European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, the advantage of following the noble Lord is that he has woken you all up and I can now get on with what I want to do. I have spoken about five times on this issue in your Lordships’ House. Your Lordships may not remember, but I have. My line has been very consistent. Whatever we may think of the referendum as a process, we cannot judge its quality by the result. If you do not like the result, it does not mean that the process was bad.

The result was quite remarkable—52% to 48%. In England it was 53.3% to 46.7%. Few people remember that out of 34 million votes, 28 million were cast in England. In England the difference was between 15 million and 13 million. The difference of 2 million was exactly the difference at a national level—18 million to 16 million—so the 3 million votes on either side were cast in the three devolved regions. So the majority for Brexit comes from England. This was an English nationalist vote—make no mistake about it—and we have to take it seriously because this is the largest part of the United Kingdom.

There is a double process. First there is the divorce and then there are negotiations on cohabitation. A lot of people in the debate today, with a lot of good will, have mixed up the two processes. They want to have a good cohabitation. More or less, they are saying, “Yes, I want a divorce”, but then, “Let’s forget it. I want the same life as we had before”—in other words, we want the single market, we want the customs union, et cetera. As the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, said, this option may not be available.

First, we have to do not a hard Brexit or a soft Brexit but a quick Brexit. The precise breaking up of the legal membership has to be done as quickly as we can. That will leave more time for the negotiations on the quality of the cohabitation, which are going to be long drawn-out. Even a trade deal will be long drawn-out if you want a trade deal with 27 other members. All the other things noble Lords have mentioned, including security and human rights, will take a long time to negotiate—so let us get the Brexit bit out of the way as soon as we can, maybe in six months. The Government may be able to come back after that to consult Parliament about the shape of the cohabitation. Once the Article 50 process is finished, we will be free to discuss among ourselves what to do next. But that distinction has to be made.

The only amendments to the Bill that will be admissible will be to clarify whether we want the parliamentary process to be there between invoking Article 50 and Brexit—whether Parliament should be consulted at all or whether we should give the Government a free hand to get on with the job and finish Brexit as quickly as possible.

The most important thing that will be discussed in the divorce negotiations is the budget. I am on the Financial Affairs Sub-Committee of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the European Union and I can say without any doubt that practically no one knows what the bill is going to be. It is a fiendishly complex issue. In October, the Financial Times, no less, said that the bill would be £20 billion. In November it said that it would be £60 billion. I could give your Lordships almost any number between £10 billion and £200 billion on perfectly sound grounds. The problem is that what we pay will be the subject of the hardest negotiation possible. For example, there is a multiannual financial framework which is agreed for seven years—2013 to 2020—and we are going out in the middle of this seven-year budgetary agreement. Therefore, the question is: we agreed to pay something in 2020; do we get out without paying or can they say, “Hey, come on, you made commitments”? Not only that—there may be a committed scheme, say, to launch a road in Estonia for €10 billion, of which only €5 billion may have been spent so far. We have agreed to spend the other €5 billion and pay our share of it. Do we stop paying it?

So there will be a number of complex issues about the budget, and unless we get that right, and get it right early, we will not be able to proceed with the other good things in life that we want out of the European Union. My view is that we need clarity of thought about this problem—and the sooner we do it, the better.

Strathclyde Review

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, we know that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, is a very nice man. I have known him for all the 25 years that I have been here, and he has shown great courtesy, charm and ability. So the question before us is: why does the Prime Minister not like him? Why has he given him what in rugby terms is called a hospital pass? He has been given the thankless task of trying to make a major tactical mistake by the Government, which was shown by your Lordships’ House to be worth definite rejection, seem respectable, retrieving the disaster that was visited upon the Government by pretending that the fault was somehow that of your Lordships’ House.

We have had an interesting and wide-ranging discussion today. We have had a kind of admission by the noble Lord that, strictly speaking, conventions were not broken on 26 October by the two Motions that were put to the vote. In the debate on the day, the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, said she was introducing her Motion because she knew that within three days the House of Commons would be holding a discussion on precisely the tax credit issue, so she was genuinely asking the House of Commons to think again. We all thought what would happen, after we had debated and passed the Motion, was that the House of Commons would think again. Indeed it did, and the Chancellor thought again too. As the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said, it is the most popular thing that the House of Lords has done as far as the British public were concerned, and the most effective thing, in that the Chancellor dropped the policy. He had to revise his policy, come the Autumn Statement.

Given that all these things have happened, why do we have to consider all sorts of questions about the position of this House vis-à-vis the House of Commons, matters of power and privilege and all that? Why can we not just admit that, strictly speaking, had the Government wanted drastically to cut tax credits—they have the privilege to do so if they want to—they should have done it via primary legislation? That would have been the end of the matter and we would not have been able to do anything about it. So why did the Government do it by statutory instrument? It is precisely because there are 1,000 of them every year. I was privileged to be on the first committee of your Lordships’ House on the scrutiny of secondary legislation and, let me tell you, they are mind-numbingly boring. However, you have to go through the details because those details matter; they have to be examined. I think someone in the other place thought, “Statutory instruments are so boring that no one’s going to take this one seriously and it will pass”. It is precisely because secondary legislation is overused that a trick was tried on us that failed.

