House of Lords Reform Bill

Angus Brendan MacNeil Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

Yes, but what worries me is the prospect of ending up with a party list system which, as we know from the experience of the European Parliament, has no legitimacy with the electorate, is not regarded as a way of electing people to represent their interests, and has been entirely discredited, regardless of the view one takes of the European Union as a whole. For that system of all systems to be chosen for the purpose of deciding membership of the upper House is totally incomprehensible to me, never mind entirely regrettable.

I say specifically to the Deputy Prime Minister, because clearly it is his party that is behind the Bill, and perhaps the only party that would care much if the Bill never saw the light of day, that if he wants to eliminate the defect he rightly referred to of the continuing presence of hereditary peers in the House of Lords, that can be done very easily by means of a simple legislative measure. If the right hon. Gentleman wants to get rid of the extraordinary nonsense that we have almost 1,000 peers, that can be done by a compulsory retirement age. If he wants an opportunity to deal with the other anomalies in the House of Lords, he does not need to go down this road. The only argument for going down this road is if he believes in a democratic upper House which, by its very nature, will then share primacy with this House of Commons. Let him, if he wants that, admit that, rather than try to conceal that fact behind words that do not carry conviction.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

rose—

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

I take no pleasure in not being able to support the Government and the coalition, in which I am a very strong believer, but it would be unworthy of anyone to argue that a constitutional measure which will have a profound impact on the well-being of this country and of our political system should in any way be influenced by its impact, if it were to be defeated, on other legislative proposals.

I have not voted against my party on a three-line Whip for a very long time. I last did so in the 1970s. I do not know what effect it will have this time on my future ministerial career. All I can say is that the last time I did it, in the 1970s, two years later Margaret Thatcher appointed me to her Government. So my right hon. and hon. Friends should be of good heart and vote as they believe, and that means voting against the Bill and against the programme motion.

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[Alan Johnson]

It is a shame that that was said by a Government Member, but the hon. Gentleman makes a fundamental point about why Labour Members have sought reform—originally abolition, but then reform—of the other place. To me, I am afraid, it represents institutionalised snobbery.

I do not agree with Walter Bagehot’s comment that the cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it, but neither do I agree with the constant stream of self-regard that comes from those on the other side of Central Lobby about how it is the greatest, most expert revising chamber ever to be devised in the world. They have certainly been very expert at preserving the status quo. I am quite prepared to listen to and debate the very strong arguments for the status quo made by Members who, despite manifesto commitments, are perfectly entitled to come here and make that case. Incidentally, that is not the view of my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett), who believes in a unicameral system. However, the consensus that we have been inching towards says that the status quo is indefensible in a modern, 21st century democracy, and that view is reflected in the proposals in the Bill.

[Mr MacNeil]

Does the right hon. Gentleman ever feel that some of those voices arguing for the status quo are perhaps looking to their own jobs at some time in the future?

[Alan Johnson]

The hon. Gentleman tried to intervene on the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), and now he has got his intervention on the record.

The first question is, “Do we need to reform the House of Lords?”, and the answer is, “Of course we do.” The second question is, “Are these the right reforms?” I think that they broadly are. I say that not because they are Clegg’s reforms, but because they are Cook’s reforms. One of my great heroes is the late, great Robin Cook. There was no greater parliamentarian and no greater defender of this place. As Leader of the House, he sent us through the voting Lobbies seven times. We voted against every option, from a fully elected to a fully appointed House of Lords. The option that nearly got through—it failed by only three votes—was an 80-20 split. Incidentally, the other place voted almost unanimously for a wholly appointed second Chamber.

After that, Robin Cook worked with the current Foreign Secretary, the current Leader of the House, the current Lord Chancellor and another great Labour parliamentarian, Tony Wright, the former Member for Cannock Chase, to develop the argument with the “Breaking the Deadlock” proposals of 2005. Those proposals are very similar to this Bill, and to various other attempts, such as that of the Public Accounts Committee and the White Paper published by my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) in 2008. The Labour Cabinet agreed to that paper, which incidentally involved a 50-50 split between elected and appointed Members.

In the end, Labour proposed a 100% elected House in the 2010 manifesto. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) knows, because he was a member of the Cabinet at the time, we knew that we might have to concede an 80-20 split because anyone who is serious about pursuing House of Lords reform does not want to take on the disestablishment of the Church of England at the same time, because that is a recipe for permanent procrastination.

