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Address in Reply to Her Majesty's Most Gracious Speech

My Lords, I suppose it was too much to hope, but I was hoping that the gracious Speech would start with a ringing declaration that the Government would dedicate their efforts to the restoration of the integrity of government and the influence of Parliament. That has not happened, but I hope that the Government, even if they cannot recognise all their other manifest failings, will recognise what an unmitigated disaster has been their determined effort to neuter the House of Commons. Perhaps now with a smaller government majority the Commons will be more difficult to ignore, and we may see some resurgence in its authority. However, unless some of the changes in procedures and working practices brought about in the previous two Parliaments are reversed—for example, the draconian timetabling of Bills, a matter referred to by my noble friend Lord Higgins—there will continue to be wholly inadequate consideration of legislation in the Commons. That means that ill considered and half-considered Bills will continue to arrive here. That is not a figment of my imagination. Every one of us who has taken an interest in proceedings in this place knows perfectly well that the unvarnished truth is that the House of Commons has not been doing its job. It has not been doing its job because it has not been allowed to do so by the absurd routine timetabling of Bills. Yet the Government, with no intention of putting things right in the Commons, intend to set about interfering with the working practices of this place and to restrict debate by placing limits on the time that Bills spend here. The Government's numbers in this place have been increased, no doubt in the hope that the beneficiaries of Mr Blair's patronage will be so grateful for the favour bestowed on them that they will dutifully vote to make this place as pointless as possible; but perhaps, like so many sent here by new Labour, they will find more profitable things to do on-shore or off-shore. We will wait and see. On the composition of this place, we are told by the Sunday Times, quoting a government spokesman, that the Government are going to "finish off" the Weatherill Peers. I want a clear answer to this question: is that right or wrong? Is the future of the Weatherill Peers one of the matters to be discussed under the general heading of "composition"? I have to remind the Minister that if the Government are going to finish off the Weatherill Peers they will be in clear breach of the undertaking given by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, when he accepted the Weatherill amendment in 1999. There is no doubt about it: the words of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, could not have been clearer. He stated: "The 10 per cent will go when stage two has taken place and their presence is a guarantee that stage two will take place".—[Official Report, 11/05/99; col. 1092.] I hope that the Minister will make the position absolutely plain in her closing speech and that there will not be a breach of that plain undertaking. It would be scandalous if the Government, while keeping a nominated House, were to make it even more dependent on the patronage of government by removing the Weatherill Peers. It is scandalous that the Government should be bent on taking revenge on this changed House for its new assertiveness by limiting its power, when the House we have today is the Government's own creation. Immediately, there are more pressing constitutional issues to be addressed. Top of the list is the enormity of MPs elected to Scottish seats who cannot vote on devolved matters in Scotland voting on purely English matters at Westminster. That point was raised by my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking. That is not the only grievance that the English voter has. The Barnett formula remains an affront, with MSPs boasting of a level of public service in Scotland that, they well know, is reached only at the expense of those living south of the border. Add to that the fact that the electoral system this time around has hardly produced justice for England and I reckon that failure to address the West Lothian question will create a grievance too far, which could in time provoke a major constitutional crisis. There is no obvious difficulty in changing Commons procedures so as to stop MPs elected for Scottish seats voting on purely English matters; it could be left to the Speaker, as it is on matters of finance, to certify that a Bill comes within that category. Then there is postal voting. The Government are clearly bent on continuing to allow postal votes on demand to, to quote from the gracious Speech, "encourage greater voter participation in elections". I wonder whether it has ever occurred to the Government that the decline in turnout may be due not to the hardship of having to go to a polling station but to a decline in respect for the Government and our leaders and that the best way to restore the people's interest in elections and arrest the decline in the number of people voting is to restore the integrity of government and the importance of Parliament, which brings me back to what I was saying at the beginning. If the Government are determined to press on with postal votes on demand, they have a duty to use all possible means to try to prevent fraud and certainly no right to discard the Electoral Commission's call for individual voter registration. It is absolutely plain that, as long as postal votes are given on demand, there will be a far bigger risk of fraud than there was when they were given only in fairly limited circumstances. Therefore, the best way to contain fraud is to reduce the circumstances in which people can vote by post. The sure way to increase fraud is to defy the commission and ignore its other recommendation that there should be a ban on all-postal ballots. Like the noble Lord, Lord Owen, I should like to say a few words about the European constitution, which, to my mind, is far more appropriately discussed in today's debate than in the context of foreign affairs. The gracious Speech refers to, "The Constitutional Treaty for the European Union". I must remind your Lordships that that is not the correct title. Its correct title is a, "Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe". It suits the Government to refer to it as if it were a treaty like any other, but it is not. If and when the treaty is ratified, a constitution will come into force. From that moment forward, that constitution and not the previous treaties will be the source of authority of the EU. That cannot be said too often. The European Union established by the constitution will owe its being to the constitution and, according to Article 1.6, the constitution—not just such laws as may be agreed by the Council of Ministers—will have primacy over the law of member states. The constitution will be open to interpretation by the court. We know, as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, knows well enough, what that means. The court will do its best to give meaning to the preamble, which states that the people of Europe are determined to be united ever more closely, and to Article 1.1, which refers to the states of Europe building a common future. So much for the assertion in a letter to the Times last October by a group of leading Europhiles headed by a former Commissioner that the treaty would protect the sovereignty of Europe's nation states and set limits on what the EU can and cannot do. That is about as far from the truth as one could possibly get, save for the other assertion in the letter that the treaty gives a bigger role to Parliament. The truth there, of course, is that, although there is a token nod in the direction of national parliaments, one third of which can ask the Commission to reconsider a proposal before it goes ahead and does what it originally intended, the constitution cedes more power to the EU over, for example, criminal law, social security, immigration and asylum, trade and competition and energy, and the veto is abolished in about 40 areas, which means that more and more powers are being taken from Parliament. The other week, a member of the Commission talked of the risk of another Holocaust if we did not accept the constitution and referred to opponents of the constitution as those who want to scrap the supranational idea. She obviously does not think that the EU has been engaged in a tidying-up exercise. The German Europe Minister calls the constitution the birth certificate of the United States of Europe. I do not think that that is all that far from the mark. It is a matter of great regret that so little was said about that issue during the general election. To me, it is bizarre that, when the people were being asked to elect a new House of Commons, it was thought inappropriate to discuss whether that House should continue to have any meaningful powers and whether we should keep our independence as a nation or share more and more power with others to the point where parliamentary sovereignty will have become a meaningless concept.