Parliamentary Democracy and Standards in Public Life

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, for today’s debate and I am glad to make a contribution to it. Debates of this kind are a bit like taking the temperature of our democracy. I am very interested in all the things that have been said so far, and I need hardly remind your Lordships that around the world today democracy itself is under attack, including in countries we count among our closest allies.

I grew up in a family that for generations had the greatest possible respect for the democratic legitimacy of the elected House of Commons. But I can also say that since being elected to this House, I have come to understand, appreciate and respect the role it plays and the very good work that can be and is done here. Both Houses complement each other, but they are not perfect.

Interestingly, as recently as Tuesday of this week, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee of another place conducted its second evidence session and took evidence from former Speakers of this House and others on the size, role, composition and purpose of the House of Lords. We might like to reciprocate by our Constitution Committee conducting an inquiry into the nature, purposes, role and activity of the House of Commons.

I will say a word or two about the legislative process. As others have said, we live at a time of skeleton Bills and Henry VIII clauses, and the result is that Bills can be either absurdly large or ridiculously short. Either way, huge quantities of detailed policy are forced through Parliament by secondary legislation and SIs, which this House theoretically could amend but in practice does not. This is a pressure cooker waiting to burst. The balance of power between the Executive and the legislature—reference was made, of course, to our dear departed, collective noble friend Lord Judge—has gone too far in favour of the Executive.

I will say something about the electoral process. There is something so simple and powerful about the act of marking a cross with a pencil on a ballot paper and putting it into a ballot box, but I regret to say that the integrity of our own voting system has been put at needless risk in recent years. All sides of this House had reservations about the recent measure to introduce ID for voting. The evidence of fraud under the old system was certainly less than the evidence so far of the deterrent effect under the new system. I do not want our country ever to be accused of voter suppression. That is very bad for our democracy—and we have enough threats as it is.

For example, looking forward, many have warned, including our National Cyber Security Centre, that the coming general election will feature AI-generated deepfakes designed to unsettle us. The sophistication of deepfaked videos is such that, to take a random example, you could make a deepfake video of the Leader of the House ardently advocating the return of a Labour Government. I suppose this would be the equivalent of the Zinoviev Letter, whose 100th anniversary we are celebrating this year, but much more powerful because of the effectiveness of the technology and the power of social media to amplify fake messages. The World Economic Forum has just announced that disinformation from AI is regarded as one of the greatest global risks.

My time has run out, but I wanted to say this. like other Members, I enjoy going to talk to schools. Before Christmas, I went to Chiswick School. Its sixth form asked excellent questions, but one of the things that was uncovered in our discussion was cynicism, which I think is the greatest threat to our parliamentary democracy. We all support the principles of Nolan, which are in our code of conduct, but we must protect the new generation of voters from the cynicism that would otherwise undermine their support for the parliamentary democracy we are debating today. I very much hope that the new generation will take comfort from the fact that we need to uphold the greatest possible standards in public life, and that they will benefit from it when the time comes.