House of Lords: Reform

Lord Elton Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, it concerns me that this debate is being conducted, and indeed reported, as though it were a battle in which the protagonists are the House of Lords and the House of Commons. It is not. We are standing too close to the canvas. It is part of the war between Parliament and government. Consider the origin of Parliament. It was invented to control the Crown in the days of absolute monarchy. Until George I came to the throne, no Minister of the Crown was allowed into Westminster without permission or an invitation. Now, we have—if you count PPSs—150 members of the body that Parliament is supposed to be controlling inside the controlling body and their power there accumulates. As the main protagonist, government is not just Ministers; it is the whole machine of government—thousands of people, all with their own views and programmes, tuned in a certain direction. As a Minister, I came across senior civil servants who regarded Parliament as a nuisance and a distraction. They of course are willing allies of government Ministers, who want to get programmes through against the will of the elected majority.

The first thing that the Government have to do in this war, which has continued since the 13th century, is to get rid of entrenched power. The opening line was of course the Parliament Act 1911 and the subsequent Parliament Act, which have definitively drawn the teeth of this House in the constitutional battle, although the question of the Parliament Acts remains open. The next thing was to control the elected power in the House of Commons. That has been done in a succession of ways. One that has been alluded to is the growing use of the guillotine—the Programme Motion, I think that it is called—in the House of Commons, which is now routine and which muzzles the elected representatives for a great deal of the time, with the result that we have to do their work.

Then again there has been the changing nature of the House of Commons. When I stood for Parliament 38 years ago, I was in a cohort of people all of whom had a profession, trade or something else in which they had been brought up and to which they could return. The rewards, when you got to Parliament—if you did, which I did not, twice—were insubstantial. Members were not paid any money at all until relatively recently. Therefore, if you were threatened with being thrown out, it did not matter; what mattered was that you were not going to get promotion. However, that has changed, because now Members of Parliament increasingly come in without a trade or profession, with nothing to go back to, and subsist on the substantial income that is given to them as Members, with increments when they take office or have special posts and with supplementary benefits, which have caused a good deal of public interest. To lose that in the middle of what should be a career, possibly with many young to pay for, is a disaster.

The result is that the Government, through the party system, have an enormous hold over the voting strength in the House of Commons. That was beautifully illustrated when Tony Blair got the 90-day clause through the House of Commons; he had a majority of, I think, 161 on paper, but he got the clause through by 14 votes. When the measure came to this House, we started discussing it on a Thursday at 3.05 and finished on the Friday at 7.31. We exerted the democratic force that the House of Commons was unable to do. We have to take a care with what we do about this House because what we do is part of the great campaign of the Government to try to swallow Parliament, while Parliament tries to remain at liberty to defend the British electorate.

The great threat of deselection is real. It attaches to any proposal to have a party system in this House in which Members could be deselected—hence the charm of the 15-year tenure of an elected Member of this House under the Bill. However, that immediately destroys its legitimacy. Other noble Lords have dealt extensively and successfully with the threat of the Bill to the procedure between the two Houses. I repeat that this discussion and its reporting have been represented as a battle, not a war. My appeal is not to all our colleagues in the Dining Room but to editors and producers around the country to wake up, to look at history, to see what is going on and to alert the country to it and to our role in preventing this ending in an anti-democratic calamity in which parties of all colours join. Every Government within 18 months become set on reducing the power of Parliament to interfere with their decisions. My noble friend Lord St John of Fawsley was swift to get to Margaret Thatcher and set up the departmental Select Committees, which were a step back on the ratchet of power going from Parliament to the Government. He got that through before she was tainted with the poison that overtakes all Governments, which I tasted briefly but which I survived.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, in this debate and to pick up the point that he has just made on ministerial appointments. He is quite right that the proposals in the draft Bill provide for the Prime Minister to make an unlimited number of appointments to a largely elected House. Well, hang on a tick. If there is no legitimacy in being an appointed Member and you need to be elected, what is the logic of arguing that Ministers in this House can be appointed by the Prime Minister? This is to turn the constitution on its head. My understanding of the position of Ministers is that they remain Ministers so long as they command the confidence of Parliament. This is turning it the other way round so that in order to be a Minister you have to be a Member of Parliament, and while the Prime Minister can appoint you to be a Member of Parliament, you will cease to be a Member of Parliament as soon as the Prime Minister has lost confidence in you. This is a complete inversion of the constitutional principles and accountability that are the heart of our parliamentary system.

