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House of Lords: Reform

My Lords, I do not think that we went that far; there was not a queue of noble Lords. I then come to the question of why I am here. Many will say that they can see no possible valid reason; but the reason I am here, which is the same for my noble friends Lord Lucas and Lord Caithness, and the other hereditary Peers, was to make sure that there was not a completely appointed House. That is why Lord Cranborne did his deal; to make sure that there could be no fully appointed House. We should therefore not be going down the line of having a fully appointed House. I remember my noble friend Lord Ferrers at the time pointing out that when we went, the next people on the line would be the life Peers, and they all said, ““No, no, it will pass by on the other side””. Now what has happened? Lo and behold, the life Peers are also facing an element of chop. They are actually finding it much less pleasant than even we did, which is why they have all been taking on what I could call the Longford role. We have been talking a lot about Commons supremacy. Of course the Commons has supremacy. The Prime Minister can be Prime Minister only if he commands a majority in the House of Commons. In around 1340, your Lordships’ House decided that it did not want to be involved in taxing subtenants, and said to the king, ““No, we are not going to have anything to do with taxing, thank you very much. If you want to go and beat up the French with longbows on the Continent, get our subtenants to volunteer to pay for it properly, rather than asking us to tell them to pay for it””. That is why the Commons has supremacy in taxation. Furthermore, there are the Parliament Acts. I enter a slight caveat on the Parliament Act, because I believe that in the Law Lords’ judgment on the then Hunting Bill there is a very slight caveat that messing about with this House against its will may not be Parliament Act-able. I am sure that the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor will be able to correct me if I am wrong on that, but I am pretty certain that it is there, so we have to be careful about that. That is the only place. There is obviously the extension of the life of the Commons. We do have a written constitution; everything that we know about the constitution is written down somewhere. It is just not all written on one piece of paper. We cannot write it on one piece of paper—well, we could—because of precedent and no Parliament being able to bind its successor. We have a written constitution. I therefore come down in favour of a hybrid House because, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, said, this House has been hybrid for 800 years. Hybridity is present here. We elected Peers, as one likes to say as a joke, are one source; the appointed majority are another; there are Law Lords and there are Bishops, all of whom come through a different process of arrival. There is nothing new in hybridity. Before, in the days of hereditary peerage, there were the Scots elected peerage on one side and the Irish on another, and before that there were the abbots and the Bishops of the church. There is nothing new in hybridity. I strongly feel that we should be able to allow people in some way to appoint Peers for a bit. That is what it is. It is not election; it is people appointing a Peer. The suggestion of the semi-open list is anathema. That is far worse than anything else that has been contemplated. That is the worst of all methods of election. If we have Peers appointed by a process of election, the argument made by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, and others, that they cannot be accountable, falls away. If you carry that argument to its logical conclusion, any Member of the House of Commons who is elected and says that they are not going to stand at the next election immediately loses his legitimacy. They do not; some people are not going to stand again, and it does not stop them being legitimate. The bane of Parliament is the over-control of parties, so we would have to devise—now is not the time for me to go into it—a system whereby the election of people was more divorced from parties. If you do that, you will see the continuation of the process. The House now uses its powers much more frequently. I am open to correction but I believe that, since 1999, this House has defeated the Government on opposed resolutions about 800 times, and the Government have accepted about 400 of those. I am in danger of changing my name to Lord Longford, but we are doing a better job than we did when composition was completely illegitimate. I want this House to have arguments with the House of Commons; I want it to make life difficult for government. If we have an elected element, we will be able to do that. It is not right that a king’s Government can always get the business that they want. I do not suggest that we go back to when Pitt proposed both the abolition of the slave trade and a reform Bill—I think that it was 1788—and lost both of them; those are major government Bills. However, it is not necessary that every Government should get through everything written in their manifesto, which may be out of date five minutes later. We must make law-passing more difficult for Governments, not easier. I hope that we will be much more inclined to go back to a balanced Whig constitution, which is what my forebears fought for in 1688.