place, commented earlier on political gerrymandering. The Labour Party was upset because some benefits that we had were going to be taken away. The noble Lord is naive if he thinks that people on this side of the Chamber do not believe that people on his side of the Chamber are as guilty as we are in seeking an advantage.

Of course, all parties try to present their case as benignly as possible, but let us be realistic. In my view, the public are well aware of what politics is about, and at the moment it is about the credibility of the coalition parties. If they do not stand together, they will fall. So far as I am concerned, the legislation before us tonight is not in the best interests of the country or Parliament, and when the public realise what is being foisted upon them in the name of democracy, they will have second thoughts. I simply say that there is still time for the Government to reflect on the pace at which they are bringing about change.

Very little in the arguments is new. What we are talking about now is the substance of the legislation. The arguments are pretty well understood. Some people on this side of the House have said that they are in favour of one thing, whereas others have said that they are against it, and the same thing will happen on the other side. The Minister, as a person, has my respect and I know that he will be fair when he winds up the debate. However, I think he ought to take back to his masters the fact that democracy in this country is being ill served by this legislation and that it should be altered.

Queen's Speech

Lord Graham of Edmonton Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Graham of Edmonton]

My Lords, I welcome the phrase, “It is better to be right than to be rushed”, which guides what I want to say in this important debate. Since 6 May, whenever David Cameron or Nick Clegg has spoken, it has always been in the national interest, never in the interests of the Conservative Party or of the Liberal Democrats. They have tried to give the impression that what was in the interests of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats was in the national interest and that any party with a different view was not speaking or proposing actions in the national interest. I do not intend to leave questions hanging in the air when I sit down because I need to give a lot more thought to the generality of constitutional change, but I speak with experience, having been the opposition Chief Whip between 1990 and 1997. I was also in the Whips’ Office in the Commons on 31 March 1979 when Labour went down by one vote. Immediately the Prime Minister went to the country to ask for an endorsement.

The arguments that we have heard all have merit, but I think that the coalition parties are so determined—or so frightened of each other—that they want to fix the parliamentary arithmetic so that whatever happens they are guaranteed to remain in office. I give one or two figures. You do not have to look into a crystal ball to recognise what the Conservative Party has done in the past. Given that I was the Chief Whip, I am perhaps more a figures man than a policy man, but the House will be interested to hear about some figures that pertained when Labour was in power between 1974 and 1979. In 1975-6, there were 146 Divisions, of which the Government of the day lost 126. Of course, you might say that that was because rotten policies were involved. However, in 1981-2, there was the same number of Divisions, 146, but the Government lost only seven of them. You can stretch the imagination and say that that was the luck of the draw and that different policies were involved, but we know that the figures are the product of the composition of the House at the time.

In 1988-9, there were 189 Divisions, of which the Government lost 12. I am grateful to the Library for having provided me with these figures. In 2002-3, there were 226 Divisions, of which the Labour Government lost 68. In 2005-6, there were 192 Divisions, of which the Government lost 62. Even in the Session that has just ended, there were 43 Divisions, of which the Government lost 14. By and large, the previous Government won two Divisions and lost one. Those figures are remarkable.

As regards the composition of the House, when I ceased to be the Chief Whip in 1997, there were 116 Labour Peers and 477 Conservative Peers. You might say that it should not be like that if we claim to be part of a democratic process. In 1991-2, there were 115 Labour Peers and 451 Conservative Peers. That again indicates not just the size of the disparity but its consistency. I am not privy to any information other than that which I read and listen to, but if a case is being made for doing something about numbers, why does one need more Members—unless it is for a political fix—when the present composition of the House guarantees the coalition Government their say?

In 1998-9—just before the Lords Bill—there were 1,210 Members of this House, 484 of whom took the Conservative Whip and 193 of whom were Labour. Tony Blair and the Labour Government said that that disparity had to be corrected and it was. They increased the number of Labour Peers from 116 in 1996 to 201 in 1999. I invite noble Lords to ask for the relevant papers, but rough parity was achieved. My noble friend Lord Grocott made an interesting point in that regard. There was an unwritten understanding that what one needed was parity, particularly between the Conservative and Labour Benches. We now have something like parity, around the 200 mark. However, there were 200 Labour Members when there was a Labour Government and a House of 700 Members. The then Government had 500 potential opponents. We never tried to increase our number above about 200 and we know of the various changes that brought more people on to the Cross Benches.

