House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Lord Colgrain Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 7th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trefgarne]

I can help the noble Lord by telling the House about my ancestor. I am the second Lord Trefgarne and my father was the first. He was a Liberal and then later a Labour MP.

[Lord Colgrain (Con)]

My Lords, I would point out that I am the fourth who has been fortunate enough to be a representative in your Lordships’ House. I am also the most recent hereditary Peer to have been elected by the whole House: 803 of your Lordships were in a position to elect me, which makes me feel that my position is slightly more democratically representative than that of a large number of others.

I was hoping to say quite a lot of things today but I do not want to be accused of filibustering. Therefore, I will foreshorten my speech and just say three things that people have referred to me when it comes to what they find attractive about hereditaries.

The first is that we do not come from the other place with trappings of party tribalism and a sense of our own personal political importance. Secondly, in the main, we do not have experience of working for the public sector, so we have a more finely tuned sense of the anxieties and insecurities of the private sector and the self-employed. Lastly, we are not beneficiaries of political patronage, which has resulted in over 300 of your Lordships being ex-MPs, MEPs or representatives of regional Assemblies and county councils. That counts for a great deal in the eyes of the public and is not something that should be discounted.

If the hereditary principle is seen as anomalous in a present-day democracy, it is probably no more so in the eyes of many, and no more idiosyncratic, than the fact that this country has been ruled for centuries without a written constitution, and for many, tradition begets legitimacy. The time for any review of the election of hereditary Peers should therefore not be piecemeal, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, proposes, but should be an integral part of the review by the noble Lord, Lord Burns. We should await the finalising of his report. If in the meanwhile there was a desire to change the current voting powers so that rather than being party specific, any hereditary should be elected by the whole House, that recommendation would have my unqualified support.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Lord Colgrain Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 15th March 2019 Lords Chamber

Michael Foot was a great man, and he got it absolutely right: if you start appointing hereditary Peers by any method other than by their electing them, you will get in the same sort of mess as we are in because of the 1999 Act.

[Lord Colgrain (Con)]

My Lords, I support this amendment and Amendment 23, having said before in your Lordships’ House that I endorse the whole House voting on hereditaries while the Burns report is being implemented and comprehensive reform is being put in place.

I am disappointed to see that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, is not in her place. I much enjoyed her comment about looking down the rabbit hole as wee Alice. My election by the whole House as a hereditary Peer was greeted by a broadsheet with reference to a Blackadder election. The producer of Blackadder is responsible for another programme—“The Museum of Curiosity”—the title of which I was hoping another broadsheet would have entertained us with, with reference to hereditaries.

It may interest your Lordships to know that yesterday I was on the roof outside the stained glass windows up there, looking at the work that had been done on the stained glass and all the leading, and as I looked in, I felt there was a certain parallel. I looked into the Chamber and could see absolutely nothing at all; we look out from this Chamber and can see daylight and lovely colour, and think that the work we do here is fully understood by the public at large. In fact, they are on the outside, looking in, and can see very little. They do not understand what it is we do, and in particular what hereditaries do.

Hereditaries are not apparatchiks of any particular political hue, whether Fabian Society or Bow Group. We are what the poet Matthew Arnold praised as being “formed men, not crammed men”, formed by the independence of our own thoughts and experience, random, without any party tribalism or essence of our own political importance. When I look at fellow hereditaries across all the Benches, I see Olympic gold medallists, journalists, film and documentary makers, doctors, dentists, the self-employed, owners and managers of SMEs, pilots, specialists in insurance, banking, shipping and property, linguists of all descriptions, married to different nationalities—

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

Is the noble Lord’s logic not that all hereditaries should be Cross-Benchers?

[Lord Colgrain]

If the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is successful in his Bill and the hereditary election process is terminated, so is this independence of thought, action and experience, to be replaced by an even greater proportion of life Peers who are ex-MPs, ex-MEPs and representatives of regional assemblies and county councils. The general public have had their fill of the body politic from the other House at the moment—some would say where lunatics are running the asylum—and would relish the chance to have a more catholic representation in your Lordships’ House.

Brexit has not endeared politics to Everyman. We should be mindful of the consequence of decreasing the number of unorthodox Peers who have a less political careerist disposition, and recall the adage, “Be careful what you wish for”.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, this is not a sensible amendment. We have one absurd system for electing hereditary Peers at the moment, which it is proposed be replaced by another. While I could not begin to justify the system of elections that takes place at the moment, I could no more justify the establishment of a commission to do it. The only justification for the status quo is that it is the status quo, and it is best to leave that until we do a radical reform of the House of Lords, which should of course end the election of hereditary Peers entirely.

There are a whole lot of problems in Amendment 32 and the construction of the commission which one could go into, but I am not sure that it is necessary. Rather, I make the point that the best thing to do—this is my fundamental objection to the Bill of my noble friend Lord Grocott—is nothing in respect of the existing House of Lords until there is a sufficient consensus or a Government who are capable of leading towards a radical reform of the Lords, which should fundamentally replace this House with an elected or federal second Chamber. To tinker with the precise way that hereditary Members of this House are appointed, whether it is by some absurd system of election, to be replaced by some equally absurd commission, seems entirely beside the point, playing the game of my noble friend Lord Grocott, which is to make tinkering changes to essentially preserve the status quo. I am not in favour of preserving the status quo—I want radical reform. The Brexit crisis we are going through at the moment and the huge public discontent in the country mean that we can no longer duck this issue of a fundamental reform of this House, and we should put paid to all these tinkering changes.