House of Lords Reform

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, ever since my early days, I have thought it anomalous to have hereditary legislators. But here I am, in the Chamber of the House of Lords, an excepted hereditary Peer. I suppose, ignobly, I have to say that in this life you have to play the cards you are dealt, and it was clear early on that I would not be a good professional footballer.

Obviously, as an individual, I am disappointed by the prospect of ejection, but that is the way of the wicked world in which we live, and the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is quite right that it is indifferent to my private grief.

For me, the real issue is not what happens to me but the process, and the consequences of those processes for the world more widely. In reading and thinking about these issues and their history, I was initially surprised that the Parliament Acts appeared to pay so little attention to the question of the transition from the old House to the new one. Then I realised that it is almost certainly because the Life Peerages Act 1958 had not been passed, so at that point the whole thing was not really an issue.

We now appear to be in a constitutional world where so long as the Executive control the House of Commons, which they invariably do, they have the capacity to abolish the second Chamber, and, if they wish, to fill it with creatures and lackeys, for which there will be clear precedent that they can be removed at will. We risk seeing a second Chamber that becomes entirely impotent and, indeed, Parliament as a whole will have no direct say in all this. So much for bicameralism, of which I am a strong supporter—and checks and balances equally so.

The fact that nothing like this has happened has to do as much as anything else with what the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, has called the “good chaps” theory of government. It has generally, though unfortunately, become accepted that this is becoming discredited. I was recently ticked off by a fellow Peer outside the Chamber for making this point. I can see the point she was making. She said, “Don’t be silly; it couldn’t happen here”. Couldn’t it?

When I was elected a Member of the European Parliament in 1989, just before I came here, I had many colleagues who had themselves, or their colleagues, family or friends had, been locked up and tortured by authoritarian regimes. The father of the then chair of the legal affairs committee, Ludwig von Stauffenberg, was one of the heroes of the July plot and had been shot by firing squad on Hitler’s orders. One of my British colleagues told me of a Member whom he got to know who never wore a tie because he had been condemned to death and taken to the gallows, and reprieved only after the noose had been placed round his neck.

For five years, I sat on the European Parliament’s constitutional affairs committee and I was struck by how many other countries had approaches to constitutional law and the courts that were quite different from ours. No doubt that is because they had been under authoritarian rule quite recently. In this country, there was no German officer on a white horse riding down Whitehall, as happened on the Champs-Élysées. That is not that far away, in either time or space.

In those days, bliss it was to be alive in the political world; now, there is volatility and even darkness in the wider political atmosphere. There are international conflicts of a kind we have not seen since the Second World War. Only a few months ago, in this very Chamber, we debated whether the Government of the day should remove the scrutiny of the courts from some of their activities. Since then, we have seen a number of extremist riots in our streets. I believe that “It couldn’t happen here” are some of the most dangerous words in politics. We should remember that we take out fire insurance not because our house will burn down but because it might.

At the conclusion of the consideration of the forthcoming Bill, I believe we will need to have a definitive restatement of how the Parliament Acts, the Life Peerages Act, the Bill itself and the sovereignty of Parliament all fit together in the interests of freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and what if any safe- guards might be needed to underpin them. For all of us here, I believe this is a case of ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.