“Breaking the Deadlock” said that there should be single terms covering three election periods, as did the royal commission under Wakeham in the late ’90s and as have various other documents. It said that Members would be elected by proportional representation, as did our election manifesto in 2010. The reason for that is to keep the primacy of the Commons. When a large proportion of the second Chamber is elected, we need to ensure that they do not seek ministerial office, that they are not after a career and that they will not be difficult with elected local MPs and seek to replace them. That is why everybody who has looked at this matter in any depth has come to the conclusion that there should be long, single terms with no further right to stand again.

All of the current proposals are right. I should probably say that they are nearly right before I get into trouble with the Whips—there are obviously some improvements that can be made in Committee. However, to get a consensus and to take advantage of what is an unprecedented opportunity to do something about this issue, as the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross said, I believe that a referendum of the British people is needed. I ask those on the Treasury Bench to consider that. To have legitimacy, the proposals have to be approved by the public. We can then ensure that they are implemented in full.

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[Mrs Laing]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Joint Committee took evidence from the Australian Parliament, and Members ought to look at that evidence and pay heed to Australia before giving away our primacy.

The most worrying thing of all is that as the primacy of the House of Commons is challenged, the unique link of accountability between the elector and his or her representative in Parliament—their Member of this House —will be undermined, so Parliament’s very accountability will be undermined as well.

Quite apart from the fact that there is no reasonable question to which the right answer is 450 extra elected politicians, having a second House of Commons at the other end of the corridor will not increase the chances of holding the Government to account. It will do exactly the opposite. A clash between the two Houses and a squabble over when and whether the Parliament Acts could be used will lead to a challenge in the courts, and I for one do not want vital political issues to be decided not by Parliament but by the judiciary. Our electors expect us to take responsibility, and they expect the buck to stop with us, their MPs. We ought to fight to preserve that.

I turn to the matter of consultation. The subject of Lords reform may have been talked about for 100 years, but we are not considering it in a proper, wider context. Reform of one part of Parliament is reform of Parliament as a whole, but we have been able to consider only the narrow proposals that the Deputy Prime Minister has put forward. I sat on the Joint Committee for eight months, and we recommended a constitutional convention so that the subject could be properly examined in context. The Government have ignored that recommendation, and now we face the possibility that we might not even be able to examine the Bill fully here in the House of Commons because of a narrow programme motion. At the same time, the Government are afraid of a referendum. They are afraid to ask the people. No constitutional convention, no referendum, no proper scrutiny in the House of Commons—that is not democracy.

[Mr MacNeil]

May I do a cursory self-interest check? Will the hon. Lady rule herself out now of ever taking a seat in an unreformed second Chamber?

[Mrs Laing]

No, I will not rule that out—not that I ever expect to be offered a seat, and certainly not by my hon. Friends on the Front Bench. I am probably not the most popular Smartie in the tube today, but I do not care about that: I am here to do my duty for democracy.

The Bill ignores the will of the people. Only one year ago, we had an expensive nationwide referendum in which the people overwhelmingly rejected a proportional representation voting system. The Deputy Prime Minister now ignores the will of the people. PR for this House was rejected, so he says, “Let’s introduce it for the other place.” What contempt! What duplicity! Why does he do it? The answer to that non-rhetorical question is that a proportional election system will give the Liberal Democrats a permanent hold on the balance of power in the second Chamber. That is not democracy; it is blatant party political advantage. It is short term and small-minded, and I certainly cannot vote for it.

There is very much more to say on this subject, and I hope the House votes to give all the time necessary for proper scrutiny of such fundamental parliamentary reform.

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[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman), who, if the proposals are passed, would end up being represented by the same regional list of senators as myself in Dudley—although how anyone could represent effectively both a rural community such as Hereford and a former industrial centre such as the black country is something we might ponder during the course of this debate.

I have always believed that the House of Lords should be reformed. It is clearly too big; it is indefensible that hereditary peers remain; and it is completely wrong that Members can fail to turn up for years and retain their membership, when they would be booted off a local authority if they failed to attend for six months. That said, however, there are major problems with the Government’s proposals.

First, the lesson of Scottish and Welsh devolution is that constitutional reform cannot be undertaken piecemeal. Those changes, which I supported, resulted in imbalances between Scotland and Wales and England and its regions, which have still not been resolved. The lesson is that a comprehensive and coherent view is needed of the relationship between the individual and the state, and of what powers should be exercised at national, regional and community level, before constitutional reform is undertaken.

