Restoration and Renewal

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, when I was a schoolboy in India, we were told stories about the British Parliament. One of the stories, of course, was of how Guy Fawkes tried to blow the old Parliamentary building up. But then I heard that every year, there was an inspection—just on Guy Fawkes Night—to check whether Guy Fawkes was there or not. Obviously, given the state of this restoration report, I think they all expect Guy Fawkes to turn up only on Guy Fawkes Day to set fire to this place.

That is what traditionalists and romantics think our history is about. What we are suffering from is the fact that there are romantics and the so-called modernisers. The romantics want this place to be exactly as it was and not change anything, which is why we are talking about restoration.

This is a great building. It is a fantastic building, but I have always thought it utterly useless as a parliament chamber. All other parliament chambers you see in the world are much more modern than this: you have a proper seat of your own, a desk, computer facilities, meeting halls and decent catering. You do not have this very crowded place, where deliberately not everybody can find a seat. If there are 800 Members, God forbid that you may think you will get a seat—heavens! You are here not for sitting down but for the gorgeous decorations, history and all those sorts of things. Yes, the pandemic forced us into modernisation, but we are rapidly marching to restore all the old habits. We do not really like modernisation.

Obviously, this report will have to be agreed to because we have no alternative. I do not think any good will come out of it, because 15 years from now we will have another debate like this—I will not be there, because I was 83 last Sunday and I may not be alive—and discuss the same things: what different committees we have formed and whether the House of Commons is refusing to decant. Let us hope that, in the meantime, no Guy Fawkes has set fire to the basement—not so much for ourselves but for the staff who work here. They will pay the cost of our laziness, not us.

If I had any choice—thank God I do not—I would not have thought about anything other than not decanting but building another parliamentary building. At the start of the pandemic, I wrote a letter to the noble Baroness in charge of this thing and said we should start building a new parliamentary building while the pandemic was here so that we would have a building ready for occupation. Had we done something like that, we would all have decanted there, Commons and Lords, and restored this building as one of the most fantastic museums of British history, exposing it to the public and showing all the decorations. I quite agree that this is an incredible building, but a parliamentary building it is not. It is useless as a parliamentary building.

I was surprised to hear that when the restoration took place after the House of Commons Chamber was bombed during the war, it was insisted that the Commons Chamber be restored exactly as it was, so that it would always be overcrowded if everybody decided to turn up. I think this is the only country in the whole world that worships democracy but makes quite sure that the parliamentarians do not have a comfortable life. The parliamentarians love it, because they think not being comfortable is the great strength of British democracy. Being comfortable would absolutely corrupt us like all the Europeans, and we do not like the Europeans. Given that we made that mistake and are not going to move out of here—we may move out, but the Commons will not—all we can do is hope and pray that within the next 50 or 100 years we get this place fully restored and are able to do what is proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, which is very important.

We really ought to think of Parliament in a different way, because our democracy is different. This Parliament was refurbished at a time when the franchise was only 10% of the population. Most people in the House of Commons were second sons of Peers, and the voting public were hardly more than 10%. We are in a very different situation now. We should use a much more consultative system whereby our citizens can communicate with us their preferences regarding our proposals and the legislation before us. How many people are aware of what we are discussing? We ought to be able to connect constantly with our citizens so that they can tell us their proposals. We should have a people’s budget in which people can tell us their preferences regarding taxes or expenditure. We do not know any of that, because we are not able to consult our citizens.

Let us concentrate on the positive aspects and, whatever we do for restoration, make this a more fit place for democracy than it has been so far. We know from what is going on in the selection of a new Prime Minister that we are not a very successful democracy.