King’s Speech

Lord Hacking Excerpts

Wednesday 8th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

My Lords, I find the news of Lord Judge’s death most painful. I started my career as a barrister with Lord Judge—we were fellow pupil barristers in the same chambers—and I have known and admired him ever since.

On Thursday 14 October 1976, Lord Hailsham, the father of the current noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, gave the Richard Dimbleby memorial lecture entitled “Elective Dictatorship”. I thought then that Lord Hailsham was right, and I think now, 50 years on, he was more than right. As Lord Hailsham argued, the Executive, when they wish, just control the legislature and not, as it should be, the other way round. Importantly, Lord Hailsham identified the cause as the

“continuous enlargement in the scale and range of government”,

with the result that more and more of the Government’s party, particularly in the House of Commons, is being taken into government, thereby strengthening the Government’s powers over the legislature.

I can give a personal example. My grandfather, in the House of Commons in the 1920s and 1930s, was a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Home Office. At that time, the only other political appointment in the Home Office was the Home Secretary. Take the position now: there is the Home Secretary, three Ministers of State, three Parliamentary Under-Secretaries of State and seven political appointments. The assumption is that this has happened in all the major departments of state, and the Government have continued, and are continuing, to extend their powers through the creation of one government agency after another.

In the current Parliament, there have been Bills, though not many, in which the Back-Benchers in both Houses of Parliament have been able to participate, to the benefit of the Bill, which is welcome—but not so with other Bills. Take, for example, the Illegal Migration Bill. This House worked very hard throughout the passage of the Bill, and when, on 12 July at well past midnight, this House was considering Commons amendments to it, we voted by significant majorities—by 60 votes or more in nine Divisions—for critical and important changes. What happened when the Bill got back to the House of Commons? My colleague in the Commons, Jess Phillips, wrote about it in the New Statesman on 21 July:

“Round and round and round we walked, voting on the House of Lords’ amendments to the Illegal Migration Bill. The first session took three and a half hours, the second two hours. It really is something to spend so much time losing votes … during these past few weeks of parliament, the farce has been real”.


I think all of us should find this very disturbing. It was further disturbing when we were compelled to pass this Bill, which most bizarrely contained provisions the Court of Appeal had declared to be unlawful. If the Supreme Court agrees with the Court of Appeal, there will remain among our statutes an unlawful statute. Perhaps its true name is the “illegal Migration Bill”.

This was not the only Bill which, in the last Parliament, fell in the House of Commons to the dictate of the Government—I refer to the retained EU law Bill. It is true that we are not an elected Chamber, but we are the only Chamber in Parliament that can place some restraint on the Government. In neither of the two Bills I cited did the Government have any electoral or other mandate. In the King’s Speech, the Government state that they intend to

“deliver on the Illegal Migration Act”.

What does this mean? I can only urge the Government heretofore not to use dictatorial powers and urge this House to look after democracy when any Government, of any day and of whatever persuasion, is patently not doing so.

I end my words by addressing the two Ministers, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, and the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom. The Lord Privy Seal, in his excellent speech yesterday, spoke about the friendliness of this House. I have now been rather unfriendly towards the Government of which the two Ministers are members. I hope that they will accept that I was not seeking to be unfriendly to them—they are good and respected Ministers. Their problem is that they are having to answer for the extremists in their party in the other place. We should give our commiserations to both of them.