House of Lords: Reform

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Lords Chamber

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane]

My Lords, it was on 17 May that the Government published their White Paper and draft Bill and, by happy coincidence, that was also my 75th birthday. I have always regarded this document as some sort of unintended, but none the less welcome, birthday present. I genuinely congratulate the Government on at least producing this Bill which, as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord McNally, will say tonight, Labour signally failed to do. Mind you, when I see the Government’s Bill, I am very glad that Labour did not produce one. I have no doubt that the Labour Bill would have been better than the Conservative one, but if it was based on the Jack Straw 2008 White Paper, I would certainly have voted against it because it would suffer from the same problem as the Government now suffer from. With smoke and mirrors and weasel words, you can pretend to be all things to all men in a White Paper. You can pretend that somehow you can devise a system of election that will be both accountable and yet in no way threaten the primacy of the House of Commons. Once you come down to legislation, you have to make a choice and spell out specifically what you are doing.

The Government have given themselves a life raft, if you like, by publishing, somewhat unusually, a White Paper alongside the Bill. You are meant to have made up your mind what is in a Bill before you publish it, but innovation is always a good thing. They have the life raft there because they recognise that once you go into detail, support for election, which is a wonderful slogan, disaggregates like snow off a dyke. The fact is that the Opposition and Cross Benches could take the day off, and this Bill, put to a secret ballot of the government Benches, would be defeated overwhelmingly in this House, and the Government know it. I am not asking for a secret ballot—that would be unreasonable—but it is at least reasonable to expect that the Government will give their membership a free vote. Let me say, and I mean no disrespect to our Whips, that if they do not give us a free vote, I am taking one, and I will be voting against the Bill. There have also been rumours that the Parliament Act might be used. Frankly, I think the Government would be well advised to dissociate themselves from that position very quickly. It smacks very much of an elective tyranny, and it would be wholly inappropriate for a constitutional Bill.

However, let us look at the Bill we have. After all, it has been in germination since 1832 and is the greatest reform Act we have ever seen, so one accepts that the Government have given it their best shot. This is the best that they can do, so what have they come up with? First, let us be quite clear that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, said, they are abolishing the House of Lords, not reforming it. I refer them to page 10, paragraph 1 of the White Paper. Secondly, they have gone for single, 15-year terms with no re-election. Let us recognise that that gives us no accountability whatever, not a scintilla. The reason they did that, I presume, is to try to make the system of election so divorced from that for the Commons that MPs will not feel threatened. Otherwise, they know the Bill will be defeated in the Commons.

The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, made the point yesterday evening that he wants to go further and have recall provisions. If I am elected for Scotland—because I gather that that is one big constituency nowadays for this Bill—I am going to make sure that I am not going to be recalled, so I am going to take steps, and I am going to demand powers to ensure that I am shown in a good light to my electorate. The Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times will have the equivalent of bird-watching cameras trained on the door of the House to make sure that people elected turn up at least once in their 15 years and do not have their cheques sent to some bank account in Barbados.

The fact is that people will be wholly unaccountable. They will certainly be no more accountable than we are. Again, although the noble Lord, Lord McNally, visibly showed dissent about this, I remind the Government about the achievement of the Joint Committee on Conventions. If there is any doubt about it, at page 23, paragraph 61 of its report, it is spelled out, in terms, that this was an agreement based on the existing composition and if an elected element, let alone 80 per cent or 100 per cent, came in here, all bets were off, and it was a new deal. If we really want to clog up Parliament with the sort of nonsense that will go on, I suspect that the reputation of politics, which is already low, will plummet.

I follow the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, who used to be my MP—

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I hope you voted for me.

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane]

I think I may have. I found the Labour Party quite difficult to support in the 1970s and 1980s, as, indeed, did most of the Labour Party.

Let us go back to this campaign. How am I going to fight an election? How am I going to differentiate myself from everybody else who is standing and appear the better candidate? Am I going to promise things? If so, how are people going to know whether I have delivered on the promises? How am I going to deal with the heckler who says, “You say you are going to do that, but do you have the power to do it?”? If I do not have the power, I am quickly going to find a way of getting that power. The fact is that it creates instability in the political system and will eventually create gridlock.

I shall make a quick jibe about the fact that Members are going to be salaried. For a start, it rather intrigues me. I thought salary went with a job and did not depend on the way that you were put into that job. The public might think, “Hold on, if the present House of Lords is not paid, and this new crowd are paid, are they doing more? Have they more powers?”. The impression will certainly be that you have to justify that salary by making more noise than perhaps we currently do. Certainly the impression will be that you have to justify that salary by making more noise than perhaps we currently do.

Let us get rid of a couple of myths. First, there is the great mantra that it was in all three party manifestos. Please remind me which party manifesto was ringingly endorsed by the electorate at the last election? It seems to me that uniquely nobody really got a clean bill of health. I quite genuinely do not want to be unkind to the Liberal Democrats but they are the most associated with House of Lords reform. They have genuine pedigree on it. They did very badly at the election. The next party that did very badly was frankly the Labour Party. It had cottoned on to an elected House somewhat late in the day. Let us say that the view was sincerely held by many people. That party was rejected by the electorate. The only party that did tolerably well was the party that was most lukewarm about House of Lords reform, the Conservative Party. I would not pretend for a minute that the election swung on House of Lords reform but had it gone the other way, all three Front Benches would have been claiming that it was because of House of Lords reform that they were all elected and that they had a mandate. You cannot have it both ways.

Finally, I want to endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, said. The other myth is that this is the settled will of the House of Commons. That is absolute nonsense. In the 2007 vote a majority of Conservative MPs and a majority of Labour MPs voted against 80 per cent election. Indeed, in the 2003 vote the most popular option—all seven options were voted against, by the way, so much for a settled will of the Commons—or the one that was least unattractive was an all-appointed House.

I think we are looking for some political courage here. All three parties have had a go at this and all three have failed. You cannot square the circle. You cannot have an elected House of Lords without diminishing the power of the House of Commons. There might come a time when the electorate wants that but I do not think it is yet. I therefore do not want this kicked into the long grass. I want somebody to get the lawnmower out, clear a circle and give it a decent burial.