House of Lords: Reform

Lord Lang of Monkton Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lang of Monkton]

My Lords, I did not participate in any of the earlier debates over the years on the reform of this House. I thought that I would wait until the traffic eased up a bit and the pressures died down, so that I would be able to dilate at leisure. Clearly I waited in vain. I am now being lapped by many noble Lords, in some cases for the third or fourth time. However, I at least have the comfort of knowing that, if I bore your Lordships on this subject, I shall be doing so for the first time.

My noble friend the Leader of the House proclaimed yesterday that this reform was promised in the Conservative manifesto at the last election. I say with the greatest respect to my noble friend, who is not in his place, that that does not necessarily make it right. Given what my right honourable friend the Prime Minister said before the last election, I find myself surprised to discover how quickly we seem to have reached our third term.

On reading the draft Bill, so many thoughts crowded in on me as to what was wrong with it that I remained baffled. What, for example, is the point of a Bill that seeks to bring increased democratic legitimacy to this House through election but would deny the elected the right to exercise that legitimacy? Surely that is unsustainable. What is the point in bringing into this House, hot from the hustings, elected and politically motivated Members, as they would be, who had probably tried and failed to be selected for and elected to the other place, and forcing them to confine their energies here to the detailed scrutiny and revision of legislation that is at present done so well by existing Members—and to do that all in the name of the holy grail of democratic legitimacy? I shall return to that issue shortly.

By common consent, this House has a diverse range of expertise and experience that the House of Commons lacks. Every Member of this House has been appointed because he or she has something to offer. The electorate will not benefit if we destroy that, and nor will democracy. Incidentally, 300 Members would not be enough. There may be only 300 to 400 Members, on average, active in the House at the present time, but they are not always the same ones. To change this would inevitably lead to frustration among the new, elected Members and then to challenge. It could destroy the invaluable equilibrium between the two Houses that is afforded by the present arrangements.

There seems to be an aggressive antagonism towards this place, implicit in the Deputy Prime Minister’s proposals. Surely that is entirely the wrong way to go about reform, which should be gradual and consensual. Consideration of reform should not be only about this House or that House, conducted in isolation with no thought for the constitutional ripples between and beyond the two. We have a bicameral system of government. We are two Houses of the same Parliament that have evolved together over centuries. I do not think that enough has been said about that bicamerality. Of course there has been passing reference, but, in this House, in our system, it has a particular and special quality. Our two Chambers interact in a unique way. They are like the two ventricles of a human heart; they share the same heartbeat. Cut into one and the other will suffer as well; complementarity and equilibrium will have been destroyed.

The bigger the change in the make-up of this House, the greater will be the need to re-examine the balance of powers and the conventions that operate between the two Houses. Together, these two Houses represent a parliamentary democracy—asymmetrical, certainly, but highly functional. It is not a textbook democracy of abstract, theoretical perfection, but a living, practising one. To those who would suggest that only elections can bring legitimacy, it is worth pointing out the obvious: this House has never been elected and yet its democratic legitimacy has over the years been deemed fit for purpose.

We acknowledge that the elected House has primacy and in any dispute must ultimately prevail. I want us to retain an appointed upper House precisely because I respect the primacy of the other place. That way we can continue to differ from it but defer to it. Democratic legitimacy is not bestowed simply by ticking the directly elected box; it is achieved by time, by custom and practice, by function, by performance and by popular acceptance. I believe that this House has popular acceptance. If it did not, it would not have endured. Those noble Lords who have spoken in support of the draft Bill seem to be saying that this House should become an elected one in order to make us as popular as the House of Commons. I believe that we can do better than that.

Still less is legitimacy achieved by the added twist of proportional representation. After all, was it not Lloyd George who described proportional representation as a “device for defeating democracy”? As to the 80 per cent elected option, quite apart from the difficulties of a hybrid and two-tier House, if an elected House is the Deputy Prime Minister’s guiding principle, then 80 per cent elected is four-fifths of a principle, which is rather like being four-fifths pregnant.

It is unprincipled to contemplate changing the membership of this House without first considering and agreeing what we want this House to do. If the powers and role are to remain the same, then so should the membership. If we change the membership, then the powers and role will assuredly change, irrevocably. I cannot believe that that is what the other place wants.

There is much need for reform within this House—reform of the way we are appointed, of our numbers, of some of our procedures and perhaps even of our length of tenure. One senses a clear consensus on that. We should press on with deciding on those and other reforms in our traditional, evolutionary way. This Bill, by abolishing the House as at present constituted and replacing it with something quite different, would enforce the unprovoked disruption of our constitution. It would cut into the very bone and marrow of our parliamentary democracy. I believe that it is an affront to our country’s constitutional integrity and we should have nothing to do with it.