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Parliament and the Public

My Lords, I, too, commend the Hansard Society for taking this initiative. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, for his chairmanship of the commission. Its 39 recommendations are, by and large, unarguable; they seem self-authenticating, and I shall refer to two of them. I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, for a quite outstanding maiden speech, which others have properly praised. I also commend the information and education departments of this House which, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, and others have said, do amazing work with tiny resources. We have fewer informational resources in this House than the average company has in its PR department. That is bizarre. I spent between 1970 and 1983 trying to get elected to the other place and once to the European Parliament. Five times I was roundly rejected by the electorate, and I took the hint in 1983. However, I learnt vividly that the British electorate are, as others have said, not uninterested in politics. Rather, they are potentially passionately interested but, for reasons others have touched on and I do not intend to repeat, they feel apart from the processes here. It was evident even then. In trying to do something at grass roots level, I set up a charity called the Citizenship Foundation. When I came here in 1998 I, like the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, made my maiden speech on citizenship and connectedness. That was the occasion on which we first discussed reform of this place. My point then was that unless we drew the public into deliberations on reform of this House, we would fail democracy and ourselves extremely badly, and I think that we did. We set up a committee but it had only eight public meetings; roughly 100 people came to each. The effort to draw in public engagement with reform here was, in my view, tragically inadequate. Unless we can do this along the lines set out in the report and along the lines mentioned by noble Lords today, we will continue down this dismal path of citizen disengagement and sourness, leading to what I call a culture of disparagement of politics, which is deeply unhelpful to the process, unfair to the politicians and unsatisfactory to our citizenry. To recover the political will and the interest of the electorate, we must do a number of things. First, we must show genuine interest in them. We simply cannot expect the public to be interested in us if, in truth, we are not interested in them. I am afraid that we demonstrate an extremely limited interest in them in all sorts of ways. Why, for example, as we take part in an accessible debate, which has been well trailed and has involved hundreds if not thousands of people, do we have—I added this up before I rose to speak—one person in the Press Gallery, two under the Bar, two in the Circular Gallery and 12 in the Public Gallery—there are a few more now—and 27 in the Chamber, with 21 speakers? That says a lot about the failings of this place and the failings of the process, and we need to go on asking why. I believe that we must reach out in every way possible. The principal mechanism suggested by the report—the new communications council or department—is central to what we do. One of the things that we could very easily do tomorrow is for all of us to offer to speak outside this place to organisations who want speakers. It would be very simple to organise. I have no doubt that 600 out of the 690 of us would say yes and probably be willing to go and speak half a dozen times a year. If such a list were publicly available for organisations such as women’s institutes, schools, parties and universities, that would be a good thing. We could have 5,000 speaking visits a year out of this place going to where people are rather than expecting them to come to us. That would be a very strong symbol, and we are short of outgoing symbols. We must also take over-legislation seriously. It baffles us: it totally baffles the punter. It is not just the volume of legislation—13,408 pages in 2003—but its complexity. I do not know how many noble Lords have looked at the Identity Cards Bill, but it needs a lawyer to find his or her way round it. We have reached a pitch in our principal function of lawmaking that is utterly self-defeating. It is self-defeating in terms of the impact on the country and in terms of citizen adhesion and ownership of our processes. We are too top-down and we must take seriously localism and devolution in all sorts of ways. I am convinced of that, and it seems to me now to be virtually agreed between the main parties that we have to reach out by reaching down and letting people do for themselves what currently we are doing very badly for them. Conduct has been referred to. The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, was a little gentle on the other place. I do not think that people understand the ways of the other place as they see it on television. I think that I understand it myself, but yesterday’s proceedings—as heard on the wireless and seen on television—were deeply inimical to a sense of public engagement with and understanding of what we are about and what we do. Nobody has mentioned electoral reform. It is a highly partisan subject, I appreciate, but I put it to the House that there are far too few voters in this country who are represented in Parliament. I have never in my political life cast a vote for a successful candidate.