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

Lord Cormack Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 8th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, introduced the Bill with his customary wit and made an extremely good case. It is one with which I find myself in substantial agreement. He was slightly unfair on himself, though, because he did not stress two things that he stressed last year when he introduced a similar Bill. First, he talked about 90; his Bill in no way touches upon the two hereditary offices of state, the Lord Great Chamberlain or the Earl Marshal. He has deliberately excluded them for constitutional reasons, and I think that is very sensible. Secondly, he did not spell out as clearly as he did last year that no single hereditary Peer sitting in your Lordships’ House at the moment is threatened by the Bill. This is not an expulsion Bill; it is merely a Bill that says in future we should not have these by-elections. I believe the case he has made, and which has just been echoed persuasively by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is one that should carry your Lordships’ House.

I believe it is a great pity if two or three, in a House that has a number of 803, seek to block what quite evidently is, or was last year, the will of the majority. I echo those calls that have been made to my noble friends Lord Trefgarne and Lord Caithness: please do not filibuster, particularly at a time when this House has potentially the most important task that it has had for over a century. We are going to have legislation brought before us on which the individual and collective wisdom of this House could have real influence without in any way challenging the acknowledged supremacy of the other place, so do not let us be involved in protracted navel-gazing. If there is a broad consensus for the Bill, let it go through.

I address my next remarks to my noble friend on the Government Front Bench. He may well say at the end of the Bill that the Government have no intention of giving it time. Indeed I suspect that is what he will say, although he will say it extremely elegantly. If the Government will not allow the Bill to pass then it will not pass; the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, knows that as well as we all do. However, there is something that the Government could and should speed forward. This has already been touched on by my noble friend Lord Cope, and it is a point that I myself have made many times in the past. What brings the House most into disrepute in this area is the ludicrous size of the electorate. We had 11 candidates and three voters, and a similar thing would apply if we had a vacancy on the Labour Benches. That makes no sense. It is impossible to defend. No one with an ounce of logic in his brain could begin to defend it. So let us, at least as a short-term measure, turn the whole House into the electorate when there is a vacancy. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, dealt wittily with the fact that 43% was 10% less than the poll in the lowest polling constituency in the recent general election. Nevertheless, if there are 800 voters and 400 or 500 of them vote, that is infinitely preferable to the farcical spectacle that we have at the moment.

I support the Bill and hope that it will pass but, if it does not, I hope that at the very least the Government will heed what my noble friend Lord Cope and I have said: we must do away with these tiny electorates. Let no one talk about precedents as things that bind for ever. I should love to hear the views of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, on this, and perhaps one day we will get them, but I remember the pledge made by Winston Churchill that he would restore the university seats. He said it; he meant it; he did not do it. It is time to move on.