House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Pete Wishart Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I cannot comment on the coherence of the Opposition in the course of that process. What we have seen so far is a pretty incoherent effort, but perhaps it will improve when we hear from the shadow Minister.

This Bill is about making immediate, long-overdue progress. The House of Lords existed for centuries as a nearly entirely hereditary House. There was an attempt to introduce life peers as long ago as 1869, with a further attempt to introduce life peers and remove the hereditary element in 1888. Despite those efforts, it was only with the passage of the Life Peerages Act 1958 that non-judicial life peers began to join the other place.

Some 40 years later, a Labour Government introduced a Bill to end the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. The events that smoothed the Bill’s passage led that Government to accept an amendment on the principle of the removal of hereditary peers. The amendment retained 92 hereditary peers on a temporary basis, until further reforms to the other place were brought forward. Despite attempts at further reform, that temporary measure is still in place.

[Pete Wishart (Perth and Kinross-shire) (SNP)]

One of the dates the Minister missed was Labour’s pledge, which has stood for over 100 years, to abolish the House of Lords. That pledge was reiterated by the Prime Minister only a couple of years ago. Is it still Labour’s intention to abolish the House of Lords? Does he understand the cynicism about further progress, given that the pledge has not been honoured in over a century?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I cannot comment on the hon. Gentleman’s cynicism about progress, but our manifesto clearly sets out the Government’s position, which is that we should have an alternative second Chamber that is more representative of the nations and regions.

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[Sir Oliver Dowden]

I will make some progress and then I will give way.

Instead of proceeding with caution, the Government have done precisely the opposite. The Bill has had no pre-legislative scrutiny, no Joint Committee and no cross-party engagement. Indeed, Labour Ministers have explicitly refused to consult on the removal of excepted peers.

All that forms a pattern with Labour’s past constitutional tinkering. We have the Equality Act 2010, which both the Equality and Human Rights Commission and His Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary have said in recent months is too complicated and needs changing. There is also the Human Rights Act 1998, which, in departing from Britain’s common-law tradition, further expanded judicial review, undermining the very laws made by this Parliament and dragging the courts into answering political questions that should be a matter for the legislature. The same applies to Tony Blair’s successive surrenders to EU treaties. Those Acts created new problems for an old country, and this Bill risks doing exactly the same.

[Pete Wishart]

The right hon. Gentleman has been on his feet for five minutes and I am finding it difficult to follow him. Can he answer me directly: is he in favour of getting rid of hereditary peers and people who are in the House of Lords on birthright—yes or no?

[Sir Oliver Dowden]

I am strongly of the view that we should consider all these things in the round. There is merit here—that is why we are proposing a reasoned amendment—but the risk of proceeding in a rushed fashion is that we come to regret it, as we have on many previous occasions.

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[Gareth Snell]

The hon. Gentleman will forgive me for not agreeing with him. There is a lot of wisdom and experience in this place that can be used to improve our legislation. Even with the removal of the 92 hereditary peers, there will still be 650 peers, who have incredible insights and specialisms. The Bill removes a group of people whose only entitlement to be in the House of Lords comes from, as the Liberal Democrat spokesperson said, a birthright many hundreds of years old, and from being selected by their friends to sit with them. The hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) may not agree with me, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Telford pointed out, the election process in the other place is a farce. There are often more candidates than electors. It is almost akin to the Tory party leadership election.

[Pete Wishart]

The only other group that seems to reserve a place in the House of Lords is millionaires—party donors. Sixty-eight out of 284 political appointees between 2003 and 2013 gave £58 million to political parties. What will the hon. Gentleman do about them?

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[Sir John Hayes]

No, I am going to finish now.

A vapid fascination with now—imagine that. Of course, those philosophers on the Labour Benches will know that “now” is an illusion, as now becomes then in an instant, does it not? Yet the politics of now have an extraordinary appeal for faint hearts and weak minds. I know there are not too many of those in the Chamber, although rather more than one might ideally wish. That fascination with modernity leaves me only able to finish by quoting Marcel Proust.

[Pete Wishart]

Oh, please not! [Laughter.]

[Sir John Hayes]

I know there are students of Proust littered among the saplings on the Labour Benches. If they are truly to become oaks and leave their acorns in the soil, they need to read Proust more. Proust said that

“the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.”

It is a prejudice that drives the Bill. It is a prejudice that does the House no credit—or at least, I should say, does the party opposite no credit.

