Queen's Speech

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I am sure that the House will learn lessons from that experience. It all looks different from this side of the House. I can assure the noble Lord that we shall certainly scrutinise the legislation carefully.

I now turn to the alternative vote. Will the noble Baroness tell us in her winding-up speech when we can expect legislation on the proposed referendum and when the referendum is intended to be held? Will a threshold be set in terms of the turnout and the size of the majority that is required for a yes vote in the referendum to succeed? Fifty-five per cent, perhaps?

Why is the coalition bent on reducing the number of Members of Parliament? I have yet to see any persuasive arguments for that. Are 70,000 electors really too small a number for an MP to represent? The intention for more equal constituency sizes will create some unnatural constituencies, as the Electoral Commission pointed out in February. Constituencies will change more frequently, destabilising the link between MPs and constituents. Again, I suggest that the answer is bound up with a narrow, partisan interest and the proposed speeding up of individual voter registration.

We passed legislation to provide for a carefully staged transition from household registration to individual voter registration in a way that would reduce the risk of people falling off the electoral register, as happened in Northern Ireland. If that careful process is ripped up and the rollout made prematurely, millions of people could fall off the register. I remind the House that that is extremely important because constituency boundaries are drawn on the basis of registered electors. We know from the Electoral Commission that 3.5 million eligible voters are missing from the register today. They are predominantly missing in areas of poorer, younger, mobile populations. It would be wholly unacceptable for seats to be cut and boundaries redrawn on the basis of an electoral register from which millions of our fellow citizens are missing.

I am pleased that the Government are supporting the implementations of the Wright committee’s proposals to make the House of Commons more effective, but what of your Lordships’ House? I noted with interest the remarks made on Tuesday by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, who said:

“I also believe that we should look afresh at our working practices. I do not think we should lose sight of the remarkable privileges that Peers already enjoy, such as the right, not given to Back-Bench Members in another place, to table amendments at three stages of a Bill, and to have each one heard and replied to. We should always keep our working practices up to date”.—[Official Report, 25/5/10; col. 22.]

The noble Lord’s rather late conversion to procedural reform is, on the face of it, most welcome, but I say to him that any attempt to restrict the right of Back-Benchers to scrutinise legislation will be firmly resisted. I am happy to discuss the report of the Labour Peers’ working group, which was in the context of a wider debate about the conventions and the pressing against the boundaries of those conventions by the party opposite at the time.

Finally, I come to reform of your Lordships’ House. The coalition parties have agreed to establish a committee. That is progress indeed. The noble Lords, Lord McNally and Lord Strathclyde, and I have already spent many happy hours in such a committee. I must put a question to the Minister, as I am not sure what the committee is going to be asked to do. It seems that the outcome of its work is already known. He has already said it today: a mainly or wholly elected upper Chamber under PR and a system of grandfathering for the current Peers. So what is left for the committee to do? What will the composition of the committee be? Will its outcome be a White Paper and will a draft Bill be published for pre-legislative scrutiny?

Grandfathering is not really about the transition; it is a term used in the regulation of professions and essentially it means that existing practitioners go forward into the new qualified regulated profession. It is clear that grandfathering means that existing Members become Members of a reformed House. I ask the noble Baroness to confirm my interpretation.

In the mean time, as the noble Lord, Lord McNally, confirmed, we are faced with the apparent intention of the coalition to appoint dozens, if not hundreds, of new Peers. Why is this being done, given that the Government already heavily outnumber the Opposition, with 258 Members compared to our 211? There has long been an understanding that there should be rough parity between the Government and the main Opposition. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, has eloquently put the case for a strong second Chamber. In his Politeia article, he argued:

“The executive may not want a second opinion, but every country needs a Parliamentary system that provides one. Part of that must lie in a strong, independent House of Lords”.

Are those the words of a leading Member of a coalition that advocates swamping the Lords to give the Government an inbuilt and overwhelming majority?

Then there is the question of the conventions. I ask the noble Baroness to confirm that the committee will look at how the current conventions will be underpinned and the primacy of the Commons assured in an elected House. I remind her of the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham, on the conventions, which made it clear that firm proposals for changing the composition of the House would require a re-examination of those conventions.

