King’s Speech

Lord Tyrie Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyrie (Non-Afl)]

I begin by congratulating the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer, on a speech full of wisdom and the noble Lord, Lord Booth, on a remarkable and thoughtful maiden speech. I say that as also the son of a shopkeeper and having fought Houghton-le-Spring, unsuccessfully, in the 1992 general election, and I know where he grew up quite well.

I put in to speak today because I was struck by something that the Leader of the House said last Wednesday. As she put it, we need to

“re-establish the confidence in our democratic and political system”.—[Official Report, 17/7/24; col. 24.]

I strongly agree. Parliament has a major role to play in reversing the collapse of trust, the corrosion of truth in political discourse, and the perception that the national interest has been subordinated at times to the personal interests of our leaders. I am thinking of the Cameron-Johnson rivalry and what appeared at times to be Bullingdon Club government. All that was wholly unacceptable. Rishi Sunak started a repair job, but there is a lot more for this Government to do.

We have another major constitutional challenge to address. I am not an electoral reformer, but I note the concern that has been expressed that our democracy is put at risk by Labour’s majority of 172 on a vote share of 34%. This House can play a major role in bolstering the trust of the electorate on both these concerns but, to do that, we need to be capable of playing a full role as a second Chamber of Parliament. That means having the courage to deploy the tools available to us under the Parliament Acts.

A good deal of valuable work is done by this House, but the truth is that we are now moving perilously close to the point where we have only the trappings of bicameralism and the reality of almost none. We are little more than an advisory body, a Conseil d’Etat, too often and too easily ignored. The incoming Government are not intending to do much about this either.

I agreed with what both the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, and the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, had to say about the current proposals. The removal of the hereditary peerage is of course long overdue, but the introduction of a retirement age is an unnecessary and probably unjustifiable distraction. The truth is that the current Chamber, which bolsters prime ministerial patronage, suits the Executive.

If we are to address the trust deficit, this House now needs much more moral authority to speak for those for whom we legislate. In the 21st century, in my view, only the ballot box can provide that. I know that is not a popular view here. I note none the less that all three major parties came to the same conclusion as I have just come to in 2010 but have done very little about it since then. That is why I strongly disagreed with the invocation from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, of the doctrine of unripe time earlier, when he argued against more fundamental Lords reform than the Government are currently proposing.

I do not think we are going to get much progress on electoral reform from this Government, but there is something more modest that we could do now: when this House speaks truth to power, it can at least do much more to ensure that it has an audience. Our current committee system is relatively weak, and the other place has stolen a march with some thoroughgoing reforms of its committees. For example, we can and should find better ways of taking advantage of the accumulated wisdom and public service experience available here to boost our committees. We need elected committee chairmen and on longer terms. We need to devise penalties for failure to supply papers to committees or to appear before them. We need to target the issues that the electorate most want us to examine.

If we do those things in the Committee Corridor, at least we can avoid becoming Mr Starmer’s poodle, just as after 1997 the Commons narrowly avoided becoming Mr Blair’s by succeeding with some reforms of the committee system. If more of us could at least signal support for election to this House in principle, that in itself might improve the terms of trade with the other place a little.