Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, I rise expressing extreme sympathy for the enthusiasm which it is possible to develop for politics at a very early age but which does not lead me to be in support of the amendment. I was one year old at the general election of 1935. I therefore had to wait until 1945, when there was a further general election. Two and a half Members of Parliament for the Labour Party have played first-class cricket and one hundred and twenty-six and a half have played first-class cricket and represented parliamentary seats in the Conservative interest. The half was Aidan Crawley. I was at a prep school in Buckinghamshire where he was the Labour candidate. It was a matter of total astonishment to me at the age of 11—admittedly, there had been no elections between 1935 and 1945—that somebody who had played first-class cricket for Oxford and for his county, Kent, could espouse the Labour cause.

It was the case by then that my late noble kinsman had won the first by-election after Munich and therefore I had lived with a Member of Parliament in the Conservative interest for the previous seven years. We arrived late at the count in 1945 in Lewisham West, where my late noble kinsman was the Member of Parliament defending the seat. His seat had been announced. It is a seat which has generally gone with the Government of the country, a fact which was further proved by the late Chris Price, whom a number of people in your Lordships’ House will have been very fond of. He told me that he was absolutely sure that the reason why he was elected for Lewisham West as a Labour candidate was the coincidence that the Tory who had won the seat back in 1951 was a Mr Henry Price and that the people of Lewisham West assumed that Chris was his son.

The thing that had the most powerful effect on me in the 1945 count occurred in Lewisham East, where Herbert Morrison retained the seat. The independent candidate—a man called Russell—had been put in prison by Morrison in 1941 and had remained there until 1945, when he was released and decided that he would get his revenge on the Home Secretary by standing against him. He got the best part of 1,000 votes and gave what was, without question, the longest speech of thanks to a returning officer that I have ever heard; Mr Russell spoke for 25 minutes, explaining why he disapproved of Mr Morrison.

In the years immediately after 1945, my late noble relative stood as the Conservative candidate in a by-election in Kilburn. She won the seat by 300 votes and held it again at the next council elections. I have, I think, every ground for thinking that she is the last Conservative councillor to represent Kilburn in all the years since. In 1949, in an era when there had been no Conservative—

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)]

This sounds like an innings by Mr Geoffrey Boycott. I wonder if the noble Lord could get to the point of the amendment.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

The noble Lord’s intervention is most gracious; if he will forgive me, I am coming towards that end. Between 1945 and 1950, no by-elections were won by the Opposition party, yet in the LCC elections in 1949, my late noble kinsman led the Conservative Party to an absolute dead-heat—that was the first sign that there was a change in the politics of the country. I acknowledge what the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, has just said and I will fast-forward as much as I can.

I followed the referendum in Scotland with the keenest interest and I totally understand why it constitutes a large part of the argument about this change. However, there were factors in that referendum that greatly raised the temperature and enthusiasm of people. In the years since I entered your Lordships’ House, the previous Labour Government insisted on changing the arrangements for election after election on the grounds that the number of people who were voting was going down, but they never succeeded in reversing the situation as a result of the steps that they took—there was diminishing enthusiasm.

I have, myself, been subjected to some evidence. A young man, a boy, who sits in a youth parliament locally—I live in rural Wiltshire—sought to enlist me in the cause of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, not directly but on the same principle. I was happy to enter into correspondence with him and to engage in argument and discussion, but I said to him that, before the conversation went any further, he had to explain why there seemed to be no shift at all in voting patterns between the ages of 18 and 35 and, if that was so, why I should support him on voting at 16. It is on those grounds that I am opposed to this amendment being carried at this stage.