We need to be careful when we look at these changes. If we are honest—I accept that we are honest politically—we must accept that we are faced with a naked attempt not only to bolster those in office but to try to ensure that they are never driven out of office again. As far as I am concerned, the Conservative and Liberal coalition Government need to be very careful before they overstep the mark and are seen to be cynically manipulating the constitution.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Tyler]

That was not the point that was being made earlier today or on Tuesday. The conventions were referred to. I served on the Joint Committee on Conventions. It is simply not true that the conventions are as were described on Tuesday and today. I certainly agree that we must review them, but it is not true that the conventions meant, as was stated on Tuesday, that the Salisbury/Addison agreement, which was an agreement between only two parties, still stands today. That is simply not true.

We have had a discussion about the threshold for Dissolution. I can tell your Lordships’ House that the original idea was to adopt the Scottish 66 per cent. As has been implied, that is indeed the custom elsewhere, but it was sensibly decided that that percentage was excessive. For those who do not understand the difference between a vote of confidence and the Dissolution of the House, I should draw attention to the sensible—as one would expect—contribution by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern. These are different issues. What is important at this stage is that this is the first Prime Minister who has been prepared to give up the right to call a general election when it suited his party’s advantage. That was not, of course, the case with the previous Prime Minister, who only dallied with the idea of a fixed-term Parliament during the fifth year of the Parliament.

[Lord Graham of Edmonton]

If the noble Lord is pleading the case that this is the first Prime Minister to give up the right to call an election, surely he would agree that that was in exchange for a guarantee that he would not face the country until the end of a five-year Parliament.

[Lord Tyler]

I am not yet in a position to give any undertaking on behalf of the Prime Minister. I hope that I will be given injury time, because I seem to be provoking a certain amount of difference.

I sincerely hope that my colleagues and friends on the opposite side of the House and in the other place will not fall into thinking that we are simply back where we were before 6 May. The electorate have spoken and I very much hope that the new leader of the Labour Party will not dance to the tune of Labour reactionaries in both Houses. We need cohesion but also continuity and consistency in this Parliament if we are to deal with the economic problems that our nation faces. It is simply untrue, as has been suggested, that somehow any form of electoral reform will necessarily lead to an increase in the occasions when we have no overall majority in the other place. As Professor John Curtice, the most influential of all psephologists, has pointed out, first past the post is likely to deliver that, too.

We had the 2008 White Paper on Lords reform and there was a great deal of agreement. I hope that we can build on that and I understand and undertake to pursue as fast as I am able to—as one Member of your Lordships’ House—the idea that the next full stage should be done as a public discussion of the options that still remain within the context of pre-legislative scrutiny. The great advantage of that is that the public can be involved, in a public way, in a discussion of the options. Relatively few issues need to be resolved, but it is not fair, right or proper for Members of your Lordships’ House to suggest that we are rushing into this. I remind them that your Lordships’ House and the other place passed the Parliament Act 1911 with the preamble that it would,

“substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis”.

That has hardly been rushed.

Finally, I turn to the role of your Lordships’ House. Yes, of course we need to undertake the most effective scrutiny on all these issues. There should be no shilly-shally. That is quite right. However, since the coalition has now guaranteed that it will pursue the whole Tony Wright agenda for reforms of the Commons, it is surely right that the exercise referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, and others, stimulated by the Lord Speaker under the title “Strengthening Parliament”, should be advanced as quickly as it can be. I, too, was glad to hear what was said from the Front Bench.

The contribution by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, and the contribution over many months by the Institute for Government on improving the way in which we operate—both Houses, all Parliament working together holding the Executive to account—demand a radical review. I hope that that will happen, because the core problem of restoring public trust and confidence remains with us.