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[Sir Gavin Williamson]

I hate to correct my neighbour, but as I have the Labour party manifesto in front of me, I will read it to him.

“The next Labour government will therefore bring about an immediate modernisation, by introducing legislation to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. Labour will also introduce a mandatory retirement age. At the end of the Parliament in which a member reaches 80 years of age, they will be required to retire from the House of Lords.”

So the manifesto talks about when the Member will retire not when the legislation will be introduced. We know the Paymaster General is an aspiring radical, potentially—

[Pete Wishart]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is there anything within your power or your gift that can make the right hon. Gentleman stop with this inconsequential rubbish?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I thank the hon. Member for his point of order. It is not a matter for the Chair, but I am sure the right hon. Gentleman is coming to the end of his remarks. I remind hon. Members to stick to the motion and that their content could better match the matter before the House.

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[Pete Wishart (Perth and Kinross-shire) (SNP)]

It is a real pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Maureen Burke). I listened with great interest to her personal journey and her remarks about the transformative power of education, and she gave a very touching tribute to her brother, which I am sure the whole House appreciated. I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone), whose speech was a tour de force around his constituency and all the things he hopes to achieve in this Parliament. I wish him personally all the best for his time in this place.

I thank the other Members who made maiden speeches: the hon. Members for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Claire Hazelgrove), for Mid and South Pembrokeshire (Henry Tufnell) and for Knowsley (Anneliese Midgley). I say to the hon. Member for Knowsley that if she gets the decks out again, we will see if we can get the Deputy Prime Minister to come and join her; and to the hon. Member for Mid and South Pembrokeshire that it is maybe not best to tick off your dad in the Chamber—that is a little tip as the hon. Member goes forward in this parliamentary Session.

The first thing we have to try not to do when we consider the Bill is laugh. We have to try not to laugh out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of considering in 2024 whether places should be reserved in our legislature for a curious subset of a particular class of person, based on birthright. We have to try to stifle the guffaws that accompany the fact that a modern, complex, industrial, advanced democracy such as the United Kingdom can still have barons, dukes, earls and various other aristocrats deciding the laws of the land because they are their fathers’ sons. They secured that right in medieval times, perhaps because one of their ancestors won a decisive battle. This is parliamentary participation defined by the “Game of Thrones” principle, in which the great houses of olde England or olde Britannia knock seven shades of whatever out of each other for the right to run the country by breeding. In some way, they are our own Baratheons and Targaryens, but without the fun, the dragons and the box office appeal. It is time to break the wheel. For those down the corridor, winter must be coming.

There is no other legislature in the world that comes close to having people there through birthright, save perhaps the Senate in Lesotho, where I believe there are still places reserved for the tribal chiefs. That is the sort of company we keep.

My other initial main thought about the Bill is: is this it? We have heard about other things to come, and have been told that we should be patient because other Bills will be introduced. We have heard that from the Labour party for 100 years. For more than 100 years, Labour has promised to abolish the House of Lords, but there it sits, bigger and more bizarre than ever, awaiting the arrival of the new Labour Lords. Where is the Brownian vision of a senate of the regions and nations? Where is the “almost federalism” that we in Scotland were promised during the independence referendum? It is certainly not in the Bill. This meagre rubbish has not even got the credibility to call itself a reform. We will probably have to wait about the same amount of time that has elapsed since the barons and earls won those decisive battles for the Labour party to introduce meaningful reform.

We are getting not abolition of the House of Lords, but the long grass from the Labour party in this Parliament. A consultation is about to be embarked upon as Labour prevaricates once again. Nobody in this country believes that the Labour party is remotely sincere about abolishing the House of Lords. From the contributions we have heard so far, no one can believe that Labour Members are in favour of genuine reform of the House of Lords. Even the watering down of the watering down has been watered down, as the proposal for a mandatory age limit of 80 for House of Lords Members has been dropped. That happened because the Government found that they are disproportionately hit by the proposals; their cohort in the House of Lords is older than that of the Conservatives. It is no wonder that few people take them seriously.

What we have down the corridor is an embarrassment, an unreformable laughing stock, a plaything of Prime Ministers and the personification of a dying establishment that represents another age. With all its ridiculous cap-doffing deference, it represents almost the exact opposite of the values of my country. I am so proud that my party will never put anybody in that red-leather-upholstered, gold-plated Narnia.

