House of Lords: Abolition

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Monday 18th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

What a great pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), who did great credit to both the petition and the Petitions Committee in leading this debate. He managed to present the arguments, and as well as giving some of his personal views, which he is entitled to do, in a fair and balanced way, he talked about the advantages of Lords reform and of a Lords with external expertise and experience. He used a phrase that particularly struck me—“the House of Lords does things that the House of Commons does less of”—suggesting that there is a complementary function.

The hon. Gentleman also outlined different options for reform, which I found interesting. There can be an academic as well as a political debate about how we proceed. Do we have an elected, an appointed or a hybrid Chamber? He suggested that one of the blocks to reform is lack of consensus on what to replace the House of Lords with, and I suggest that we have seen that in today’s debate. There is no real consensus on how we proceed, which is one of the reasons why we are not proceeding at all.

Is there not a real danger that the legitimacy of the Lords will continue to decline? My concern is that if it does, it will drag down the whole of Parliament and therefore this House as well. I was particularly interested in the responses the hon. Gentleman spoke about, from students at the University of Strathclyde and—was it Stelling grammar school?

[Paul Scully]

Steyning.

[Christian Matheson]

Steyning Grammar School. They talked about the lack of diversity in the Lords and a view that it was simply a job for life for politicians. Again, there is a danger, based on the position the hon. Gentleman outlined, that the nation is changing faster than we in Parliament are, and that we are not keeping up with changing attitudes in the nation. That is further evidence that the House of Lords is becoming further and further out of touch with the attitudes of the younger generation, which it does not reflect.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) talked of a “closed political world” from a different century, and there is a very real danger that that is the case. He also quoted “Blackadder the Third” and the Dunny-on-the-Wold by-election, which brought a smile to my face; but again there is a danger that life imitates art and that the relevance and credibility of the whole of Parliament, not just their lordships’ House, is damaged. We are told that one in five Members of the Lords does not vote. My hon. Friend, who is also my constituency next-door neighbour, said that we should not assume, simply because someone is appointed, that gives them expertise. He is absolutely right about that.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon in the Chair]

The hon. Member for Monmouth (David T. C. Davies) gave us an excellent and intriguing history lesson, particularly on the changing nature of the Conservative party over the years. Sadly, he did not bring us bang up to date on where he feels the Conservative party is at the moment. He made a great point about seizing the moment and shaping the change that he wants to see. I hope he will forgive me if I do him a disservice, but he did not actually talk about the type of change that he would like, although in his typical fashion he was very forthright in his views.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Drew) gave a considered speech about what we want the Lords to do and offered a considered view of where we in this House might be going astray, which threw an additional element into the debate. The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) began by warning of the dangers of sounding like a lawyer. The ears of my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston pricked up, because he is a lawyer. However, the hon. Member for Henley did not sound like one when adding a different element to the debate on the question of how we should organise constitutional change and manage referendums.

The hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) said he was amused by the hon. Member for Monmouth and talked about the importance of the primacy of the Commons. Again, that is an additional complication, but it is a relevant consideration when discussing reform. It is probably one reason why reform has not happened so far, because we cannot decide how it should affect our own House, let alone how it should affect the other House. I will come on to Brexit—the hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire discussed our having to wait and see how the Lords behaves over the ping-pong process this week and whether it will accept the decisions of the Commons.

However, it is clear that there is a crisis of legitimacy concerning the House of Lords and how it is composed. Even if we do not feel that so acutely here, there are members of the public—169,000 of them and counting—for whom the House of Lords no longer represents a legitimate part of the legislature. The question is how we go forward.

I express some concern about the nature of the debate. It is timely, and it has come about, I believe, because an awful lot of people out there believe—potentially incorrectly; it goes back to the point by the hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire about our seeing in due course—that their lordships intend somehow to block Brexit, or at least the quickest and hardest Brexit possible.

Even today, in its current composition, the Lords has a constitutional role as a revising Chamber and to offer a pause to consider bad legislation. I find it ironic that some hon. Members—none of whom are here, I hasten to add—are happy to block private Members’ Bills in this place, such as those concerning free hospital car parking for carers or the long-term sick or, dare I say it, an urgently needed law to ban the revolting practice of upskirting, using the lame excuse that they do not like legislation that has not been debated and thought through, and they use parliamentary mechanisms to stop any debate at all on such measures.

