Queen’s Speech

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow my noble friend Lord Roberts of Conwy. We entered another place on the same day in June 1970 and have been friends ever since. I am also delighted to have been able to listen to the novel but extremely important speech of the noble Lord, Lord Owen, who, unlike most of us, did not talk about reform of your Lordships’ House but with expert knowledge drew our attention to issues on which it is surely important that the Government should focus. I could not help but think during his speech that there is probably no other forum in this country—certainly not at the other end of the Corridor—where a speech based on such knowledge and expertise could have been delivered. The noble Lord will forgive me if I do not follow him; I am not equipped to do so. I want to talk on the subject on which we have focused our attention today.

There was a very interesting moment when the Deputy Prime Minister and Mr Mark Harper went to give evidence to the Joint Committee. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, is not in his place, because I wanted to pay him a tribute—or at least to quote him. In the inimitable way in which we all know that the noble Lord speaks, he looked at the Deputy Prime Minister and, very respectfully, said: “Mr Clegg, are you a House of Commons man or are you a man from the House of Commons?”. There was a look of blank incredulity on the Deputy Prime Minister's face. He really had not a clue what the noble Lord was talking about. Therein lies so much.

I like to think that I was a House of Commons man. I sat there for almost exactly 40 years, and I shall always look back on those years with great affection and a feeling of real gratitude. As Horace Walpole once said, there is no greater honour that any British—he actually said English—man could enjoy than being elected to represent a constituency in the House of Commons. A century or more later, Anthony Trollope said something very similar.

I still believe that. It is not that I do not enjoy this place; I do. I feel proud and honoured to be here. I believe that this place has a collegiate atmosphere that the other place does not and, indeed, never could have. It brings together a group of men and women of real, varied experience and expertise such as you would find in no other parliamentary assembly in the world. However, I still look down the Corridor to the place where there is an unambiguous democratic mandate. That is the great thing about our system: we all know where the buck stops.

Not everything is perfect in the House of Commons. My noble friend the Leader of the House, in a remarkable and frank interview that he gave to the FT earlier this week, talked about the elected second Chamber inevitably becoming far more assertive, and that is right. I would like to see the House of Commons become far more assertive, because it has become far too much the creature of the Executive. That is partly the fault of having had in recent years Governments with enormous majorities. If any man ever said a true thing, it was the late Francis Pym—Lord Pym—when he said in 1983 that he did not want the Government to have too big a majority. He was sacked for his pains, of course.

The trouble when you have a big majority, be it Mrs Thatcher’s majority of 1983 or Mr Blair’s of 1997 or 2001, is that it is very easy for Parliament to be the creature of the Executive. That is added to by the fact that the Executive are drawn from the legislature, and therefore there are always a fair number of very ambitious young men and women who are a little reluctant to cross swords with the powers that be. That is part of our system, and we all accept that, but I would like to see the Commons become more assertive. Through its new Backbench Business Committee, which seems to have got off to a very good start—I am delighted about that—I would like it to tackle the Government head-on on the subject of the timetabling of Bills, because the programming of Bills is inimical to true parliamentary democracy.

We do not have that here, and it is one of the greatest attributes of this place. We cannot, of course, veto ultimately but merely hold up. We can delay, at the most, for a year but we can and do say, “Think again”. When your Lordships in this House look upon Bills—we have seen this happen recently, because not all legislation presented to us by the coalition Government has been impeccable in its drafting or in anything else—we have seen what was the Health and Social Care Bill improved beyond measure. We have seen the Welfare Reform Bill and the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill improved in this place, while at the same time Members in this place have recognised that they cannot stop the will of the elected House. I believe that we do not sufficiently accept, or many of us do not, how crucial to our unwritten constitution and our democracy that is.