The coalition professes that it wants to strengthen Parliament to create a new politics. I would have thought that this should have been grounded in promises that the parties made to the public in the recent election. However, when we look at the proposals to be brought before us, how many do we see that were in the manifestos of the two parties? The Conservatives were certainly silent on a referendum on the alternative vote. They were also silent on fixed-term Parliaments. The Conservatives were silent on the intervals between elections to be fixed at five years, as were, incidentally, the Liberal Democrats. The Conservatives were silent on the 55 per cent super-majority required for the Dissolution of Parliament, as were the Liberal Democrats. The Conservatives were silent on their intention to give the Executive a massive majority in the Lords, as were the Liberal Democrats. We see proposals for major constitutional change that were not put to the British people at the recent election. They were cobbled together behind closed doors. They amount to a lack of trust between the two parties and they will do little—

[Lord Tyler]

Does the noble Lord now resile from all the promises made by Mr Gordon Brown before, during and since the general election on AV, on fixed-term Parliaments and on implementing the White Paper produced by Mr Jack Straw? Is the Labour Party’s position now that it does not stand on any of its manifesto commitments?

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[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, in expressing delight that my noble friend Lord McNally is sitting where he is, I should also express my thanks and appreciation that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and the noble Lord, Lord Bach, with their invariable courtesy and constructive dialogue, occupied that Bench with distinction.

In retrospect, Mr Tony Blair and his Government in May 1997 were unlucky and unfortunate in terms of the way in which this country has been governed. They had too big a majority. Had there been a small, or indeed no, majority, we would have seen completion of the necessary reforms that were set out in the agreement between Mr Robin Cook and the then Mr Robert Maclennan. Instead, of course, we had very timid Lords reform. We had no outcome from the Jenkins commission on electoral reform, to which Mr Blair had committed himself. Instead, he was in thrall to old Labour—Messrs Prescott, Straw and Blunkett—and there was no partnership for a radically reforming Government in the 21st century. We had 13 years of retreat on civil liberties; constitutional renewal was under constant attack; there was subservience to the right-wing tabloid press; and even the 2008 Lords reform White Paper sat gathering dust for two more years. There was weak-kneed collapse of the discussions on cleaning up party funding and then only a deathbed repentance on electoral reform. Those on the opposite side of your Lordships’ House who now bemoan what happened on 6 May have only their side to blame, because they failed to address the collapse in public confidence in politics and Parliament.

I never thought that I would say this but, in contrast, David Cameron deserves full credit for recognising, in the first hours after the electorate gave their verdict, that a much more imaginative and radical response was required to make possible any renewal of trust in politics and Parliament. It would have been only too easy to have adopted the Wilson lesson of the summer of 1974. I remember it well. What Mr Wilson did was to delay any serious discussion of the economic problems, to delay any of the painful decisions that were necessary and to postpone all the difficulties until he thought that he would get a majority. On our side, it would have been very easy for the Liberal Democrats to continue in the comfort zone of perpetual opposition.

I give full credit to David Cameron and Nick Clegg. That was true leadership. Breaking the mouldy mould of confrontational politics was not only the right thing but the popular thing to do. By 2:1, a large majority, the public are showing their favour for the new agreement. That is far greater support than any other Government since the war has enjoyed. People recognise—

[Lord Hughes of Woodside]

How could the electorate give a confidence vote to an agreement that was never envisaged at the time of the election?

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, I have heard so often from those Benches the expression that the public are in support of something because the polls show that and because a large majority of people voted for those parties. That is what people do at general elections. They do not vote for every jot and tittle of the manifestos; they vote to support the judgment that they believe to be nearest to their own view. That is what happened. I say this honestly and sincerely to friends on the opposite side of your Lordships’ House: it is important that they, too, recognise what the electorate said on 6 May, as we have, because people recognised, in the light the economic legacy, that a different response was required. The Labour Party has not yet woken up to that reality.

