---

Parliament and the Public

My Lords, the message that should be put across about this House is important in light of the changes that have taken place over the past five years. People should be told, for example, that no longer is there an army of hereditaries waiting in the hills to descend on us. Instead, there is a very narrow, hard pressed and hard working group of parliamentary Stakhanovites who work harder, perhaps, than many of the rest of us. There is no longer a built-in majority for the Government nor even for the Conservative party. Neither major party has more than 30 per cent of the votes in this House and 40 per cent is composed of noble Lords in the Liberal Democrat and Cross-Bench corners of the Chamber. That is an important insight into the increased role that this House plays. The elected Chamber, quite rightly, has the last word, but this Chamber makes a distinctive input to the working of Parliament. When I address it, I feel that to some extent I am addressing the national jury—this broad spread of interests and expertise. It is probably more accurate to describe this House as the national judge because we distil the wisdom, as we like to think, but we then present that to the national jury in the democratically-elected Chamber who have the last word. That is perhaps the better parallel. I have one footnote on the historical aspect of this House. I can well understand the concern of people—I have felt it myself sometimes—at the over-elaboration of ritual and dress. On the other hand, I confess to having been attracted by it on some occasions. I designed a uniform for the Chancellor of the Exchequer in which to go to the Trial of the Pyx because I did not see why everybody else should be dressed up and not me. However, we ought to remember that, although we are rightly critical of particular aspects of these things, tradition, history and ritual can serve a real purpose. Emma Crewe, who is after all an anthropologist, goes a little far when she says:"““The rituals are the real staff that politics are made of””." That is an overstatement, but surely our language—the noble Lord, the right honourable gentleman in the other place, my noble friend—is a courteous way of reminding us to respect each other, instead of saying, ““You’ve got it wrong mate””. It is odd, but important. I do not stand up for every aspect of ritual, but dress is also important. People wear various degrees of strange dress from Annabel’s to Butlin’s, from the Quai d’Orsay to the Kremlin, for recognition purposes and to tell the staff from the visitors. To return to my opening reservations, the terms of reference obliged the noble Lord and his colleagues to concentrate perhaps too much on better presentation of the performance of a Parliament whose role is ever less respected because it is ever more stunted, ““cabined, cribbed, confined”” by the behaviour, not just of this Government but of successive governments. The noble Lord rightly reminded us of Robin Cook’s phrase. That is one reason why people feel that they have lost ownership of Parliament—because it has been hijacked by the Executive. A similar question is posed in a book produced recently by Sir Christopher Foster, called Why Are We So Badly Governed?, which contains a lot of perceptive observations on all this. Is it not just because of the declining role of Parliament but because of a decline—a much wider question—in the candour, courage and quality of democratic political leadership, not only in this country but in other countries around the world? Is that being reflected and entrenched in the diminishing role of Parliament? What is it—and this again reflects the question posed by the noble Lord—that makes it so hard for us in today’s democracies to carry through those changes that many citizens and many Members of this House know in their hearts to be necessary, on the questions that he identified, such as climate change, nuclear energy and retirement age? We all know that those questions are crying out for earnest, candid address; why does it not happen? I was delighted to rediscover a quote that I once used in a party conference speech. It is an observation almost 150 years old by Walter Bagehot, at the time of our first major step towards universal suffrage, the 1867 Reform Bill. He said that he could conceive of nothing more corrupt than that a combination of well taught and rich men—noble Baronesses must forgive me, as he was talking about the 19th century—should compete for the support of the working man and promise to do as he likes, if only he would tell them what it is. That is an apt definition, from a long time ago, of focus group politics. In effect, he was forewarning us about the kind of thinking that has caused so many things to happen, and not just here. Why has the European Union failed to implement the Lisbon agenda? Similar fears stand in the way of candour in that regard. We do not have to go on proving Bagehot right. As the noble Lord said—to requote his quotation—democracy is governed by information, and we have to understand that democracy is a two-way process. I hope that I may be forgiven for returning us to the issue, but there is ample room—as I believe the government led by my noble friend Lady Thatcher demonstrated—for courageous political leadership in interpreting the nation’s mood. We had one advantage in our favour at the time when we were doing those difficult things, in that almost everyone realised that the nation was in the last chance saloon. But it is possible to identify what is necessary, expound it and go ahead with doing it. Political leaders need to identify, with as wide a consensus as possible, the way ahead, which is often in truth the only way however unpopular it might be, and to persuade people why they have to follow that road. That is at the heart of the credibility of Parliament and politics. Public opinion needs to be persuaded and not spun; it needs to be led and not fed. That is the right way, the best way and the only way towards ““a more effective Parliament””, to quote the first sentence, and towards the subject of today’s debate, wider participation in the political process.