Parliamentary Democracy and Standards in Public Life

Lord Beith Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend made a superb speech, which was not partisan and covered ground that is common to all parties.

I will pick up first on her point about law-making by statutory instrument—by powers given to Ministers—with only very limited parliamentary scrutiny. On the only occasion during my time here when this House used that power effectively, the Government went ballistic and wheeled in the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, to tell us that we should all be abolished or in some way have our powers reduced. A power which is never used is not a power. In this case, whenever these powers are introduced in Bills, they come with explanations that the matter has to be considered by, and requires a resolution of, both Houses of Parliament. If we never deny that resolution, we do not exercise the power. It is a great weakness in our system, which is more important now that the Commons devotes so little time to the proper study of legislation and sits for fewer hours than we do.

My other point is the system of appointment to this House. We have had 17 new Conservative Peers—the Liz Truss list, the Boris Johnson list and then all those who were brought into this House to serve as Ministers, perhaps for less than a year, and are Peers for life as a result. It is a completely distorted system and we need to change it to an orderly one. The Burns committee produced a system which could be used, in the absence of any more fundamental reform of the House of Lords, to give some coherence and fairness to that system of appointment. It was widely accepted right across the House, but the Government have not acted on it. Theresa May did when she was in office but subsequent Prime Ministers have not done so, and they ought to. The continuing absurdity of the nomination system brings the House into disrepute.

Across the free world of parliamentary democracies there is a very real threat. We are seeing it in France, Germany and the United States, where ex-President Trump says he wants to be a dictator for one day so that he can entirely reverse US policy on climate change. This is dangerous territory. We have got to make the parliamentary democracy system deliver and get it to the point where people find that it properly deals with their concerns. We should not treat attempts to achieve that as partisan; they are very necessary to our democracy.