Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Cormack

Monday 14th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

Those of us who have followed in great detail the Committee proceedings on this Bill will know that I have argued at length, together with other noble Lords, for a large number of measures that could greatly improve the accuracy and completeness of the electoral register, particularly schemes of data matching and data mining, which would enable public and private databases—

[Lord Cormack]

Was it this purity of motive that provoked the Deputy Prime Minister to make his off-the-cuff statement on 6 August?

[Lord Rennard]

The Deputy Prime Minister’s statement on 6 August was clearly not off the cuff and noble Lords to my left should have been aware of what he was going to say in the event of other issues which took place.

If I might proceed with some of my arguments, I would also like to say that for some of these Benches, another argument is very important. In the long deliberations on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, we considered the relative effects on the power of the Executive and Parliament of reducing the number of MPs from 650 to 600. My party has always considered the need to reduce the number of MPs in the context of issues such as greater devolution and decentralisation, and the reform of your Lordships’ House. Not all my noble friends behind me will agree on some key aspects of Lords reform, but we all want to see an effective second Chamber able to hold a Government, of any party, to account. The failure to achieve—

Queen’s Speech

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Cormack

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

I think that Lloyd George in his many arguments against the hereditary basis of the House of Lords felt otherwise as he tried to introduce radical legislation.

Turning to more recent times, I would dare to suggest that opposition to the Government’s legislative programme in the past two years has often gone well beyond polite exhortations to the Commons to reconsider. This House has real purpose and real power, even if limited today to the significant power to delay non-financial matters. The power to delay can in practice often be the power to prevent.

The issue of legitimacy for this House to exercise its powers has been debated for more than 100 years. It is frequently suggested that we may now be moving too rapidly to conclude that debate. As I have said previously, it is probably only in this place that a Government intent on proceeding with a principle contained in all major party manifestos and introducing a phased programme of democratic reform over about 15 years could be accused of acting with “undue haste” with only a mere century of deliberation so far.

Proposals for reform appear to have shocked many noble friends to my left in this Chamber—I do not mean to my political left, of course—as well as a few around me. Some of those around me should recall that we have two words in our party title. The first word is “Liberal”, which takes us back to the party of Lloyd George and Asquith and that fight to end the hereditary principle and, at least in Asquith’s case, to replace it with the popular principle for membership of the House.

[Lord Cormack]

My noble friend will of course remember that both Lloyd George and Asquith accepted hereditary peerages.

[Lord Rennard]

Indeed they did, and some of us accepted life peerages. Some of us who I know were strong supporters of the principle of democracy and elections to this place accepted peerages because it was the only way in which we might have a voice in these debates and eventually a vote to support those principles.

For Members around me perhaps looking for a little further guidance as to where our party should be on this issue, I suggest that there is a clue in the second word of our party name, “Democrat”. I take a simple view about the nature of representative democracy: I strongly believe that those who approve the laws should be elected by those who have to obey them.

As for noble Lords who take a more Conservative position, I understand that it took a long time for their predecessors to accept such principles as the universal franchise, the secret ballot and the abolition of rotten boroughs, but I might remind them of what their party has said in more recent times. Under the leadership of Mr William Hague in 2001, the Conservative Party manifesto stated:

“We would like to see a stronger House of Lords in the future, including a substantial elected element”.

Under the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne, in 2005, the Conservative Party manifesto said that,

“proper reform of the House of Lords has been repeatedly promised but never delivered … We will seek cross-party consensus for a substantially elected House of Lords”.

In 2010, the manifesto on which 307 Conservative MPs were elected stated:

“We will work to build a consensus for a mainly-elected second chamber to replace the current House of Lords”.

[Lord Cormack]

I know that my noble friend likes to be accurate, so would he acknowledge that in 2007, when another place voted on these proposals, more Conservative Members voted against the party’s official policy of 100% elected than for it? That policy, enunciated in manifestos, has been repeatedly repudiated by the majority of Members of the Conservative Party.

[Lord Rennard]

Indeed, but the question must be put as to why the party stood on that manifesto in 2010 as clearly and unequivocally as it did. The Conservatives stood on that basis over 10 years, with three manifestos— whether there would be a substantially or predominantly elected element or changes to the House of Lords. It was on that basis that they were elected. That is a matter for others to judge them on.