While we can laugh at the hereditaries, the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) and other Conservative Members are quite right to point to the ridiculousness of having 26 places reserved for Church of England bishops. We are the only legislature in the world that has places reserved for clerics other than the Islamic Republic of Iran. We can take comfort from the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury is not going to embark on some sort of religious jihad, but what strange company to keep. If there was an intra-parliamentary union of serving clerics, it would be exclusively comprise Church of England bishops and ayatollahs.

It is not even the hereditaries or the Church of England bishops that concern me most. The group that concerns me most in the House of Lords is the appointees—the donors, the cronies and the placemen who end up with a role in running our country and making the laws of this land because of prime ministerial patronage. People have a place in our democracy whose only qualification seems to be an ability to give substantial amounts of money to one of the three major establishment political parties in this House.

We have evolved a legislature that is at least partly designed by one person: the Prime Minister decides who has the opportunity to take a role in running this country by appointment, based on lists drawn up by him and other British party leaders. No other party leader or Head of State has this power anywhere in the world. It is a prerogative that would make a tinpot dictator in a banana republic blush, yet we on these Benches lecture the developing world about good politics and democracy.

The temptation is to stuff the Chamber full of friends and the politically useful. It is a place to reward the servile, thank the time-servers and compensate the downgraded. Only this week, we are considering such an example; there is talk of Sue Gray ending up with a place in the Lords as some sort of compensation for her sacking. I suppose that when she goes down there, she will get an ermine coat to accompany the envoy’s ostrich feather for when she visits her most northern territory, Scotland, as the British envoy. Already, her loyal subjects are practising their haka to welcome their new envoy when she makes that journey north.

To see how bad things could get, we need only remember Boris Johnson’s list, which was full of friends, donors and former staff—a list that could not be more gratuitous. Notionally, there is a House of Lords Appointments Commission, but it is an utterly toothless body that Boris Johnson simply ignored. It has done nothing to stop the accumulation of cronies and donors: 68 out of 284 nominations from political parties between 2013 and 2023 were political donors handing over £58 million to the political parties, and 12 of those appointed gave over £1 million. That was the price during “cash for honours” in the early 2000s. We might think inflation would at least be factored in when it came to getting a place in the House of Lords, but not a bit of it: the going rate is still £1 million.

“Cash for honours” led to one of the most dramatic police investigations during the 2005 to 2010 Parliament, when a sitting Prime Minister was questioned by the police under caution. Some of his staff were actually arrested. We might think that, after all that, the establishment parties would be a little more circumspect, but not a bit of it; the cash keeps coming in, and the peerages keep getting rolled out. Even as recently as 2021, I asked the Metropolitan police to investigate the Conservative party when we found that 22 of the Conservatives’ biggest financial contributors had been made Members of the House of Lords in the past 50 years.

This Government have no plans whatsoever to do anything about the appointees in the House of Lords, save to make more of them. One of the reasons we are getting this Bill so early in this Parliament—the Conservatives are possibly right about this—is to clear the place out, so that the Labour party can put in more of its donors, cronies and place men. It is making sure that there are spaces available, and that the other place does not look so big.

The House of Lords is the most absurd, ridiculous legislature anywhere in the world. Famously, it is second in size only to the National People’s Congress of China. Bloated, ermine-coated, never been voted—it is the antithesis of everything we know about democracy. Increasingly embarrassing, probably corrupt and certainly rife for all sorts of abuse, it is an institution whose time has surely come.

We put forward a reasoned amendment to the Bill, because we want to hold the Labour party to its historical commitment to abolishing the House of Lords. Unfortunately, that amendment was not selected, but there will be opportunities as the Bill goes through the House to come back to the issue. I say to the Government, “Yes, bring forward your step-by-step incremental changes, but what the general public want is meaningful action on the House of Lords.” A YouGov poll out yesterday showed that the vast majority of the British people no longer want the House of Lords. They specifically and defiantly want it reformed. It is not good enough continuing to pass the buck for another 100 years; something has to be done. I say to Labour, “Pick up Gordon Brown’s report, for goodness’ sake, and have a look at what he says.” The Labour Government should try to enact some meaningful reform. Who knows? It may even make them popular again. It seems to be what the public want. This could be something that they do that the public would actually genuinely support.

We have waited centuries for action from the Labour party and we have got next to absolutely nothing. Now is the time for action. No more prevarication—take real action, and get dealing with that place down the corridor.