[Lord Elton]

Does that not exactly endorse my claim that this is part of a war of Government against Parliament? It is trying to seize control of this House.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

Indeed it is; I entirely agree with my noble friend, who I thought made an absolutely splendid speech. I see on the front page of the Telegraph today—if I can be a candid friend to my right honourable friend the Prime Minister—that he is quoted as saying,

“You do the fighting, I’ll do the talking”.

If I can give him a bit of advice, a bit of listening might be in order here, otherwise some of us will start doing a bit of fighting. My noble friend, whom I have never really regarded as a great rebel, is absolutely right to say that this is about Parliament and its role.

My noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood, in his speech, described the draft Bill as a dog’s breakfast. I know that he breeds Labradors, and that Labradors will eat absolutely anything. However, I suspect that his dogs would find this pretty hard to digest, because it is a complete shambles from start to finish.

If the politics of this are, as I read in the newspapers, that this has been put forward as a consolation prize to the Deputy Prime Minister after the debacle of the AV referendum, I would have to say that it is more of a poisoned chalice than a consolation prize. Listening to and reading the speeches made so far, I would have to say that there is no way in which this legislation will get through this House and on to the statute book.

My noble friend the Deputy Prime Minister would do very well to listen to the proposals that have been put forward by my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood. My noble friend’s proposals are about reform; the Deputy Prime Minister's proposals are about the abolition of this Chamber and the creation of a new House of 300 paid and pensioned Members. This Government have a curious sense of timing. At the very moment when they are telling people in the public sector that we cannot afford their pensions and we are short of money, they are proposing to create 300 new politicians, all with index-linked pensions. It beggars belief how we are expected to explain that to a public who are already sceptical about our political process.

I have been thinking, “What would it be like to be one of these elected Members of this House? What would I do if I were an elected Member of this House?”. The first problem I thought of is, “Which manifesto would I be bound by—the one that I was elected on, which would last for 15 years, or would it be a manifesto which changes?”. I shall give an example. My own party has had a series of positions on tuition fees: we have been for them and been against them, all within a 15-year period. If you were elected on a manifesto that said that you were in favour of tuition fees, what would you do if, at the next election, the party changed its policy? Which manifesto would prevail?

If there are going to be 300 Members of this House, presumably one of them will represent an area where there are three constituencies. A sacred part of our constitution is the ability of Members of Parliament to be elected for whatever party but to represent their whole constituency. You don’t say, “Don't come to my surgery if you didn't vote Tory”. We say that we represent them all. We have some experience in Scotland of what happens when you get that kind of effect. The list Members start playing politics in the constituency and try to undermine the Member of one party. That leads to a waste of public money, to officials getting letters from every corner of the geographical area and to utter cynicism on the part of the constituents.

I return to my question: how would I behave? I would think, “I am there for 15 years. The average tenure of a Member of Parliament is about eight years; perhaps it might be a little longer with fixed-term Parliaments. I am going to be the incumbent. I am going to be the person whom everybody knows. So what am I going to do? I am going to do everything I can to ensure that my party wins the constituencies in my areas—that is what I am going to do”. The idea that we will be like Members of the European Parliament, as the noble Baroness suggested a moment ago, is ridiculous. And, in behaving like that, we would undermine the whole nature of this place.

The Deputy Prime Minister says that he is bringing forward these proposals in order to restore trust in Parliament. They are based, he says, on a principle that they will not alter the way in which Members of Parliament behave. But of course they will. If I am elected, I will have constituents; and they are going to come to me with problems, and I am going to do everything that I can to advance their cause. Even if that means making life difficult for those down the corridor, of course I am going to do it.

By the way, the most ignorant part of the statements made in support of this legislation has come from those who have said that the conventions and powers will remain the same. The powers of this House are unlimited. Do those in the other place who support these proposals understand just what we are capable of doing if we have democratic legitimacy? That is the message for the House of Commons, which was made so powerfully and effectively by that champion of Parliament, the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, in her excellent speech yesterday.

No, we want no part of abolition. But we do want reform, and reform is there. I advise those members of the Joint Committee, who have been handed a hospital pass, that at their first meeting they should conclude that there is nothing to be done except to pass the Steel Bill. It would reform this House. It would let the hereditaries wither away by getting rid of the by-election system. It would allow retirement and remove on permanent leave of absence those who do not come here. It would provide for an independent Appointments Commission. That is a sensible piece of reform that we could pass tomorrow. It is ludicrous that Parliament should be treated as a kind of political football in a game which, at its roots, comes from the failure of the Liberal Party to retain the trust of the people because it did not keep the promises it made at a general election. There is no criticism of the work of this House. The implementation of a regular guillotine has undermined the work of the House of Commons and made it all the more important that we fulfil our constitutional duty.