I yield to no one in my respect for the former Leader of the House, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon. I have the greatest respect for her, but, honestly, her speech on Tuesday did not do her justice. Sarcasm does not suit her. It was a very ungracious speech. It is amazing how quickly former Ministers, bereft of their advisers, fall into the trap of silly oppositionitis. Take the example that has regularly been mentioned today that the new Government have a complete and guaranteed automatic majority in your Lordships’ House. That is to suggest that Members on the Cross Benches have no influence and no say in what happens in this House. That is simply not true.

[Lord Grocott]

I shall be brief. Can the noble Lord confirm that, if the Liberals had always voted with the Labour Government in the past 13 years, every single Division—bar one or two at the most—would have been won? The Government have a majority in this House and to suggest anything else is to distort the language.

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[Lord Tyler]

That was not the point that was being made earlier today or on Tuesday. The conventions were referred to. I served on the Joint Committee on Conventions. It is simply not true that the conventions are as were described on Tuesday and today. I certainly agree that we must review them, but it is not true that the conventions meant, as was stated on Tuesday, that the Salisbury/Addison agreement, which was an agreement between only two parties, still stands today. That is simply not true.

We have had a discussion about the threshold for Dissolution. I can tell your Lordships’ House that the original idea was to adopt the Scottish 66 per cent. As has been implied, that is indeed the custom elsewhere, but it was sensibly decided that that percentage was excessive. For those who do not understand the difference between a vote of confidence and the Dissolution of the House, I should draw attention to the sensible—as one would expect—contribution by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern. These are different issues. What is important at this stage is that this is the first Prime Minister who has been prepared to give up the right to call a general election when it suited his party’s advantage. That was not, of course, the case with the previous Prime Minister, who only dallied with the idea of a fixed-term Parliament during the fifth year of the Parliament.

[Lord Graham of Edmonton]

If the noble Lord is pleading the case that this is the first Prime Minister to give up the right to call an election, surely he would agree that that was in exchange for a guarantee that he would not face the country until the end of a five-year Parliament.

[Lord Tyler]

I am not yet in a position to give any undertaking on behalf of the Prime Minister. I hope that I will be given injury time, because I seem to be provoking a certain amount of difference.

I sincerely hope that my colleagues and friends on the opposite side of the House and in the other place will not fall into thinking that we are simply back where we were before 6 May. The electorate have spoken and I very much hope that the new leader of the Labour Party will not dance to the tune of Labour reactionaries in both Houses. We need cohesion but also continuity and consistency in this Parliament if we are to deal with the economic problems that our nation faces. It is simply untrue, as has been suggested, that somehow any form of electoral reform will necessarily lead to an increase in the occasions when we have no overall majority in the other place. As Professor John Curtice, the most influential of all psephologists, has pointed out, first past the post is likely to deliver that, too.

We had the 2008 White Paper on Lords reform and there was a great deal of agreement. I hope that we can build on that and I understand and undertake to pursue as fast as I am able to—as one Member of your Lordships’ House—the idea that the next full stage should be done as a public discussion of the options that still remain within the context of pre-legislative scrutiny. The great advantage of that is that the public can be involved, in a public way, in a discussion of the options. Relatively few issues need to be resolved, but it is not fair, right or proper for Members of your Lordships’ House to suggest that we are rushing into this. I remind them that your Lordships’ House and the other place passed the Parliament Act 1911 with the preamble that it would,

“substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis”.

That has hardly been rushed.

Finally, I turn to the role of your Lordships’ House. Yes, of course we need to undertake the most effective scrutiny on all these issues. There should be no shilly-shally. That is quite right. However, since the coalition has now guaranteed that it will pursue the whole Tony Wright agenda for reforms of the Commons, it is surely right that the exercise referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, and others, stimulated by the Lord Speaker under the title “Strengthening Parliament”, should be advanced as quickly as it can be. I, too, was glad to hear what was said from the Front Bench.

The contribution by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, and the contribution over many months by the Institute for Government on improving the way in which we operate—both Houses, all Parliament working together holding the Executive to account—demand a radical review. I hope that that will happen, because the core problem of restoring public trust and confidence remains with us.