House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Friday 3rd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and an honour to join your Lordships’ House. It is a pleasure because of the immense kindness already shown to me in abundance by all who legislate and work here, and it is an honour to be able to work here with so many of your Lordships whom I have greatly admired, first, as a journalist writing about government and, later, as an outside observer of the British constitution from my academic home in the school of history at Queen Mary, University of London.

I have long had a fascination for the hidden wiring and the moving parts of our constitution, and now I find myself a small new particle of a very big and significant part of the British constitution—your Lordships’ House. The fascination began almost 44 years ago on an autumn evening in the library of St John’s College, Cambridge, where I spent my undergraduate years. What triggered it? My first reading of Walter Bagehot’s 1867 classic, The English Constitution, a magnificent work, brimming with brio and insight into this most ethereal of governing phenomena. Finding the British constitution has been, in one professional guise or another, an elusive quest for me ever since that evening in Cambridge—a fascination, I have to confess, that has not always been fully understood by less than empathetic colleagues and friends, who tend to see in it a dash of the young trainspotter that I was in the glorious days of steam.

In the context of today’s debate, it is intriguing and, I think, useful to plunder Bagehot’s chapter on the House of Lords, even though it was written in the mid-19th century, and I shall come to that in a moment. On the theme of utility, it is sometimes only in long historical perspectives that we can discern the retrospective work of your Lordships’ House. For example, it turned out to be the prefect receptacle when our country mercifully shed its habit of executing those it had come to regard as failed politicians. I made this point a couple of weeks ago to the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, when we were companions on a journey returning from the University of Aberystwyth. We partly filled the long slog home across mid-Wales by contemplating the value of your Lordships’ House and what might await in future. The noble Lord responded to my historical depiction of the House of Lords as an alternative to execution, and I have his kind permission to relay our conversation, by saying that he had made a similar point to the Russians while on a visit in his capacity as Secretary-General of NATO a decade or so after the Cold War had ended. He told his hosts that what communist Russia had lacked was a House of Lords of its own into which it could have decanted the likes of Leonid Brezhnev. “If you had possessed such an institution,” the noble Lord told the Russians, “you might still have a Soviet Union”.

Back to the real thing, though: your Lordships’ House. In 1867, Bagehot saw it as a Chamber of,

“temporary rejectors and palpable alterers”,

of draft legislation. It was imperative, he wrote, that the House should contain a “class of respected revisers”. He regretted that Lord Palmerston’s proposal for the appointment of life Peers had been rejected, and warned that without such an infusion of persons with professional knowledge and experience, the House of Lords could find itself in peril. He wrote:

“Its danger is not in assassination, but atrophy; not abolition, but decline”.

It took another 91 years before Bagehot’s prescription was fulfilled with the passage of the Life Peerages Act 1958, almost certainly the most transforming incremental reform of your Lordships’ House in its long history, with a powerful and cumulative effect that has made it what it is today—Bagehot’s House of respected revisers. That, in my judgment, is the crucial test to be applied to any of the new configurations of your Lordships’ House that may be proposed: could the Members of a reformed Chamber still be seen as respected revisers?

I was once in favour of an elected Chamber—a British senate of 100 legislators, elected on the basis of proportional representation by huge constituencies that embraced city, town and countryside, with one-third up for election or re-election every five years. I have changed my mind; indeed, it would have been improper to have applied for appointment to the Cross Benches of your Lordships’ House if I had not. There are two chief reasons why I have changed my mind. First, there is the high and continuing utility of having a group of people somewhere in the legislative process who are sensitive to politics and government but are not themselves partisan in a party-political sense. Secondly, in most trades, crafts, professions and walks of life, we are ever keener to widen the confluence of backgrounds, knowledge and experience when recruiting. In my judgment, appointment rather than election will remain the best and primary instrument for achieving this if it is a goal that we share.

Quite apart from election, which would create the danger of a replica Chamber that, by its very existence, would promptly inspire a tussle in terms of relative power with the other place, it is very difficult to imagine that elections would sustain the flow of experience and knowledge that the appointments system provides for your Lordships’ House, especially regarding those with a background in science and technology, business and industry. To rise in the other place, you need first to make your way there in your 30s or early 40s. With the best will in the world, that is usually too soon and too young to have acquired fully professional depth in the laboratory or the boardroom.

I know that undue controversy has no place in a maiden speech, and horizon-scanning is a perilous craft. I hope, however, that your Lordships will allow me a concluding thought on the Bill before us. Once we have seen a debate on the coalition Government’s proposals on reform of your Lordships’ House and they contain, as we expect, a dominant element of election in them, if the two Houses of Parliament find that they cannot reach a consensus on a new DNA for the revising Chamber, and if in the approaching twilight of their term the coalition Government are unwilling to reach for the Parliament Act, we have in the House of Lords Reform Bill in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, a rational, valuable and relatively readily implementable alternative for worthwhile improvement that cuts with the grain of past changes—a means, in short, of effecting organic reforms as an alternative surgery.

Much of the British constitution remains unwritten, though a good deal of it, since I first read Bagehot in 1966, has moved from the back of an envelope to the front of a code and then to the face of an Act of Parliament. I have in mind particularly the Civil Service element in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. Yet much remains as magical and mysterious as when Bagehot picked up his pen to describe what he saw.

Constitutional statutes, when they are drafted and brought forward, are, in effect, the Companies Acts of the British way of government. They are often what Bagehot called the “latent part of legislation”, laden with unanticipated implications for other parts of the British constitution and dripping with the possibility of unintended consequences. Their scrutiny calls for the most special care.