Queen’s Speech

Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, this has been a stimulating and, from my personal point of view, instructive debate. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, in our debate on this subject just before Prorogation, said in his rather world-weary way that he had not heard any new questions being put and implied that it was something of a failure on the part of those who have problems with the Bill to come up with serious objections to it. I think the problem is the other way around. So far, we have not had anything like enough answers. If the Government feel that some of the objections that are being raised are not valid, it is up to them explicitly to take the time to refute them, and if they cannot do so, to recognise that it is necessary to think again and come back with something better. It is only on that basis that we will make any progress on this particularly difficult issue.

I have always been a supporter of a 100% democratically elected House of Lords. I have taken that line throughout my political career. I have spoken along those lines in another place, but hitherto I have not had an opportunity to do so in this place. I voted along those lines in the House of Commons whenever I had the opportunity. I can also remember speaking along those lines to Gordon Brown both before and after he was Prime Minister, so I have a consistent record. But I could not possibly support the Bill that is now before the House. Indeed, I read it with complete astonishment as it seems to be deeply flawed. It is flawed in three places, or perhaps more, but certainly in three places it is in glaring contradiction with its own principles. That is a very serious weakness in a Bill and it would be a great mistake on our part if we put it on to the statute book. Clearly I need to justify that statement, and I intend to do so.

Let us take, first, a membership of 80% elected and 20% appointed. It is clear to me that you cannot have it both ways. Either democratic election is necessary for political legitimacy, which is the argument behind the White Paper and the Bill, or it is not. You cannot say that it is a principle that must be applied to some people but not to others, that democratic legitimacy can only be conferred on me by election, but on my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours it does not have to be conferred by election. You cannot possibly have a so-called “universal principle” which is selectively applied. In putting forward that idea, the Bill destroys its own argument and we should not proceed on that basis. It is entirely unjustifiable.

The practical point of view—if noble Lords think that that is a theoretical point, it is actually very important to get the theoretical points right and get our thinking clear on this subject—is whether we in this place, either elected or nominated, would rival in some way members of the House of Commons in their constituency functions. Another point made the other day at some length and with a lot of quotations by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace—and there is a widespread view in this country to this effect—was that the British public have lost faith in their institutions and have lost confidence in their politicians and people in public life, and that we need to do something about it. His suggestion was that we need this Bill in order to do that. Can you imagine a situation in which you introduce a Bill to have 80% of people elected to the House of Lords for a 15-year term who then, as the Government think will happen, refuse to take up any personal or local cases brought to them by their electors? Presumably they would say to those who had elected them, “Thank you for electing me, it was very good of you. But actually I have a 15-year term and I cannot stand for re-election, so you can get lost”. If we behaved along those lines, can anyone in the House think of a way more calculated to reinforce any cynicism there may be about people in public life or encourage a greater degree of rejection of our institutions and of us individually?

The second problem I have with the Bill has already been referred to by several other speakers. Clause 2 suggests that there would be no change in the constitutional position or the powers of the House of Commons if we became an elected or a largely elected House. This is a matter of elementary logic. If you define the qualities or status of something in relation to something else and you change the something else, you change that status and those qualities. If it be the case, as Erskine May says and as the White Paper argues, that the House of Commons is special because it is democratically elected, and then if the second House in our legislature becomes democratically elected, clearly in that respect the House of Commons would no longer be special. To recognise that is a matter of simple logic and honesty, otherwise one is in the business of promulgating an intellectual dishonesty. It is just like saying that everybody can have priority; for example, that everybody in this army can be a general but we will not change the concept of a “general”, or that everybody can go first class on aircraft or in trains but we will not change the concept of “first class”. However, you would be changing the concept of first class or generalship, and it is dishonest to believe otherwise.

There is a third area in which the Government seem to be in contradiction with themselves, and that is in relation to a referendum. I cannot make out what has happened to the Liberal Democrats on this because they fought the last election, as we did, saying in their manifesto that they were in favour of a referendum on this subject. Now, as part of the coalition, apparently they are no longer in favour of a referendum on a House of Lords reform Bill, and the Deputy Prime Minister goes around saying that he does not think that one is necessary. I also have a consistent record throughout my career of not liking referenda. My very first political campaign, which I enjoyed taking part in and am very proud to have done so, was the 1975 referendum on our membership of the European Community, as it was then called. But even at the time I personally regretted that that decision was taken by a referendum and not by Parliament. However, it would be less than honest not to recognise that over the past 30 or 40 years, the constitution of this country has evolved and there is now a general acceptance that major constitutional Bills cannot simply be passed through Parliament, as has happened down the centuries, but that they require a referendum. That would be the case if we left the European Union or, I think by universal agreement, if we joined the euro. Over the past few decades it has always been the case for devolution.

Moreover, noble Lords will recall that we have had referenda on much more minor issues like whether to have elected police commissioners or mayors. We had the referendum on AV last summer. It is really quite extraordinary that we now have a proposal to make a major constitutional change without a referendum. I think that that is very suspect and curious. What is more, it comes just a few months after we voted through the Europe Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and I spent some time debating matters on that Bill which, as I recall, provided for 39 different circumstances in which there could be a referendum in this country, some as relatively trivial as changing the rules on the appointment of the Court of Auditors at the European Commission. That Bill is now an Act—a very bad one, in my view, but I will not go into that now—that provides for the possibility of referenda on extraordinarily trivial subjects, yet we are told that we cannot have a referendum on House of Lords reform. That is an inherently incredible and unbelievable situation. It would be very suspicious and everyone in the country will ask, “Why is there this inconsistency?”.

