Queen’s Speech

Lord Stoddart of Swindon Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

My Lords, after I had listened to the Queen’s Speech I listened to the BBC interviewing a Scottish nationalist about it. The Scot nat referred to, “this awful conservative Queen’s Speech”. I thought, “He must have been listening to a different speech from the one I was listening to”, because I could not discern anything particularly conservative in the speech at all. Indeed the speech, if one is to be kind, can only be described as drab. It had no real content that would excite the people of this country.

I also thought, “Well, we have just had local elections where the ruling parties suffered very serious losses”. I thought that they would want to take notice of what the people were saying—that they were not satisfied with the progress of the coalition. I thought I would perhaps hear that the Government were considering the fact that an extra 1 million people—lower management sort of people—were to be put into the 40% income tax band. There was nothing about that. There was no move, as far as I could see, to restore child benefit to those same hard-working people. There was nothing about that in there at all, or about dropping the granny—or perhaps it should be grandfather—tax. There was something about paternity leave, but nothing about providing more work. I should have thought that the Government would want to provide work rather than persuade people not to go to work, which of course paternity leave is all about.

On Europe, I had expected that we would hear something from the Government that was going to prevent us being sucked further into the European construct and, in particular, into the eurozone. But what do we see? There is a Bill in the Queen’s Speech to ratify the European stability mechanism, and I understand that it is to be started in this House on 23 May. Perhaps I have not got things right, but I believe that there is going to be a referendum in Ireland—but not until 31 May. I also understand that the Germans have decided to defer the matter until the autumn. So why the rush to bring forward this Bill, and why on earth is it going to start in this House instead of the Commons? Again, I cannot see anything conservative about that proposal.

Not only that; we are also apparently to have a Bill to ratify the accession of Croatia to the European Union—yet another eastern European state to be added to the EU, all of whose people will of course have the right of admission to this country. That will lead on eventually to the admission of Turkey, with 90 million people all having admission to this country. As I say, I can see nothing conservative in this Speech.

The Government claim that their priority is getting the economy right, yet reform of the composition of the Lords is to be part of their centrepiece. They hope to get consensus for reform, although any hope of that has not only been dispatched in this House but been dashed in the other place as well. There is no sign of any consensus and, frankly, we are wasting our time in discussing it. I suppose that we have to, though, to show the Government just how opposed Parliament is as a whole to what they are proposing.

If the second Chamber is to be fully accountable, it has to be wholly elected. There is no way that you can get away from that; if it is to be fully accountable, any second Chamber has to be fully elected. You cannot have first-class and second-class Members; that will not work, as anyone knows who has sat on a local authority with an aldermanic bench. Furthermore, the idea that the primacy of the House of Commons can be maintained with an elected second Chamber is simply preposterous. Where are the people who say otherwise? Do they not realise that every body that becomes elected, and this includes the European Parliament, wants power? Not only do they want power, they want more power. Believe me, if this Chamber becomes elected, it will demand power and it will deserve it. If it does not get it then the people who elected it will have been cheated, and that is not what democracy is all about. In the long term, that would be completely unsustainable.

At present we have a unicameral system that is posing as a bicameral one. The House of Lords does not make laws and the House of Commons is thus sovereign. Anything that we do here can be overturned by the Commons, and the Government are responsible to the Commons alone. There is no doubt in anyone’s minds, either in this House or in the country, that the House of Commons is supreme under the present situation. We have an almost perfect system where one House is sovereign but the other—that is us—can give powerful advice and guidance, and that is exactly what we do.

The House of Lords is a cheap second Chamber, if I may put it that way. If it becomes elected, make no mistake: the costs will go up. I think that the Deputy Prime Minister imagines that Members of the new House of Lords would get a salary of £60,000 and no more. Believe me, though, elected Lords will demand expenses because they will have constituents and will want to do the job of holding the Government to account. It is not going to be a cheap alternative, and people should understand that when they talk about an elected second Chamber.

If we are going to have reform, let us have a proper reform in which one House shares power with the other. As the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and others have pointed out, however, that would require the powers to be written down and set in stone in a written constitution. Indeed, the four days of debate in this House and the erudite reports that we have received show that the question of reform is not the simple matter that the Deputy Prime Minister appears to think it is.

It is not only Parliament that makes laws. The judiciary makes laws—they make the common law, which are often serious laws indeed—so should they be elected? I very much doubt whether supporters of Lords reform would agree to that. Quangos also make laws. Do we elect the quango boards? People would get fed up with all these elections. You cannot say that the House of Lords must be elected because it has to be accountable but all these other people should not be accountable.

Does the present situation work? Yes, and it does so very well. Is there a demand out in the country for Lords reform? We know that there is not. It should not be a priority because there is no demand for it. It would be far better if the Government listened to all the voices, including that of the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, who spoke before me, and scrapped this piece of legislation and got on with dealing with the desperate financial and economic crisis. Any House of Lords reform under these circumstances should be put off until the next Parliament and not dealt with in this one at all, and, when it arises, it should be subject to the will of the people.