House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Julian Lewis and John Hayes

Committee of the whole House
Tuesday 12th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Julian Lewis]

I am not aware that anything I have said this afternoon has been in favour of retaining the hereditaries. It has not. If the hon. Gentleman had listened to my earlier interventions, he would have known that is the case. That is why I said I am going somewhat wider than this Bill, which focuses solely on the hereditaries.

The suggestion that the upper House stands in low repute is ill-conceived, and I urge the hon. Gentleman and other new Members to take advantage of the seminars that Labour and Liberal Democrat Members and I try to organise to enable new Members from all parties to be brought into contact with leading Members of the upper House, to see what they do. That would be a good use of his and other Members’ time.

[Sir John Hayes]

My right hon. Friend is making an important point about the subtlety of the relationship between the two Houses. I spoke earlier about the relationship between the Government and the Opposition. In an unwritten constitution, political culture prevails, and that political culture is informed by that subtlety and by those relationships. My right hon. Friend described an occasion when legislation emanated from an origin in the other place, but very often legislation is improved and perfected through that connection. That should not be lost as we rush headlong into a piecemeal reform of the House of Lords.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

The elements that make up the House of Lords consist of different groups of people: some have got there by accident of birth and are now going to leave; some have got there as the result of political horse-trading of some sort, and perhaps should not have been put there in the first place; but a great many have got there, as I said earlier, by having reached the heights of their various professions and having proved themselves to be outstanding intellectuals who can bring a level of specialisation to the scrutiny of legislation. Even if we in this House were on exactly their same level of accumulated knowledge, we cannot bring that same level of scrutiny because of the demands we face on our time and in looking after our constituents, which inevitably works to the cost of the amount of attention we could give purely to focusing on improving legislation.

I wish to place on record that the reason why I became an ardent advocate of an unelected second Chamber—and why I would rather have no second Chamber at all than two elected Chambers—is precisely that it is impossible to whip such a Chamber to prevent people with good ideas from persuading peers of the virtue of those ideas. Members of an unelected second Chamber are able to have at least a sporting chance of amending legislation in good ways that would not get beyond first base in this House, because the elected Members, for the most part, almost all the time, obey the whipping.

Before I was an MP, when I was a political activist, I and my colleagues managed to get four pieces of legislation into law. Since I have been an MP, I have got only one, on the privacy of Members’ home addresses, on to the statute book, because, exceptionally, that was a free vote. How many free votes happen in this House? Hardly any. The equivalent of free votes in the upper House happen all the time.

We required postal ballots for trade union elections, which was incorporated into the Trade Union Act 1984 and the Employment Act 1988. We outlawed political indoctrination in schools, which was incorporated into the Education Act 1986 and carried forward in the Education Act 1996. We prohibited local councils from publishing material that

“promotes or opposes a point of view on a question of political controversy which is identifiable as the view of one political party and not of another”,

which was incorporated into section 27 of the Local Government Act 1988. Finally, we more strictly defined the concept of “due impartiality” in the coverage of politically contentious issues on television and radio, which was incorporated into the Broadcasting Act 1990.

Every one of those measures was got through the House of Lords first, and then either adopted in the House of Commons directly or brought forward by the Government in their alternative proposals. We do away with the expertise of the House of Lords at our peril. All we will be left with are machine politicians, whether they are in one elected House or two elected Houses, and that is to the detriment of our democracy, not to its enhancement.

Income Tax (Charge)

Debate between Julian Lewis and John Hayes

Monday 4th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

Aristotle said that the state exists to advance the wellbeing of its members; a state that fails to advance its people’s wellbeing is not merely a state that acts badly, but an institution that has failed to achieve its defining purpose. Such a positive vision of the state requires strong institutions that are able to act, with a Government accountable to the people but free to take actions driven by what Disraeli understood to be the social welfare of the people.

A Chancellor who hides behind the supposedly impartial pronouncements of the OBR is incapable of delivering real, meaningful change. Restoring accountability in practice requires two parallel processes: first, political control of decision making must be rebuilt; secondly and equally importantly, a greater sense that the public have a stake in society—and by implication the state that serves it—must be engendered.

Restoring political accountability means removing what the economist and writer Dan Davies has termed “accountability sinks”: the mechanisms that ensure that nobody is to blame when things go wrong. Accountability sinks are one of the greatest banes of modern life, from automated call centres to computers that say no to applications for loans or other financial services. They are a matter of design, not accident. In the private sector, they can shield organisations from legal liability, as happened in the Post Office scandal. A decision made by an individual is much more open to question than one that is the consequence of a general policy.

In the public sphere, accountability sinks often shield politicians and other public servants from genuine accountability for Government policy. Privatisation, contracting out and private finance initiatives have all been used as ways of shifting responsibility from Government to market forces. The establishment of an independent Bank of England with an arbitrary inflation target is a classic example of a generalised policy that has replaced specific individual decision making and responsibility. Similarly, the Office for Budget Responsibility was established explicitly to protect the Treasury from taking responsibility for Budget forecasting. As Davies notes, the role of the courts and international bodies is similar.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Is my right hon. Friend suggesting that we ought to replace those bodies and have the Government re-adopt responsibility for economic policy in the round, such as by setting targets for inflation, instead of saying, “It’s all down to an unelected body”?

[Sir John Hayes]

Absolutely. Restoring accountability means reversing many of the processes that have been taken as read in recent years. Democracy is dependent on clear lines of accountability, but in the past 40 years they have been either diluted or displaced. Is it any wonder that the public feel disillusioned with the exercise of power as a result?

The British economy has suffered more at the hands of neoliberal globalisation than those of most of our competitors. Foreign ownership of UK public firms has risen from just over 10% in 1990 to 55% in 2020. Ownership has become remote and unaccountable to workers, customers and even shareholders. Credit creation has facilitated the growth of private equity and leveraged buy-outs. Private equity firms have been able to take on vast amounts of debt in order to take over businesses.

Our economy is controlled by oligarchies careless of their customers and their employees. The result has been to make all other business objectives secondary to the imperative of having enough cash to survive. As Davies puts it, the debt burden “creates an ultimatum”: if companies do not put their efforts into making profits, they go bust. Our constituents can see the increasing power of unaccountable globalist enterprises and can see the Government’s inability to do anything about it, just as farmers can see that the Government’s policy on inheritance is completely belied by the fact that most asset-rich farms do not make a lot of money. It is not about assets; it is about income. Such disillusionment is socially corrosive, but it is justifiable when the most important economic decisions are taken by commercial entities with no regard for the needs and values of the people.

Turning the ship around requires radical concerted action, not just platitudes. We need a new economic model—one that harnesses the power of the state to break up the power of rentier capitalism and restore an economy that works for society, not against it. Fraternal economics is the means; popular wellbeing is the end.