It will be to the relief of the House that I will not quote every Labour manifesto on the subject of House of Lords reform. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, tried to refer to 11 of them in brief. I will quote just one, which happens to be the one on which the last Labour Government were elected. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is not in his place. He suggested that whenever the Labour Party advocated Lords reform, it lost. I seem to recall that the Labour Party won the 1997 general election, and did so decisively with a majority of 179.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Rennard]

I simply think that PR is a matter of democracy and we need democracy within this House.

Given the Labour Party’s recent history on House of Lords reform, I am surprised by this new-found enthusiasm for a referendum on the issue. I note that that was in the Labour Party’s manifesto in 2010 but not previously. In the 1996-97 period, leading Liberal Democrats such as my noble friend Lord Maclennan of Rogart, together with the late Robin Cook and other noble Lords and Baronesses—some of them present in the House tonight—agreed a fundamental reform of the House of Lords in the event of the Conservatives losing the 1997 general election. There was no suggestion that there should be a referendum on the proposals. It seems that if there is to be a referendum on the issue it would be because parliamentarians in the other place have failed to do the job that they were elected to do.

I would like to refer briefly back to the report on referendums—

[Lord Cormack]

How does my noble friend square his championing of the referendums for electing mayors of our cities and for AV with resolutely being against a referendum for the biggest constitutional change in the composition of our Parliament that we will have seen for over a century?

[Lord Rennard]

My noble friend and other noble Lords will never have heard me argue the case for referendums for mayors. Noble Lords present during the debates last year on the Localism Bill will have heard me express strong reservations about referendums. There are often major problems with the conduct of referendums. The only exception I have thought of to my general belief in representative democracy above referendums is that the system by which Members are chosen in the place that has primacy should be chosen not by those Members themselves but by the voters.

A number of noble Lords have suggested this evening that electors a year ago chose first past the post and rejected proportional representation—that was the implication of a number of arguments. I remind noble Lords that the option of proportional representation was never offered to the voters last year because noble Lords from other parties and Members of another place were too fearful that people might decide to have that system rather than first past the post.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Cormack

Monday 18th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords—

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords—

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, could carry on and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, could speak after him.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Cormack

Monday 21st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, not long ago the noble Lord argued quite passionately that it was too much for your Lordships to consider together the two items of the voting system for Westminster and constituency boundaries. If he is now suggesting that the alternative to piecemeal legislation would have been a more comprehensive piece of legislation dealing with those two issues and the issues of fixed-term Parliaments and House of Lords reform, he is rather contradicting the argument that he made not very long ago.

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, was not drawn by the somewhat mischievous question of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes. Many of us hope that it will be a very long time indeed before we debate elections of any sort to the Second Chamber. When that day comes, we hope that those proposals, whatever they may be, will be seen off.

For the first time, I find myself almost wholly in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, in the substance of his speech proposing the amendment. As he says, it seems quite extraordinary that, in a Bill which is supposed to be clipping the wings of the Prime Minister, we should be giving the Prime Minister such tremendous power. Unless we are to appoint a soothsayer to the Prime Minister—“Beware the Ides of March”—for the life of me, I do not see that any Prime Minister could conceivably be able to forecast so accurately that he could bring forward the date of an election by two months. As the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, has said and as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, and my noble friend Lord Norton have indicated, that should certainly be deleted from the Bill.

On the postponement of an election, one can understand that there could be a great national emergency or tragedy—one sincerely hopes that there will not be—when it would be quite improper, totally insensitive and wrong to plough ahead with a general election on a specific day. I will not rehearse the sort of things that could happen but we have talked about the foot and mouth crisis of 2001. I was one of those in the other place who strongly supported Prime Minister Blair when he came to the House and proposed that the local elections should be postponed. That was entirely right. God forbid that there should be some disaster like 9/11, but in such circumstances one understands that it would be right to postpone the date of an election.

It is important that the spirit of the amendment of my noble friend Lord Norton should be taken on board by the Government and that there should be a clear specification of the sort of circumstances. I also think it is important, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, has said that such a proposal should be put to and approved by both Houses of Parliament. I was delighted that he made that point so clearly and forcefully. Of course, we shall not be voting on this tonight but I hope that my noble and learned friend Lord Wallace of Tankerness will be able to give us a very positive and encouraging reply. He is a man of infinite resource and he is always genial and helpful to the House, but if he could not give us a real promise on this point of significant change to the current wording in the Bill, then I think on Report there would be amendments which many of us would feel obliged to support.