Queen’s Speech

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, the noble Lord has responded to my invitation to speak with clarity. Labour will support only a 100% elected House with a codification of powers that means that the elected House will have less power than the existing one. The noble Lord can quiver and quibble—he and his noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton can do all those things—but in the end they need to be clear on all this. I wonder where all this nonsense came from. Throughout the past 10 years, no Joint Committee, White Paper or any aspect of this has ever mentioned that Labour was in favour of the codification of powers.

[Lord Rooker]

I will tell the Leader where it has come from. We want to make the primacy of the elected House a reality. You cannot make the primacy of the Commons a reality unless you do something about codification of the powers here. The refusal to take that seriously, as was shown by Clause 2 of the draft Bill, shows that the Government still have not got it.

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, was a distinguished Minister with the previous Administration. At no time did he make those points in Parliament or within his Government, in all the Joint Committees that met or the White Papers that were published. They did not start quibbling about the primacy of the House of Commons then. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, in his Joint Committee has made an entirely sensible, reasonable and well argued case about the defects of Clause 2, and we will take those up. However, the Labour Front Bench in this House and, I suspect, in another place, has decided that it does not want to create a consensus, and that is why it has come up with these conditions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, it is an interesting idea. If we face huge constitutional change in the affairs of the United Kingdom because of the referendum and the potential of Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, one should at least put on the table the fact that there might need to be some kind of constitutional convention to consider what impact that would have on Westminster and certainly on the second Chamber. In the mean time, if a Bill is brought forward we will of course give it every consideration. None the less, it will have to deal with the issues of powers and relationships—we believe that it should be 100% elected—and one cannot duck the fundamental positions that my party has adopted.

[Lord Rooker]

Perhaps I may give my noble friend another example. We did not develop this matter in the Joint Committee, but it was raised. If we were to have a second elected House—80% or 100%, it does not matter—it would leave the United Kingdom as the only country in the world with two elected Houses and no written constitution. If you looked at the matrix of those with unicamerals and those without written constitutions, and then look at those with elected second Chambers, you would see that we would be unique. In other words, there is nowhere else we can go to learn about how you work with two elected Chambers without a written constitution for settling disputes. That is a barmy position in which to put ourselves.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

I agree with the noble Lord. He is absolutely right. Of course, this is not new. One has only to go back to the preamble of the 1911 Act because the drafters of that Act knew that too. That is why they said that if a Chamber were constituted on a popular basis—and noble Lords on the Lib Dem Benches frequently remind us of the distance between 1911 and 2012—new proposals would be needed for limiting and defining the powers of the new second Chamber. The position in 1911 was exactly the same as the one pointed out by my noble friend today.

We are on a truly uncertain journey. Last week, in a notable intervention, the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, asked how the public would feel about a constitutional change, which is really a deal got up by the two political parties in the coalition, whereby the Conservatives get extra Members in the Commons and in return the Lib Dems get control of the balance of power in the House of Lords. I wonder how the public would feel—as has been briefed in the past few days by a number of people close to the Conservative Party—if, in order to save the immediate future of the coalition, another deal might be got up in which the Conservatives do not get the extra seats after all and in return the Lib Dems drop their passion for Lords reform. What would the public think if that were to happen?

Indeed, how do the public feel about Lords reform? As a Birmingham resident, last week I took part in a ballot to decide whether we were to have an elected mayor, and I wonder why the people of Birmingham are not to be given a say on whether we should have an elected second Chamber. There is only one answer: Mr Clegg is frightened of a referendum and what the public would say.

The Government owe it to the nation to think very hard about the substantive issues that are likely to be raised in our debates on the Bill. I hope the Government will listen carefully to the words of the Joint Select Committee and the alternative group. I also hope that the Government will in the end realise that they owe it to the British people to decide and will agree that, whatever proposals come forward, there ought to be a referendum of the people.