House of Lords Reform

Lord Reay Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Reay (Con)]

My Lords, democracy is a strange animal: an animal of which no perfect specimen exists anywhere, nor ever has or ever could. It is an animal that is different from one country to the next, because countries have different histories, social and cultural characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, peoples and peculiarities. It is an animal that is different, too, from one moment to the next. Who would have thought that one-third of the popular vote in a British general election, on a turnout of 60% of the electorate, could generate, for the party concerned, nearly two-thirds of the seats in the other place and a majority of 174? Not I—yet that is what happened in July of this year.

As I say, democracy is a strange animal and at some moments, it is stranger than at others. Of course, politicians are strange and imperfect animals too. On the whole, whatever they themselves may fondly believe, they are very much stranger than most of those they represent. One might think that a truly freak election result, such as that of 2024, would necessarily lend a certain humility to the MPs, the party, the Government concerned, and therefore a certain openness and flexibility of mind, and a certain caution, not least on constitutional matters, such as the composition of this House. One might think that, and think it only normal, which it would be—but strange as it may seem, if one did, one would be disappointed.

That brings me to the topic before us today. I have three questions. We are, all of us—however we come to be here, by whatever strange route—Members of a revising Chamber. My first question is therefore this: would the loss of its hereditary Members make this place a better or a worse revising Chamber, or would it make no difference at all? I believe that it would make it a worse one, and that a majority of your Lordships, on all sides, know this full well and know why. Forgive me if that sounds vainglorious, but this is too important a moment for false collective modesty. We box, in this place, above our weight, and everyone knows it.

My second question is, would the loss of its hereditaries make this a more democratic and thus a more representative Chamber? At first glance, perhaps it would. After all, what could be less democratic than a hereditary legislator? Or, to speak of my own case, what could be less democratic than to owe your membership of this House to a title created, as the Daily Mirror put it, because your

“great-grandad’s cousin’s dad’s fourth cousin’s dad’s cousin’s great-great-great-grandad was made a Lord in 1628”?

Who could be less representative of the general population than the bearer of such a title?

Yet it is not quite that simple, is it? Not when one considers the underlying political, constitutional, cultural and human realities. To begin with, we have—all of us hereditaries—been elected, and some of us by the whole House. King Charles might be the King, and most of his subjects British, by virtue of an accident of birth, but it is not by accident of birth alone that we sit here. By contrast, the vast majority of Peers, all but the Lords Spiritual and ourselves, owe their place on these Benches to patronage. I have looked hard at this system of patronage—looked, so to speak, in its mouth, under its bonnet, in its nooks and crannies—and for the life of me, I can find nothing very democratic about it.

There is then the little matter of those cultural and human, flesh, blood and temperamental realities: the kind of people we are, individually and collectively; or more to the point, the kind we are not. We are not politicians or political players—or not of a conventional sort. We are of a conventionally strange sort, perhaps. Of course, this is something we have in common with most members of the public we seek to represent. I believe it to be something rather important.

My third and last question has to do with timing. Is this the right moment for such reform? There were negotiations. There was clear agreement to postpone our removal, if removal there must sadly be, until wider and deeper reform of this House. Present proposals seem premature, peremptory and unworthy of Parliament. So to my three questions: would the loss of its hereditary Members make this place a better revising Chamber? It would make it worse. Would our removal make this a more democratic and representative Chamber? No, it would not. Is this the right moment? If agreements mean anything, it is not.