House of Lords: Membership

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, indicated—and I congratulate him on his timeliness; this is an ingenious way of tabling a debate—the central issue behind the dreadful mess that we are in is the irresponsibility of people increasing the size of the House, on this pretext or that. The connection between that and the memorandum of the Clerk of the Parliaments is palpable. You cannot go through these paragraphs without seeing that this problem would not be so acute or even here at all if we were in a sensible constitutional position. In this country we seem to have been able to make up a constitution through a so-called coalition agreement for Government, but when I lecture on behalf of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy in Mozambique, the one thing I tell them they cannot do is invent constitutions as they go along according to short-term political considerations. That is what we are doing in this country and it is shameful.

To be even-handed, I blame all the three major political parties, but perhaps some more than others. I will just run through the charge sheet because it has a bearing on what we can do about it. The first mea culpa is for the Labour Party, but as my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath will confirm, in response to an invitation from Tony Blair some six or seven years ago, the Labour Party wrote a memorandum, which I helped to draft, on the future of the House of Lords. It included all the elements that were subsequently picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, and sold to the noble Lords, Lord Cormack and Lord Steel. It largely became the Steel Bill. There were people in all three political parties with an answer; they were not just whingeing about it.

Now we have this absurdity, and I shall come on to the Liberal Democrats. We stopped kicking the ball in the right direction when there was a change of Prime Minister on the Labour side, but the most absurd formula, of course, is the one written as a holy writ in the coalition agreement. It says that the pattern of this House should reflect the voting in the last general election. What an absurdity; what a shameful absurdity in constitutional terms. Yet Mr Clegg and his followers, with a straight face, express the belief that it is fair. We do not need much of a crystal ball to speculate about what might happen after the next election. If, as I hope, Labour gets in with an overall majority and we were to apply that formula, what would the Liberal Democrats be supposed to do? Half of them would commit hari kari. It would be painful to watch, but that is the logical result of their position.

Finally, the Clerk of the Parliaments is someone who can look at this position dispassionately and for the long term. When he wrote the first draft of this memorandum, which a lot of people saw, it had in it a suggestion that the three party leaders ought to get together and agree a formula on this very question, but then he was nobbled. I do not think that the Clerk of the Parliaments should be nobbled by the party leaders, but the first draft had that suggestion in it, and now it is not there. It was the final paragraph, and it has now gone. I think that this is a case of the politicians getting above their station in this matter. We ought to allow the Clerk of the Parliaments to speak for the constitutional requirements that lie behind debates of this kind.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are getting into very difficult constitutional questions here. Again, I have heard discussions about this among some of my noble friends. A Labour Party that wins a majority of seats in the House of Commons on perhaps 35% of the vote and a 60% turnout raises the question of whether that is really a majority or not.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am sorry to press the point, but is that not precisely the doctrine of the coalition agreement—the formula should reflect the results of the last general election—or is it only to suit this particular Government at this particular moment in time?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, it is that in new appointments, one should head in that direction. I speak for a party which received no nominations to this House for several years under Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative Government. Let me say—