I remember Lord Simon of Glaisdale, whose name was mentioned earlier, who used to warn us about Henry VIII legislation and so on. There is indeed a problem; if we are going to have 1,000 or 1,200 pieces of secondary legislation, someone has to scrutinise them. I also agree with the many noble Lords who have said that your Lordships’ House would scrutinise them with much greater care and attention than would the other place. However, given that, we also ought to ask whether a lot of those sorts of decisions should not be much more open and transparent and be part of primary legislation, and not in skeleton Bills? Therefore, those are the issues.

I want to make one slightly radical suggestion about financial privileges. I accept that since the 17th century or before that it has been the House of Commons’ privilege to have powers with regard to financial matters. In 1911 the House of Lords blotted its copybook and got smashed for that reason—quite rightly so—and in 1949 our powers were again curtailed. Coming to today, the relationship between our two Chambers is quite different, because your Lordships’ House is no longer a seat of privilege or a place of feudal Lords. It is a place as representative of the great British public as is the House of Commons. Yes, we are unelected, but we are not unrepresentative. Also, as was proved on 26 October, we sometimes have better judgment on financial matters than another place.

Therefore, when we examine all the big questions of our constitution, we ought to ask ourselves: is it not time that we used the expertise of this House and its representativeness to have a greater input into financial matters than it is allowed today? It will not happen any time soon—if we ever have this great constitutional convention we may be able to consider that—but we should certainly not leave that question undiscussed in our future deliberations.

House of Lords Reform

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and privilege to follow the noble Lord.

All sorts of things have been said, so let me start with something that has not, and that is about the way the public, and especially the media, view the House. Whenever there is any whiff of scandal or when they want to criticise us, the picture they give is of the State Opening of Parliament. People are invited to ridicule us because there we are in our robes and tiaras and so on—this is not a frivolous point but is very much evident. I have proposed before in this House that we should move the State Opening of Parliament from here to Westminster Hall. The Commons and Lords should be invited to sit down together, so that we do not have to be in robes, and Her Majesty should give a speech about her personal moments, rather than having to read the Prime Minister’s speech, and then invite the Prime Minister to read the speech he has written. This would do lots of things: it would reduce the absurdity of the House of Commons people standing at the Bar; it would get us out of our robes; and it would increase our respectability in the eyes of the public, because people cannot understand that we do not actually come in robes every day—they still think we are always like that, prancing around. That is my one constructive suggestion for the evening.

Being the 22nd person to speak, I think that practically every solution that I could have thought of has been put forward. However, we have what economists, artists, engineers and so on generally call a “stock-flow” problem. We have a large stock of life Peers and the egress is very small, with maybe 20 per year; the incoming flow is always much larger than the annual egress, especially around election times. In the nice paper that the House Library has produced, I notice that over the past 15 years we have had a large ingress around election time—either in the year before an election or in the year of the election. In 2000 and 2001, there were 87 new Members. In 2004 and 2005, there were 96 new Members. In the Parliament of the coalition Government, the figures were really extreme: in 2010 and 2011, there were 129 new Members; and, when the coalition was going out, in 2013 and 2014, there were another 69, so there were 200 new Members within the coalition Parliament. It is a problem when one has a limited reservoir; with little egress and a lot of people coming in, the place will be flooded—and we are flooded right now.

There are solutions. First, let the Prime Minister do whatever he wants by way of appointments but say to him that, to begin with, he can only give people a peerage but not the right to sit in the House of Lords. That right would be rationed by the number of people exiting. Either we have “one for one” or we have “three for one” or whatever. That will slow things down. Secondly, we should try another solution: as we did at the time of the reform of the hereditary peerage, each party or constituent group should select from within it a number of people who should leave. That could be done by a “first past the post” or proportional system. If we could say that the number would not reduce from 800 to 400 unless each group decides to halve itself; and, perhaps after deciding whatever the necessary number of voluntary retirements should be, the groups would choose who leaves. In that way, we could reduce our numbers ourselves voluntarily. We could say to the Prime Minister, “You can appoint who you like, but those men and women can come here only if there is a vacancy”.

If we combined those two things, we may within five or 10 years achieve a House of Lords of about 400, which is the ideal size. But it would have to be done by a drastic reduction in the current numbers and a limit on the number of people coming in to match the number of people leaving.

English Votes for English Laws

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

In the same vein, I should say that the advantage of having a proper Bill that undergoes pre-legislative scrutiny by both Houses, and is debated and passed in both Houses, would cover all the unanticipated and unanticipatable consequences of such a narrow construction of the question. If we do not at the beginning take care to examine all those consequences, we shall regret it and have to come back to this question again and again in a very messy way. The best thing to do is to follow proper procedures, use the strength we have in the two Houses and come to a proper conclusion on what is the most important constitutional question for the United Kingdom.

Caste Discrimination

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I do not have exact figures and names to hand but I am very happy to write to the noble Lord with them.

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, is not the problem that the majority Hindu and Sikh organisations are responsible for discrimination of the minority in their own ethnic origin community? I do not think that one should quietly concede the majority’s view in this respect.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I agree with the noble Lord that this can be a problem within communities of that nature, and is not generally something that is within the British culture.