Debate on the Address

Debate between Stephen Dorrell and David Davis

Wednesday 9th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy). While I may differ with his analysis, there is never any doubt that he holds his views passionately. He certainly supports his constituency and community passionately, and has done so in the past several years in which I have watched him in this House.

Let me say to the Prime Minister that it is also a pleasure to talk about the real Queen’s Speech as against the one that I and others proposed last week. This Queen’s Speech has enormous merits to it, particularly in the context of growth. I am particularly supportive, as he will be unsurprised to hear, of his proposals on bank reforms, competition law, and joint enterprise law reform, including labour law reform. He will be happy to hear me mention those, but I am afraid that it goes downhill from here on in. [Hon. Members: “That was less than a minute!”] Well, I will make up the whole minute by saying that the Government can be proud of most of their record in the past couple of years on the issues of liberty and justice, which the Prime Minister knows I hold very dear. Their actions on identity cards, on cutting down on the amount of detention without charge, and on the misuse of counter-terrorism stop-and-search powers are all matters of pride for them.

Beyond that, however, I have three concerns: one about a constitutional issue, one about state power, and one about justice. Let me start with the constitutional issue on which the right hon. Member for Tottenham finished—the House of Lords. One of my concerns about our whole approach to the House of Lords is that we are arguing about its composition without worrying enough about its purpose, which we have not done enough to consider. There is a great deal of talk about the House of Lords as a revising and reforming Chamber, but it has a much greater function than that. Historically, the House of Lords has been a serious check on excessive Executive power. It was a check on the Government of Margaret Thatcher when she had a very large majority, on the Government of Tony Blair, and on the Government of the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), and no doubt it will be a check on this Government as time goes on.

It is very important in Britain that we have this check, because we are different in one respect from most other democracies. Without any separation of Executive and legislature, the power of the Executive in this House means that this House is less good than it could be at defending the rights of individuals when the Executive impinge too much on them. We saw that very often with the previous Government. There were a great number of occasions when I am sure that many Labour Members did not want to support some of their Government’s more illiberal actions. That is why the House of Lords is incredibly important.

[Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making a case from a Conservative point of view against reforming the make-up of the House of Lords. If the House of Lords has the distinguished record of preventing excessive use of Executive power that he is suggesting, why does he think that Margaret Thatcher’s first Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, delivered a speech roughly 50 years ago in which he said that we did not have sufficient checks and balances in our constitution, which he characterised as an elective dictatorship?

[Mr Davis]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, because he goes right to the central point. The House of Lords is not perfect, and there are many things that it has wrongly allowed to happen. I am in favour of reform of the House of Lords, but we must be very careful to get it right. If, in our reform, we do away with, or weaken or mitigate to any great extent, the check that it provides, that check will never be returned, because no Government will ever bring back a restraint on their own powers.

I think it was the Deputy Prime Minister who characterised his preferred state of the House of Lords as being one that more reflected the political composition of the House of Commons. That is precisely what I would not want it to do. A House of Lords that exactly reflected the political composition of the House of Commons would not be very much of a check on the Executive, and that would be a really serious problem. We must be very careful about what we do.

I do not believe that a referendum, of itself, will solve the problem, because it is a subtle and difficult matter and will be very hard to argue in public. However, it is very important.