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House of Lords: Reform

My Lords, first make it more legitimate and then castrate it. That is the recipe recommended to us from Jack Straw’s cookery book mark two, but I cannot see it being dished up any time soon—it may be washed up before it is dished up. One of the reasons why the Leader of the Commons, despite his great courtesy, which I salute, led the Commons into this predicted morass—many of us predicted it in terms—is that he has drained the word ““legitimacy”” of any meaning, just as happened some time ago with the word ““democratic”” and now with the word ““consensus””. If we are now heading towards what is called a consensus, my name is Marco Polo. Speaking of consensus in the proper sense, the Leader of the Commons has, of course, looked a gift horse in the mouth by not concentrating on addressing two immediate issues: that of making party political appointments more transparent and that of finally saying goodbye to the hereditary principle and practice. He should have stuck to that because, at the moment, we are a million miles away from a consensus on the most fundamental question of all: do people want more checks and balances, fewer or about the same? The majority in the Commons seems to be saying the first but means the second. Hence we have a false prospectus. How did the Leader of the Commons, and the Commons more generally, get there? If the case had been examined by Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, the latter would have remarked, ““We have here, I am afraid, a strange case of schizophrenia””. In any event, when Jack Straw, in an interview in the Guardian, said that we can simply bolt back on the primacy of the Commons, he adduced no reasoning or evidence to suggest that that would be possible if this House were to continue to have the power to amend Bills. How would that new statutory primacy rule be translated into practice? Would the Commons simply be able to wave aside any amendments it did not like from the Lords on the Legal Services Bill or whatever? The civilised version of ping pong that is played today would by no means be the name of the game between a much more partisan second Chamber and an equally partisan Commons, where majorities may often differ and issues could be and would be pressed. Indeed, on the 100 per cent elected hypothesis, a separate point arises in that it is difficult to see how, when—it is ““when”” rather than ““if””—the governing party in the Commons is not the leading party here, we can carry on with the tradition that the leading Front Bench here is provided by the same party as in the Commons. Why should that be? Perhaps my noble friend the Lord Chancellor can deal with that point among others. If that issue does not arise and it is to make no difference whether more people in this House are Labour or Conservative, what will people want to change by voting one way or the other? It is known that there will be roughly 200 Labour Members, 200 Conservative Members and so on, for the foreseeable future, in the second Chamber. The second part of my remarks deals with thinking through the procedures of a reformed appointments system. We can certainly build on criteria such as regional balance, a point well made by my noble friend Lady Quin. It would be perfectly possible to have a number of indirect elections through different hinterlands, including local government, industry, the City, trade unions, ethnic minorities, and so on, as was spelt out in the speech of the greatly respected former Secretary to the Cabinet, the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster. I will say a word now about how I think the Labour Party could do that and I would be very grateful if a member of the Conservative Party would indicate whether it could be done in that party in similar terms. The Liberal Democrats have some sort of half-way house, but I do not think that that form would necessarily work well in a party with the rather more complex structure of the Labour Party. Given the 200:200 balance, the White Paper, whose status is very obscure, made some limited proposals. Naturally and correctly, they were largely on the role of the statutory Appointments Commission and did not consider how the Labour Party and the Conservative Party would go about it. That has led some people—in my view inaccurately—to conclude that the main responsibility would lie with the statutory Appointments Commission. On the contrary, one needs to pause for a moment to see that the whipped Members of this House—Labour or Conservative Members, as we are talking about political Members—will not be chosen by the statutory Appointments Commission from a larger number. That is because that process would be rejected by the party conferences as it would be tantamount to the statutory Appointments Commission preferring, or being perceived as preferring, more right-wing people or more left-wing people. It would not and could not work like that. So how would it be done? I shall sketch it briefly. Each of the parties would need to draw up criteria and write them into their rules. They would have to be in their rules because party conferences and executives could not interfere in detail with selection as there would have to be some degree of confidentiality. The parties would register the criteria with the statutory Appointments Commission and then submit names to it, and the statutory Appointments Commission’s override would, as at present, be restricted to grounds of probity. My final point is that a shadow run on this in the next couple of years would be helpful to test out some of the issues that arise. However, there is no reason why this House should not proceed with a Bill to establish a statutory Appointments Commission. In conclusion, given the massive majorities we can expect in this place tomorrow for a modernised, reformed appointments system and against selection, the tabloids will want to have a field day in caricaturing them as ““Lords puts up two fingers at Commons””. I do not believe that the voting here would have been any different if it had taken place in the week preceding the vote in the Commons. As the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, said, it is now for the Government to take a long look and reflect on how opinions in both Houses can be brought together to see where we go from here.