House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, there is one insuperable objection to the Bill, and it is not to do with the qualities of our hereditary colleagues, which have been referred to many times in this debate, most recently by my noble friend Lord Bethell. It is absolutely true that they do the unthanked, workaday, unremunerated jobs—they serve as Whips and sit on all the dull committees that make the place work—but I do not expect that to be as persuasive an argument on the Government Benches as on these Benches.

Seeing my noble friend Lord Remnant, I rather had this fantasy that he might be the very last hereditary Peer. That would have been an enormously suitable thing, but, again, I do not expect it to be a convincing argument.

It is not, by the way, the fact that we are removing the only elected element from the Chamber. Yes, they are elected by a tiny group of people but, none the less, that is more of a mandate than the rest of us have. We are here by the whim of the Executive. If you think about what a legislative Chamber exists to do and has existed to do since Magna Carta, we have been here to hold the Executive in check. On the idea of having one of our two legislative Chambers wholly appointed by the Prime Minister, if that were happening in Zimbabwe or somewhere, we would all say that it was shockingly undemocratic. Being beneficiaries of it does not make it any less so.

It is not even the breaking of the link back to Magna Carta, which my noble friends spoke of earlier. Look around at the architecture of this room: it was in the minds of Barry and Pugin to recreate the idea of a medieval King taking counsel of his bishops and barons. You take the hereditaries out of it and it is very difficult to see how we can remain being a House of Lords—the idea of our having titles will become absurd once we have snapped that thread with history.

Finally, it is not about the Government’s failure to build consensus behind this major constitutional change—and it is major, not a tiny tidying-up measure. Imagine if Olaf Scholz decided to remove 10% of the members of the German Bundesrat, or if Emmanuel Macron decided fundamentally to change the composition of the French Senate. It could not be done without a major constitutional process. There was an opportunity to build consensus, but the Government have a mandate, and there is no rule that says that a Government with a mandate need to be wise or consensual—we are all allowed to be immoderate and mistaken. That is how the system works.

I would make a defence not of the hereditary principle, which everyone says is indefensible, but of the hereditary practice that we see around us and which seems very defensible. We see it from high streets—every time we see a sign saying “Williams and Son Butchers”—right up to the Throne, and people do not seem to find that at all indefensible. But none of that is going to persuade the Government Benches.

Frankly, I am a supporter of an elected House. It always sounds transgressive to say that here, and I always feel slightly guilty doing it, even though it is, I think, the position of every party represented at the other end, from the Greens to Reform. I do not know why it is such an odd position.

The fundamental, insuperable objection to this legislation is simply that it breaks a deal. That was conceded by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, in her opening remarks, when she said that the mechanism for hereditary by-elections was never expected to be used. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, confirmed at the time in the late 1990s, this was because he expected the second stage of reform to have come into effect before the first by-election took place. There was a bargain, in effect, between the hereditaries and the Labour Party, and the bargain was that the hereditaries would not hold up Tony Blair’s 1998 legislation in exchange for the remaining reprieved 92. To say that it is indefensible or irrational or does not make sense is utterly beside the point: the 92, if you like, were there precisely to be the pebble in the shoe, the reminder that the second stage of reform had not been delivered and that we were not going to remain with a Zimbabwean system of the Executive appointing half the legislature.

This Bill taps that pebble from the shoe without delivering the rest of the bargain and moving to a democratic upper House. Fundamentally, that is what is wrong. It is dishonest and dishonourable. To claim that the only reason that this cannot be done is because it is a delaying tactic and that, unless we all agree on everything until it is all agreed, nothing will happen, simply does not apply when you have just won 411 seats at the other end. The Government are perfectly capable, if they want to, of having a democratic upper House. They are refusing to do so for the same reason that every previous Government have: they like to have the patronage powers and to be able to move people out of the way.

I remind the party opposite that it has been its commitment since 1902 to have a democratic upper House, and they entered into an explicit bargain in 1998. The hereditaries delivered their side; the Labour Party should deliver its side. Pacta sunt servanda.