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[John Glen]

I am sorry, but it is the hon. Gentleman’s Government who are now in charge of the agenda before Parliament. It is for them to be accountable for it. I am so challenged by the poverty of ambition that exists on the Government Benches. We are given to believe that they are planning a new wave of peers, and the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff has reportedly been overheard saying that she is top of the list. The Prime Minister was previously reported as trying to make our political system better, because it had previously been undermined by “lackeys and donors” appointed to the other place. Sadly, it seems that as soon as he got into Downing Street, he discovered the Government’s own lackeys and donors were already waiting for him. I think that reflects this Government’s wider approach and attitude to constitutional reform and our institutions.

[Pete Wishart]

I am glad that, at last, somebody else has mentioned the donors, because to me they are the biggest problem we have with the House of Lords. Will the right hon. Gentleman back an amendment that says something along the lines of anybody who has given any more than, say, £20,000 to a political party should not be able to get a place in the House of Lords?

[John Glen]

I do not think we should rule out people who are successful in all walks of life, but I would look seriously at all amendments from colleagues throughout the House.

We need to come back to the facts of the matter. The House of Lords is not there as some ornamental, archaic decoration in our Parliament: it is an embodiment of Magna Carta—of power that devolved from beyond the Crown and beyond the Executive. So what is next? Is this all just a foreboding of the kind of parliamentary flagellation we can expect from this new Government? Well, not if we on the Opposition Benches can help it.

Our reasoned amendment recognises that this Government have no recognition of the need for a reasonable process for constitutional evolution and reform. Our amendment is about the careful and considerate review of change, as well as the acceptable or effective method of enacting major constitutional change. Surely it is reckless at least, and grossly irresponsible at worst, to seek to cast aside the experienced and independent voice of excepted hereditary peers, so many of whom play a crucial role in scrutinising parliamentary legislation in our nation—and some of whom have played an instrumental role in delivering government—without setting out a clear, coherent plan or narrative for what comes next, which should be scrutinised, discussed and refined. I hope colleagues will join me and support the Opposition’s amendment.

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[Ellie Reeves]

Absolutely not. I listened to the hon. Member’s contribution; the royal family and the monarchy are one of our country’s greatest assets. The contribution of the King and the working members of the royal family to public life in the UK is incredibly significant. The Government have enormous respect for the unique role that the royal family play in our nation. This reform does not affect the role of the sovereign. Ours is a model of constitutional monarchy that continues to be practised worldwide. By contrast, the UK is only one of two Parliaments in the world that retains a hereditary element. To seek to make any comparison between the two is not credible. The sovereign is our Head of State and provides stability, continuity and a national focus. Nothing in the Bill changes that.

Let me turn to the reasoned amendment tabled by the official Opposition. The Government have introduced the Bill to end the outdated and indefensible right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. I am sure that the House will agree that it is important for Parliament to give proper consideration to the Bill, which reflects a Government manifesto commitment, rather than to dismiss it out of hand. Although the Government are grateful for the contributions that hereditary peers and their predecessors have made to the other place, it simply cannot be right that the second Chamber retains a hereditary element in the 21st century.

Let us be clear. Those on the Opposition Benches talked today about consultation and engagement. First, I will not take any lectures on consultation from the Conservative party, which rammed through a Budget without engagement with the Office for Budget Responsibility and proceeded to crash the economy that has left people in my constituency and across the country still paying the price in their mortgages and rents.

On the substance of the Bill, the right hon. Member for Hertsmere (Sir Oliver Dowden) could not even be clear, when asked, whether he is in favour of the principle of removing hereditary peers from the second Chamber. From the sometimes quite lively contributions from the Opposition Benches, one thing is clear: there is a wide range of views that are not always consistent with one another. The new-found, if at times slightly confused, zeal for the job of reform of the second Chamber is noted, yet Opposition Members had more than 14 years to bring about reform and never did so. Those on the Labour Benches laid out our commitments for reform in our manifesto, which was scrutinised by the public and then overwhelmingly voted for.

[Pete Wishart]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. Will she tell the House whether it is still Labour’s ambition to abolish the House of Lords in its current condition and set up a democratically elected Chamber, yes or no?

[Ellie Reeves]

We set out in our manifesto that we want to see an alternative second Chamber that is more representative of the nations and regions. I will say a little more about that later.

Our manifesto was scrutinised by the public and then overwhelmingly voted for. This is a tightly drafted piece of legislation that directly makes provisions for the specific commitment to remove immediately the rights of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. I am confident that there will be no shortage of scrutiny from Members of this House and Members of the other place throughout the passage of the Bill. The effect of the reasoned amendment tabled by the right hon. Member for Hertsmere would prevent the House from scrutinising the Bill.