This is the moment when one is right to remember the famous question put by Lenin. I emphasise that I am not a Marxist-Leninist. Indeed, unlike my noble friend Lord Grocott or a number of other people in this House, I cannot say that I have always been in the same party, but I have never been in a Marxist-Leninist party. Lenin had a point when he said the key question to ask about any proposal was, “Who, whom?”— “Kto kogo?” Who benefits and at whose expense? I think that people up and down the country, given this extraordinary dog’s breakfast of a Bill, with its mass of self-contradictions and breach of its own principles, will naturally ask that question. They will ask who had the incentive to bring forward this extraordinary legislation at the present time. The answer to that is quite obvious: it is the Liberal Democrats. We all know that the Liberal Democrats have dreamt for decades of introducing proportional representation for House of Commons elections, which would give them the balance of power in the House of Commons for the rest of time and therefore leverage and lien over, and probably membership of, every Government for the rest of time. It is clear that they have now despaired of introducing PR nationally; after the AV referendum, they despaired even of getting something in the direction of PR nationally; so this is now the next great agenda. The idea is that, since they cannot do it with the Commons, they should improve the standing of the Lords vis-à-vis the Commons by making the Lords directly elected, as will inevitably happen, and making sure that, through PR, they get their permanent blocking minority in the House of Lords for the rest of time. It is a very simple agenda, and I can see that it is very alluring for the Liberal Democrats. They see it as much more important than any individual piece of legislation that might go through in this Parliament; this is the long-term, historic prize; this is the great existential change for the Lib Dems if they can achieve it—and what a wonderful opportunity, being in coalition with the Conservative Party which is dependent on them for survival, to get this through. I think that that is really what it comes down to. I cannot believe that, without such an agenda, anybody would have come forward with such a self-contradictory and messy Bill.

I am worried that, if we proceed on this basis, there will be exactly what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, predicts; that is, increasing cynicism on the part of the electorate about our priorities, the way we do things and how we cook up initiatives. It will be widely seen that this fundamental change in the constitution, accompanied by all these anomalies, is going through because it meets a party-political agenda. That will be seen as extremely squalid and, I fear, contribute to exactly the disease which the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, described the other day.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Rennard]

It was the beginning of the last Labour Government. The manifesto said in 1997 that,

“the House of Lords must be reformed ... to make the House of Lords more democratic and representative”.

In particular, the 1997 Labour manifesto said that,

“the legislative powers of the House of Lords will remain unaltered”.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. I have noticed—as has the whole House—that he has not attempted at all in his remarks to contest my hypothesis that the Lib Dem party is, in this matter, pursuing an entirely selfish party-political agenda. While we are quoting manifestos, can the noble Lord explain to the House why the Lib Dem party appears to have abandoned its commitment in favour of a referendum on this issue, which was certainly in its most recent general election manifesto in 2010?

[Lord Rennard]

With the greatest respect to the noble Lord, there was absolutely no promise of a referendum on the issue of Lords reform in the Liberal Democrat manifesto in 2010. I believe in representative democracy. I think there are many problems with referendums, as I shall elaborate. The Liberal Democrats did not promise any such thing in 2010.

In answer to the noble Lord’s basic premise that the Liberal Democrats are acting out of pure self-interest in this matter, I point out the major flaw in his argument. In common consensus around the Chamber tonight, we have talked about there being perhaps 400 or 450 Members of this House who are particularly active. I draw noble Lords’ attention to the fact that there are now 90 Liberal Democrat Peers. That is not far off some 23% of the active membership of this House. I also point out to noble Lords that many people who talk about the effectiveness and work of this House have said that it is effective because no one party has an overall majority. No one party has an overall majority if you have a system of proportional representation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I was just coming to the issue of Commons primacy. The issue of primacy is partly a matter of whether one wishes to have a written constitution or one operates on the conventions of an unwritten constitution through restraint and reasonable behaviour. Of course we acknowledge the view of the committee that Clause 2 is not capable in itself of preserving the primacy of the House of Commons, which a number of noble Lords have cited, but we should listen to the committee in full when it said:

“A majority, while acknowledging that the balance of power would shift, consider that the remaining pillars on which Commons primacy rests would suffice to ensure its continuation”.

The primacy of the Commons rests on many pillars. These include the conventions governing the relationship between the two Houses, the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949, and the fact that the Prime Minister and most of the Government of the day are drawn from the House of Commons. The whole of the House of Commons will be renewed at each election, and that will clearly be the election in which the Government are chosen. The second Chamber will have, as the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, termed it in her interesting speech, a “different sort of legitimacy” as the second Chamber. The relationship between the two Houses is not a zero-sum game.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. How can the Parliament Acts possibly be a defence for the primacy of the House of Commons when all the legal advice that the House has heard on the subject makes it quite clear that the Parliament Acts would cease to apply if the House of Lords became an elected House?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, there is room for a discussion and a concordat between the two Houses. We have also seen in the evidence that there is some resistance to putting into statute a further codification of the relationship between the two Houses because, as I have heard many noble Lords say, the jurisdiction of the courts and litigation would not necessarily be desirable. The Government did notice and will consider the recommendations of the Joint Committee with regard to initiating preliminary work on a concordat between the two Houses, but such work ultimately would be the responsibility of the two Houses rather than of the Government, as it would be concerned with constitutional conventions.

I want to make one other brief point. I was puzzled to hear a number of noble Lords say that this Chamber is not part of the legislature. Erskine May has been quoted on several occasions. On the first page, chapter 1, page 1, paragraph 1 states:

“Parliament is composed of the Sovereign, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Collectively they form the legislature”.