House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Saatchi Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Saatchi (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the two Front Benches in the Whips’ Office for allowing me to speak at this very late stage. I have been given a very strict time limit and I will stick to it exactly. I give my salutations to the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, and congratulations to my noble friend Lord Brady. Will the noble Baroness the Leader of the House allow me to address her directly now with an appeal to put aside, just for a minute, hereditary versus life Peers, the over-80s, participation rates et cetera and look at the broader context of the Bill in British politics today?

Everyone agrees that there is a general demoralisation. All polls show that the British people think things have “got worse” in the last five years and will not get any better in the next five years. Maybe that is just about money, the cost of living and so on, or maybe there is more to it. Maybe people do not like it when Governments keep breaking their promises on immigration, tax, the NHS et cetera. Maybe they do not like having to wait five years until the next election before somebody will listen to what they say. In their manifesto, as we have heard many times, the Government made a promise of “modernisation”. It is a good word. I looked it up. It means development, renewal and upgrade. I would like to help the noble Baroness the Leader of the House to deliver on that good promise of modernisation.

An obvious way to demonstrate modernisation is to do something modern. How about some new technology? Would it not be wonderful if our House would lead the way with new technology to invite people to participate a little more with questions, discussion and conversation about what we do here—what the noble Lord the Lord Speaker himself has called a “direct connection” between Westminster and the people—to overcome what my noble friend Lady Stowell calls “the democratic deficit”? ChatGPT now speaks to 280 million people a week. With a little help from our friends in OpenAI and Microsoft, we could easily create our own parliamentary version of ChatGPT, which we can very happily call ChatLords. The noble Baroness the Leader of the House may wonder why she should take any advice from me, of all people. After all, Professor David Butler, the master of the history of British general elections, told me directly that I was “personally responsible”—I am quoting his words—for “ruining British politics”. I asked how I had done that, and he explained that it was by, “Turning all British general elections into negative campaigning”. I defended myself by pointing out that nine of the 10 commandments are negative. He was not impressed.

I will end. The noble Baroness the Leader of the House is rightly proud of her party’s electoral success, built on its reputation for caring about the people. If that promise too is not to be broken, I hope she might consider taking forward this proposal for a more participative form of democracy led by your Lordships’ House.