I was talking recently to the ambassador of a major European country. He said to me, “We do not have a House of Lords and we would not invent one, but you have this assembly of extraordinarily varied and talented people, drawn from all walks of life and all backgrounds. Why are you thinking of getting rid of it”? It is not hampering democracy but buttressing democracy. It is adding to our system, not detracting from it, and we all ought to recognise that.

If it ever came to a referendum, I have absolute confidence that if these things were truly explained from public platforms around the country—colleagues have referred today to people perhaps not fully understanding how this place works—and the alternative of, as my noble friend Lady Shephard of Northwold said, 450 paid politicians were offered in exchange, I think that we would have a result similar to the one in the north-east when the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, then Mr Prescott, was confident that there would be an elected assembly, people were given the chance and they said no. Last week we saw something of the same in the series of referendums on mayoral office in many of our great cities. In the second city of our land, Birmingham, candidates were already lining up but the people said, “Hold on a minute—we don’t want that”. I think that they would say much the same in a referendum on the future of this place, but I hope that it does not come to that.

We will have before us a Bill to do with composition. Earlier today I sat in, as I am sure some of your Lordships did, on the Statement on the aircraft carriers. The Minister presented it very effectively and was congratulated in all parts of the House—some of the congratulations were slightly barbed but that is only to be expected—but he made the point that the Government recognised that a change of course and of policy was necessary. I hope that when they have listened to this debate and they come to draw up the Bill, they will realise that a change of policy is necessary here too.

The Government should focus on the word “composition”. What does it mean? It refers to those who are here and perhaps to how they get here. We know that there are issues on which there is a degree of true consensus—and how that word has been distorted—right across the Benches in this Chamber. We all recognise that we have to look at such things as size, retirement and expulsion—a range of things that the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, in one of his speeches on his Bill, referred to as “housekeeping issues”. That is partly the case, but they are more than that. There are things that could make this Chamber so much more effective than it is already.

This morning I was talking to a Minister who said to me, “I hope you will make the point about the committees on Europe”. I promised that I would, so I will do so. In the House of Commons there is one committee dealing with European matters, chaired by the redoubtable Mr William Cash, whose views on Europe are of course entirely neutral, who has no fixed aim or agenda himself, and who chairs that committee with a draconian aplomb of which only Mr William Cash is capable. What do we have in this House? We were reminded yesterday, when the noble Lord, Lord Roper, stepped down from the European Union Committee and my noble friend Lord Boswell of Aynho was appointed to take over. There are eight sub-committees dealing with a range of issues, so effectively that there is no other country in the EU that produces reports of rival quality. That seems to be acknowledged whenever one talks to politicians and commentators in this country and beyond. Does that not add value to our system? Would it be possible to find the people for eight committees at the other end of the Corridor, taking into account their myriad responsibilities in their constituencies? Do not let us forget that because we do not have constituency responsibilities, we can bring to our work a degree of objectivity. We also do not have to face elections, and that brings objectivity too. We can bring that to our work, as well as more time to study and to take part in deliberations.

Last week I talked about form and function. If we are to look at the future of our parliamentary system, it is terribly important that we look at the function as well as the form—who can do what best? Although this place is not perfect, and no human institution ever was or will be, I believe that we have here an assembly of real worth and real renown, and I believe it would be a constitutional tragedy to get rid of it. The Business Secretary, Mr Cable, said we should do it quietly and quickly—my noble friend is nodding at me from the Front Bench, and I shall sit down in just a moment—like burying Sir John Moore at Corunna:

“We buried him darkly at dead of night”.

They are not going to do that here. We have got to be prepared to put up a real fight if it is necessary, but I beg of my noble friend on the Front Bench that it will not be necessary so that we can reform this institution constructively and properly without creating unnecessary competition with the other end of the Corridor, creating a House that is not complementary but in conflict, because that is what we would do, and in the process exposing something else. Yesterday in this Chamber Her Majesty read the Speech from the Throne. That is what this debate is all about. Do we really want to suggest by implication that one has to be elected in order to be legitimate? I think not.