However, when the House of Lords debates thoroughly a matter dear to those hon. Members’ hearts and asks us to pause to give time for more consideration, those hon. Members are all of a sudden up in arms at there having been too much debate and call for the abolition of the Lords. They cannot have it both ways. Debate is good and reflection on legislation is good, but when it comes to debate on Brexit, those hon. Members believe such debate blocks the so-called will of the people. I remind the House that Brexit is not necessarily the will of the people but the will of a slim majority of voters. I am concerned that, rather than wanting a detailed discussion about the type of democracy and the type of legislature that we want, many of the petition’s signatories—I cannot presume to know why all of them have chosen to sign it—signed it simply through frustration over Brexit.

Attacking the Lords is part of a broader strategy that we have seen in some of our newspapers of attacking and undermining any institution that they believe might be getting in their way. Before calling the snap 2017 general election, the Prime Minister attacked the other place, describing peers as “opponents” of the Government who had

“vowed to fight us every step of the way.”

We have seen hon. Members in this House attack the integrity and impartiality of the civil service, we have seen the senior judiciary being attacked and Conservative Members have been attacked in certain newspapers as traitors for standing up and voting according to their convictions.

Moving away slightly from the subject of the debate, if we really want a fairer, more open and democratic political discourse, we might start with challenging the unelected, unaccountable and uncontrolled power of those national newspapers and their billionaire owners, whose opinions taint our politics so much, long before we deal with the House of Lords. However, that is another debate for another day.

I welcome the notable conversion of Government Members to looking at the need to address the undemocratic nature of the House of Lords. For hundreds of years, the Conservative party had an in-built majority in the Lords—the hon. Member for Monmouth talked about its changing composition—but I do not recall hearing any complaints from Conservative Members during that time. However, with the abolition of most of the hereditary peers, which is an anachronism that I still find very hard to explain to foreign visitors, that in-built majority ceased to exist.

My noble Friend Baroness Smith recently reminded the other place:

“Challenge and scrutiny are not new. They were not invented by this Opposition.”

She meant the Labour Opposition. When the Labour party was in government, the then Conservative Opposition

“could boast well over 500 government defeats, including 145 during the 2005-10 Labour Government and 245 during the 2001-05 Labour Government, which had an elected majority of 167”

in this House. She continued:

“Those many defeats included a government Bill at Second Reading, two fatal SIs and a number of key national security measures that involved ping-pong late into the night.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 13 January 2016; Vol. 768, c. 278-279.]

It is only since 2010 that Conservative Members have shown any concern about the composition of the Lords, but their response has been to pack it with more life peers than any preceding Government. David Cameron appointed more peers per year, and at a faster rate, than any other Prime Minister since 1958, when life peerages were introduced, with more from the Government party and fewer from Opposition parties. Indeed, on the weekend of the royal wedding, the Prime Minister sneaked out an announcement appointing nine Tory peers, following her predecessor’s legacy by appointing only three Labour peers. All of that is at the same time, as the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) mentioned, as the Government intend to press ahead with plans to cut the number of elected Members by 50. It seems incongruous that we are not considering Lords reform but we are considering cutting the size of the elected Chamber.

Let me be clear: Labour believes that the second Chamber should be democratically elected. However, the first step must be to reduce the number of peers, with a good start being to remove the remaining hereditary peers—particularly along the lines suggested in the private Member’s Bill tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (David Hanson), which remains on the Order Paper. Indeed, my right hon. Friend reminds me that all but one of the hereditary peers currently sitting in the House of Lords are male; only one is female. If we are to tackle diversity, that should be a basic starting point.

There can surely be no continued justification for having hereditary Members of our legislature. The Opposition have proposed a constitutional convention to decide the best way forward for the second Chamber. We support the Burns proposals, which seem entirely sensible, as a start. Above all, we want a solution that is workable, democratic and fair, and which is generally thought through, rather than what I fear is a knee-jerk reaction to the Lords doing its constitutional role of offering our House the chance to think again, particularly on the Brexit issue before us at the moment. If we care about good legislation, we should be grateful for the chance to think again and should not be intimidated by national newspaper owners. However, we have to ask whether an appointed Chamber—let us not even mention a semi-hereditary Chamber—is suitable to be part of a democratic Parliament in the 21st century.

This subject is not going away. I commend to this House the idea of a constitutional convention so that we can get over the disagreements that are blocking the way forward and finally decide how to reform the House of Lords. I urge hon. Members to get behind the idea and get on with the discussion, so that we can get on with the reform.