Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Lord Elton Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, your Lordships can now return to an equally controversial matter, on which I think the camera has somehow got too close to the subject. I know that there is a general impression outside this House, although probably not inside it, that we are observing the early to middle stages of a power struggle between the two Houses, whereas we are actually in the closing stages of a power struggle between the Crown and Parliament.

The Crown and Parliament are the protagonists on whom we should keep our eye. By “the Crown”, I would have said “the Government”, but when one talks about the Government, one tends to think of what is only a thin veneer of ambitious politicians laid over a vast machine with a collective memory that goes back for centuries and which understandably regards Parliament as something of an obstacle to its objectives. As a Minister, one can detect this in individual civil servants, although I should say at this stage that I am commenting not on individuals but on human nature. However, you find that there is surprise and resentment that some proposal that appears to be eminently sensible to people who are not in touch with the mood of public, which as a Minister one has to be, can be obstructed by the parliamentary machine. The combined apparatus of ambitious politicians and career civil servants has a momentum of its own. The Crown as such has been trying to retrieve the power that it lost to Parliament in the 13th century, and it has retrieved a great deal of it.

One cannot survey the history in seven minutes, but I can give a good illustration of the state of play in more or less contemporary times by asking noble Lords to look at the year of 2005, and in particular to what happened between noon on Thursday 10 March of that year and 7.31 pm on the following Friday evening, which if I have calculated the period correctly is a total of 31 hours. Many noble Lords who took part will remember that the then Government had brought in a Bill with a clause that would have empowered the Home Secretary—in the legislation I think it is the “Secretary of State”—having consulted a single senior police officer, to sign a bit of paper that would consign a British citizen to what was called “derogated detention” for up to 90 days without the intervention of any legal force whatever.

Anything less consonant with British liberty or standards of democracy is difficult to imagine. It was got through the House with a government majority of 131 and was carried by a majority of only 14. We removed the clause and sent it back. Commons messages arrived and then we started on a round of ping-pong. As a result, that draconian measure was subject to very thorough judicial supervision and did not resemble what had been sent to us to start with.

Why was the House of Commons not able to control the Government? I remind noble Lords that Parliament was invented to control the Government. What was the difference between that House and this place? There are four differences. The first is that Members of the other place receive a substantial salary and are in what we would regard as career jobs. As has been alluded to, if you lose your seat you can move on to another, but if you lose your seat you lose your job and your salary. It is certainly true that the Whips have the power to deselect a Member so that he actually loses his job and perhaps cannot pay his mortgage, the school fees and so on. That is it, really. Members of Parliament have to be re-elected to hold on to their jobs, so they have to toe the party line; and if a Government have a substantial majority they actually hold those jobs and livelihoods in their hands. In this House, we are not elected and we do not have a salary. Although I benefit from it, I regret the fact that we now have a certain incentive and an interest that we ought to declare in this debate: if we claim it, we are in receipt of £300 a day for attendance. To that extent our continuance in office is a matter of personal concern, but of course we cannot be turned out, as the others can.

The present Government proposal entails the introduction of a majority of elected people who inevitably will have to be paid large sums of money in the form of salaries, and in effect those salaries will be in the gift of the Whips, if they have to be elected Parliament by Parliament. If we are going to move to something along the lines of what is being suggested, it is essential that the term of office, the tenure, should be for at least 15 years, although I would rather see it set at 20 years.

Perhaps your Lordships would pause to reflect for a moment that it was actually the undemocratically produced House that in March 2005 defended the electorate from a democratically elected Government when the elected House was unable to do so. Therefore, I see no need for election. Further, on appointing Members, I would remind noble Lords that more than 50 per cent of this House was appointed during the prime ministership of the then Prime Minister, and I believe I am right in saying that the Government suffered the largest defeat of any Government since the war. So I am here merely to say: please remember that we are trying to preserve the power of Parliament in the face of the Government, and to do that you need at least one House of Parliament with what the Americans call “tenure”. As it is not available in the other place, we ought to have it here.