Procedure and Privileges Committee

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Monday 14th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, I will not speak for long, as I have no dog in this fight. However, I remind the House that under Standing Order 10, agreed by both Houses, by-elections are part of the 1999 compromise written into law and due to remain in place until the second phase of Lords reform. By-elections have been free and fair, and they have produced many worthy Members of this House, including the current Chief Whip, the noble Lord, Lord Ashton of Hyde, and a shadow Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, to name but two.

Since I have been in this House, which is not very long, it is the hereditary Peers who have impressed me the most. A huge percentage of them work hard, sit on the Front Bench and stay late at night. I have no reason to think the by-election should be postponed yet again. As the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, mentioned, postal voting is already used and could be extended; it would be unconstitutional for it not to be. I wonder whether this decision had something to do with dislike of hereditary Peers; surely personal bias is not an acceptable reason to delay by-elections further. Therefore, I will support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Mancroft.

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to speak in support of the amendment to the Motion in the name of my noble friend Lord Mancroft. I will make four points. First, it is a fair assumption, is it not, that a lawmaking body might just, on the balance of probabilities, have a duty to uphold the law and not continually to postpone its implementation, as we are doing in the case of hereditary Peers’ by-elections—a minor detail for some, I dare say. But I wonder whether there is an elephant in the room—in the Chamber, even—that dares not speak its name, and so large is it that it distorts all sense of perspective.

This brings me to my second point. Some say, occasionally on a Sunday, that your Lordships’ House is too large. But that disregards the fact that only about half of us attend on a regular basis. The elephant in the room, which some have a vested interest in ignoring, is that the introduction of a mandatory retirement age would address that issue overnight and to a far greater extent than yet another unjustified suspension of the hereditary Peers’ by-elections.

My third point is simply this: who among us could fail to have been impressed by the example of duty and public service to her people set by our sovereign during one of the deepest domestic crises of her long reign? So, why, closer to home, here in your Lordships' House, do we hack at the roots of such a noble tradition by denigrating, rather than celebrating, such a strong sense of duty and public service passed down from one generation to the next by some of this country’s oldest and most distinguished families?

Finally, I was born not with a silver spoon in my mouth but with a broken leg. I have no vested interest, but neither am I burdened by a boulder on my shoulder. Surely we are bigger than this. We should honour our duty and uphold the law. Hereditary Peers’ by-elections should resume without delay.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, I listened with care to what the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said, and increasingly, I find myself deeply shocked by his whole attitude towards these elections. Every week, he is perfectly happy to vote against the Government on a whole load of extremely important issues, but when it comes to voting on something like this, he suddenly gets all coy and shy and does not think he is capable of doing so, and nor is the rest of the House. This must be complete nonsense.

The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, misrepresents the reason that I, my noble friend Lord Mancroft and others are so opposed to the Bill he has proposed many times. The reason is not to defend the continuation of hereditary Peers or the by-elections but to avoid the creation of a wholly appointed House. Many Peers have spoken on this. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has made several great interventions on the issue. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, would find his Bill far easier to pass if he were to bring forward a clause for the creation of an independent, statutory appointments commission that would, at that stage, police who came into the House, but he is steadfast against that.