Queen’s Speech

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure from these Benches to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter. I am always conscious that I was appointed early to this House after the untimely death of her father when my party needed a foreign policy specialist. I have now been here rather longer than I originally expected.

I want my speech to follow closely what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, has said and his quoting of the fine but empty words of the Queen’s Speech:

“Her Majesty’s Government will ensure the constitution is defended.”


We have all seen the drift away from the conventions and practices of constitutional government in recent years, which Members of this House and elsewhere need to resist vigorously. The balance between the legislature and the Executive, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, remarked, has been tipped further in favour of the Government and against their effective accountability to Parliament. I recommend to noble Lords the newly published book from the Institute for Government’s deputy director Hannah White, Held in Contempt: What’s Wrong with the House of Commons?, which sets out in detail the deliberate sidelining of the Commons by both Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and the decline in public respect for Parliament that has enabled them to go so far.

I recommend even more strongly the report by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, which was published two weeks ago and has already been quoted, What Next? The Growing Imbalance between Parliament and the Executive. I urge the Government Front Bench to arrange an early debate on it. The report identifies poor-quality legislation, restriction of parliamentary scrutiny, failure to provide impact assessments, inadequate explanatory memoranda and SIs regularly having to be corrected after they have been published.

More broadly, this raises the question of the role of the Lords as a revising second Chamber. We are here to ask the Government to think again. Our usefulness depends on the Government’s willingness to listen to reasoned criticism and to respond with reasoned answers and, where appropriate, concessions. If the Government refuse to listen and respond to the Lords, we no longer have a useful role. Perhaps in this Session, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, suggested, we need to send back an SI or two to demonstrate that there are limits to what Ministers can get away with.

The size of the Government payroll vote in the Commons and their 80-seat majority, reinforced by the strength of their whipping, allows the Government to treat the Commons with contempt. Badly drafted Bills have been passed to the Lords with little examination since their introduction, and with no amendment. That has increased the pressures on the Lords for reasoned and effective legislative scrutiny. In many of the weeks so far this year, this formerly part-time House has met as a Chamber for longer than the Commons. MPs have briefly considered Bills in timetabled debates and hurried back to their constituencies, leaving us to struggle on.

I found the final stages of the last Session dispiriting. Conservative Peers were whipped as ruthlessly as MPs in the Commons, with threats of removal from committees or loss of the Whip if they exercised their consciences. I heard leading Conservatives dismissing the Cross-Benchers as a bunch of left-wing intellectuals rather than the experts and evidence-seekers they represent. Then, half the Labour Peers went home after one or two votes, rather than pressing the Government to concede on important points. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, when Leader of the Opposition was far more determined to defend legislative authority against the Labour Government, pursuing ping-pong two, three or even four times when necessary. I congratulate the example that he set.

If the Lords can make only occasional and marginal changes to minor legislation, perhaps we should all go home and accept that in our current half-broken constitutional framework there is no useful role for a second Chamber. We depend on the Leader of the House to make the case to her colleagues in government that concessions to reasoned amendments in this House are a constitutional practice that Ministers should respect. We depend on Lords Ministers to persuade their colleagues from time to time to listen and to admit that they may have been mistaken. I wish I were more confident that Lords Ministers in this Government will do so in the face of this populist Prime Minister and his advisers.

The UK is now in a constitutional crisis, as the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, remarked in the Times some weeks ago. The union itself is shaky and will become shakier still if the threat to revoke the Northern Ireland protocol is acted on. The longer our current Prime Minister is here, the more likely it becomes that Scotland will in time drift towards independence. Public respect for Westminster and our central government is lower than in almost every other western democracy except the United States.

This is compounded by the political crisis created by our adversarial political system, which entrenches two established parties, both of which are deeply split, and the dangers to political stability of the aggressive rhetoric of the Government’s dominant right wing. Our Prime Minister and the Australian and US Republican influences he follows, mean that No. 10 is superb at campaigning, but dreadful at governing. This is neither a constitutionalist nor a conservative Government.

I hope that all Members of this House will in this Session defend the constitution, as the Queen’s Speech declared, and defend it when necessary against this constitutionally careless Government.