[Mr MacNeil]

Are not the hysterics we are hearing in the House today reminiscent of the hysterics heard in 1979 about a Scottish Assembly, and in 1997 about a Scottish Parliament? There are hysterics only within these four walls, but when these things actually happen, the sky does not fall in.

[Ian Austin]

As I said, I supported the proposals for devolution, but I think the previous Government made a mistake in not undertaking them as part of a far-reaching, comprehensive and coherent view about the arrangements for governing Britain as a whole. Reform of the House of Lords needs to be properly thought through as part of a wider package of constitutional reforms to deal with the regional and national imbalances that are the result of stalled devolution.

For example, a renewed approach to regional government is needed. It is ironic that the Bill proposes that Members be elected from the English regions, which the Government have been doing all they can to abolish in all other respects. They claimed that the regions did not exist when they abolished the regional development agencies, regional spatial planning and all the rest. We have regional government in this country in the NHS, the police, planning, transport policy, housing and regeneration, but they are run by faceless civil servants in England, and by politicians in London, Scotland and Wales. I would prefer to have proper regional government and proper regional accountability for those powers and then to establish a revising second Chamber drawn from the regional assemblies.

The Government are proposing far-reaching reforms, which have huge implications for the way the country is run, and are doing so without a referendum. We had to have referendums for voting systems, for Scottish and Welsh devolution, for a regional assembly in the north-east and for directly elected mayors in some quite small cities, but the people of Britain will have no say in huge changes to their Parliament.

The central question is whether the House of Lords should be elected. I do not think it is possible to defend, as a point of principle, appointments and patronage. I am a democrat and I am in favour of devolving power to the people. That is one of the reasons I became interested in politics and got involved: I wanted to ensure that ordinary people have as much power as possible over the way the decisions that affect them in their daily lives are taken. Clearly, the current system is one of appointment, not election, but what we have to decide is whether the changes that the Government propose are appropriate and will do the job.

First, whatever the Government say, having an elected House of Lords will inevitably change the relationship between the two Houses. That is bound to happen. The Bill promises that this House will retain primacy, but simply asserting that and ensuring that it happens in practice are very different. It is not credible to say that nothing will change, when it is inevitable that people who have been elected will claim a democratic mandate and assert their authority. Secondly, there is no question but that elected Members of the second House will claim democratic legitimacy in our constituencies. That is bound to happen. In this debate and during the detailed scrutiny of the Bill that follows it, I want to see how the Government and this House will deal with those huge questions.

There are other issues we have to deal with. It is pretty clear that 400 new senators will bring huge additional costs. They will immediately demand the same level of resources, staff and offices and all the rest as we have, even though they will have no real constituency. Of those 400, the west midlands will have about 35 representatives elected from a regional list. Voters will have very little idea who they are voting for. I spent the weekend asking people in Dudley if they could name their MEPs. Michael Cashman and the other six west midlands MEPs do a good job, but the current system ensures that almost no one knows who their MEPs are. I take more than a passing interest in politics and I struggle to name all seven of them off the top of my head.

What I do know is that the introduction of a regional list system for those elections has resulted, to our great shame, in Britain being represented in the European Parliament, for the first time, by people standing for a racist and fascist party. It is pretty clear to me that if we go ahead with a similar system for a second Chamber, all sorts of cranks and extremists will get elected.

The idea of people being elected for a 15-year non-renewable term is appalling. One of the reasons that politicians work hard, particularly in marginal constituencies, is that we have to answer for our views and actions at the ballot box. The proposed system, which prevents people from being held to account for their actions by seeking re-election, appears to be based on the most appalling elitist view that listening to the public and taking their views into account is a bad thing.

Although I am in favour of democracy and elections, I shall be following this debate and the subsequent scrutiny of the Bill and amendments with great interest, to see whether the concerns I have expressed today can be dealt with.

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[Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)]

The House of Lords has more than 800 Members, and that is far too many; it has Members who are there simply because of who their fathers were; and in this Parliament it has had so many Liberal Democrats from Wales appointed to it that it sometimes seems there is none left to populate the Assembly. The House of Lords therefore needs reform, and for that reason I will vote to support the Bill’s Second Reading tomorrow. If there is no reform with this Bill, there will be no reform in this Parliament.

I will vote against the Government’s programme motion, however, because the time that it allocates is wholly inadequate. This Bill is so important to all aspects of our parliamentary system that it must be considered in its entirety, and all Members who have views that they want to express should be permitted to do so.

