Queen’s Speech

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, this really is a huge, wide-ranging debate—far too wide-ranging in my view. I do not know how on earth the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, will sum it all up, but I am sure all his skills will come into play. There is one thing, at least in my mind, that is very simple about today: there is one issue that is far more important than any of the others that have been discussed, and the issue we will shortly address, which is the future unity of our country.

Having said that, I suppose I should apologise in advance: that is not where I will focus my own few minutes, not least because of one of the contributions in particular, that from my noble friend Lord Reid—although there have been other very good ones as well. My noble friend has made many splendid speeches that I have listened to, but that one took some beating. It was on the weaknesses of the separatist case. It would certainly bear reading or re-reading, I should suggest to anyone who is thinking of doing so.

I am always amused when I hear my good friend Lord Reid speak, and I dare say I will feel similar when my noble friends Lady Liddell and Lord McFall speak. I assume they will address this issue. It is palpably ridiculous to suggest that any of those three and their predecessors, who have presumably been living under the yoke of the union, have somehow become any less Scottish or that their national identity is in any way diminished through all those years of oppression. Presumably I am one of the oppressors; I had not been aware of that, but maybe that is the case. How you can make my noble friend Lord Reid any more of a Scot than he already is is beyond me. Maybe some of the separatists could address those arguments in the period that lies ahead.

I want to use a text on other constitutional issues. My text is from the Queen’s Speech:

“My Government will continue its programme of political reform”.

What political reform? The grandiose schemes for political reform, as outlined by the Deputy Prime Minister shortly after the coalition agreement was signed, were,

“the most significant programme of empowerment by a British government since the great enfranchisement of the 19th Century. The biggest shake up of our democracy since … the Great Reform Act”.

I think that might have been a mild overstatement, but I am happy to say that his attempts at constitutional reform have been largely unsuccessful. I think, for example, of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act. Some people worked pretty hard not to get that on to the statute book. We would have saved a lot of money had people listened to us. I do not have a problem with equalising constituency sizes—that is a perfectly laudable, principled thing to do—but I do have a problem with telling the British people that at the next general election they will have only 600 and not 650 MPs. That would diminish democracy by increasing constituency sizes. I am glad at least that that has been postponed, I hope for good.

I am glad that in the end we had a referendum on the alternative-vote system. It cost £75 million, which we could have spent on other things, but at least the result was terrific and showed British support for the first past the post system. That is something we could certainly adopt for the European elections. Last month we saw the wonderful new PR system that was going to encourage people to flock to the polls as it would give them the chance to express their vote. However, yet again we saw a low turnout for a European vote. Maybe one little bit of constitutional reform that we could have would be to revert to first past the post, and perhaps then we would even get the turnout up to the 36.5% that was achieved the last time the vote was held on the first past the post basis. That would help to reconnect Europe with the people of Britain.

The other great constitutional objective was Lords reform. My word, we gave enough warnings on that, but still the Government ploughed ahead for two years, wasting a lot of money. I checked that in a ministerial Question. The amount was £620,000. Five to 12 civil servants worked on it flat out, all to no avail, and they could not even find an answer to the question, “What would a ‘democratically’ elected second Chamber do to relations between the two Houses?”. All the brains in the top ranks of the Civil Service and all the Ministers could not answer that fundamental question satisfactorily. That is why that reform fell and deserved to fall, and I was very pleased about that.

Given that constitutional reform did not happen at a national level, I am glad that at a local level the mayoral referendums flopped as well. They were an attempt to import some American system of government into this country. There were 10 referendums, which cost us a lot of money as well—£2.1 million. I am happy to say that in nine of those referendums the people, including the good people of Birmingham, sensibly said, “No thanks very much. We don’t want that”.

We have mentioned police and crime commissioners, but I will end on the one reform that is still, for my book, unfinished business: the fixed-term Parliaments legislation. What a disaster that has been. Here we are plodding along. If only the Prime Minister—he is not my Prime Minister, obviously—had the power to say, “Look, we’ve had enough of this. Let’s see what the people think”. However, as we did for the last six months of the previous Session, we have to plod on.

I think that the lesson on constitutional reform has been that all these grandiose schemes really were not worth the paper they were, rather expensively, written on. I am glad that there is nothing like them in the current Queen’s Speech, but I hope that future Governments learn that lesson.