I specifically asked the Whips to maintain strong opposition to any programme motion for this Bill primarily because of the Government’s appalling behaviour in respect of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011. By their deeds shall ye know them. I spent a great deal of time in this Chamber waiting to speak on the aspects of that legislation which affected our constitution, and on the relationship between Wales and the United Kingdom, but, in the words of the great Diana Ross, “I’m still waiting”, and I have no doubt that if this programme motion is passed I will have no opportunity to make my views known on the profound inadequacies of this Bill.

My fundamental view is that it makes no sense to undertake such a profound review of the second Chamber without taking into account the massive constitutional change of devolution. It is high time that we approached constitutional reform in a holistic way. Every change to a part of our constitution affects the whole, and we currently have more inquiries and commissions on different aspects of our constitution than I can ever recall. We should scrap the lot and undertake a single constitutional review, looking at the procedures of the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the devolved authorities, with the aim of arriving at a single, settled constitution.

If there is one lesson to be learned from devolution, it is that it opens a Pandora’s box of proposals to change the powers of the body it has created: the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, the Northern Ireland Assembly and the London Assembly all pressed to change their powers immediately upon being provided with them. I have no doubt that any change to the second Chamber will lead to exactly the same process, unless it is accompanied by a constitution defining its powers. That is a massive flaw in the Bill.

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman says that the Scottish Parliament looked for a change of powers immediately upon its creation, but that is not true. In its first eight years it was run by an unambitious Labour-Liberal Democrat Government and did not look for any change to its powers. It is only now, with an ambitious Scottish National party Government looking for further powers, that that is happening.

[Ian Lucas]

That statement is simply untrue. There was further devolution to the Scottish Parliament and to the National Assembly for Wales, and it happened throughout the course of devolution’s development in the United Kingdom.

There are further flaws in the Bill which we need to discuss. Creating separate types of Member of the second Chamber is wrong: having elected Members, appointed Members and bishops will create confusion and undermine the democratic principle. Having bishops as Members is wrong, too. Giving precedence to Church of England clerics is an extraordinary thing to do, and it is even more inexplicable on this very day, when the Church of England has decided not to appoint women bishops. Is not having such a clause in the Bill a breach of the European convention on human rights? Will the Minister give a specific response on that point?

As my hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Tom Greatrex) said, little consideration has been given to the proportion of elected Members allocated to each part of the United Kingdom. It appears to have been done on a purely mathematical basis that takes no account of the different nations within the UK. That point was well made by Dr Paul Behrens of the university of Leicester, who refers to the very different approaches taken in the United States and German constitutions.

The use of the 15-year term that many Members have mentioned is appalling, and I am amazed that it has survived from the draft Bill. I have not spoken to anyone who supports it, and I was astonished to hear one or two Members do so even though they are in a tiny minority. It is a recipe for the creation of isolated, narcissistic Members of a second Chamber who will have no connection whatever to the real world.

Those are just a few of my concerns on the specifics of the Bill; I have many more and I am sure that more will occur to me as we discuss the matter. I have no doubt that further issues will arise when the Bill is considered in detail, because it is a bad, bad Bill—badly drafted, badly drawn and based on a compromise that is not working. My concern is that proper consideration will not take place because of the inadequacy of the time that is allocated. The result will be a very bad Bill going to the Lords, where it will no doubt be scrutinised at greater length, and the reputation of the House of Commons will be diminished still further.

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[Dan Byles (North Warwickshire) (Con)]

It is an honour and a privilege to speak in a debate of such fundamental importance. We have heard some truly fascinating speeches from Members on both sides of the House. I personally take the view that the weight of argument is firmly on the side of those who do not support the Bill, but we have heard some interesting speeches across the board. It is a particular honour to sit next to my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray), who made what must have been a particularly difficult speech.

The economy is struggling, the eurozone is tanking, the banks are in crisis, and Syria is burning. Our constituents must be blinking in bewilderment at the time, effort and political energy being expended—

[Mr MacNeil]

Has the hon. Gentleman made many speeches in this House on those subjects, or is he just here to talk about House of Lords reform?

[Dan Byles]

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I am here today to speak about this extremely important issue, but I speak regularly in this Chamber about key events and intervene in others. I am not one of those Members who chalks up short speeches on TheyWorkForYou and then judges themselves by the number of speeches they have made rather than their quality.

As I said, our constituents are blinking in bewilderment at the amount of time we are spending discussing this issue, but discuss it we must—[Interruption.]