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House of Lords: Reform

My Lords, after 44 years in this House I find myself in a state of great excitement and enthusiasm because of what has happened in the past day or so. I often wonder where this excitement might come from. When I first came here, I came as an independent unionist Peer, and I have always felt that I was independent and believed in the Union. The great advantage of having been here for 44 years is that you can say the same thing that you said 44 years ago, and no one here will remember it. When I came in to the House, I found that we were to sit on the Benches opposite—but nobody showed me where to sit, so I sat down in the front, because I thought that the important people were at the back. Then I was told politely that I should not be there because I was not a right reverend Prelate—but I was then told that I could sit in any place in the House that I wanted, and that the House was a unified animal. Over the 44 years, I found that I was expendable—that I was not environmentally friendly. I realised, too, that I was getting excited because I was perhaps an ethnic minority group, which is terribly popular. But there was one thing that this House did for me: it taught me that you can talk to people. I go back to 1968, when all of this began, and I was asked to do a bit of work as a researcher on the future of the House of Lords. Your Lordships may remember that at that time Willie Whitelaw came here; we always called him Willie—everybody needed one. He suggested for the first time that the Peers might elect some of their own Members, as the Scottish Peers had. The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, was totally against that. I should remind the House that the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, has been here since 1945 and is without doubt the best Foreign Secretary and one of the best Ministers that we have ever had. Then we moved on a bit. Of course, at that time the idea was that hereditary Peers should be allowed to sit but not vote, because it was all about the numbers game and voting. As time went on, we came to 1997 and then to 1999. In 1968 it was said that the hereditary principle should go, and in 1999 we all accepted it. But that was not the problem; the problem was the way in which it was done. However, one great thing came out of it. Even if I am environmentally unfriendly, there is one bit that I have so enjoyed in all this—when the noble and learned Lord the then Lord Chancellor, who was always going on about hereditary Peers and elected hereditary Peers under various Acts, made a statement in 1999 that, "““the hereditary Peers who remain will have greater authority because they will have been elected ... A nice element of the compromise is that to stand in an election will be a novel experience for the 75””.—[Official Report, 30/3/99; col. 207.]" Your Lordships should understand that the term hereditary Peers refers to all those who are entitled to inherit a peerage. It is used in this House to describe people who are actually elected hereditary Peers or, in some cases, appointed hereditary Peers. It is not 92 in total—there are 92 who are elected, including the two statutory office holders, but another 12 are appointed. Four are appointed from these Benches, all of whom had been Leaders of this House. I give this only by way of a background, but I am proud to have been here—and I wanted to be properly elected, as I believed in those days that we should have a fully elected Chamber. I still believe that that should be an objective. The question is how it gets achieved. It will not get achieved through this strange piece of paper that we have been given, which is a form of Green Paper. It might have been called a White Paper, but in previous times White Papers, as I was told by one of my noble colleagues, were very useful. After you read them, if you put a rubber band round them and soaked them in water, they made very good firelighters in the winter. This White Paper is short on information and data, which is why I decided to write my own. I wrote my own and sent it out to as many people as I could, but the system here would not allow me to make major use of the photocopying machine. I typed it all myself—and the biggest worry was licking the envelopes, when I cut my tongue. That is why I look forward to an elected Chamber, if I could stand for election, because we might have proper back-up and facilities. What is going to happen? The excitement now is that we are in a very strong position to make some forthright and positive proposals. Parliament is both Houses—the upper House and the lower House. The weakness of the system at the moment is the other place, which is dominated by the Executive, who have too much power that is misused and who misrepresent the situation and, for selfish political reasons, promote things that they should not. We should get together with the other place and strengthen the right and position of the individual Member of Parliament to represent his constituency and his own thoughts and feelings. We should refuse to accept any legislation that has not passed a scrutiny commission on leaving the House of Commons. The time-wasting and the extra cost in this place are enormous. What happens if we decide suddenly to be elected? Noble Lords will notice in my White Paper that, if one is negative, everybody starts to become a mutual admiration society or self-preservation society and that the turkeys do not vote for Christmas. On the other side, you can look at this House and ask what it is made of—who knows what it is made of—but let me tell you what would happen if we got rid of it. First, 187 former Members of Parliament, who have served their country well and who were elected at one time, would walk out the door. Then, 189 privy counsellors would go—but the Government want to get rid of privy counsellors anyway, or so I am told. That would get rid of some parts of the newly elected Chamber. Then, 46 QCs would go, along with a range of legal people; the Law Lords would probably mostly go. As for the vicars—I am sorry, the right reverend Prelates—they might go, too. The knowledge at the base is quite considerable, and I take only one example—the subject of defence. In this House we have four or five former Chiefs of the Defence Staff, which is quite a lot. We have six former Secretaries of State or Ministers of Defence, two former Secretary-Generals of NATO and another 40 former Ministers in the Ministry of Defence. More than that, more than 170 noble Lords have served in the Armed Forces and know what it is like to have bad boots. They remember when the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders went to Korea in their shorts because they did not have time to get winter clothes. So we have a large knowledge of defence. I will not go through the whole lot, but I could do that with every single department. There is a wonderful base of knowledge here and, if we lose all that knowledge and experience, we will not be able to get it back. Therefore, we have a solution. We should sit down with the House of Commons. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, in that regard. He should not be surprised to hear that one thing I did when I first came here and got attacked for being a hereditary Peer was to say, ““When I was a temporary shop steward in the Transport and General Workers' Union, and about to suffer from asbestosis, I remembered the words of my uncle, Stafford Cripps””. Or I could have said, ““I am a chinless wonder hereditary merchant banking Peer who ought to be put down, because I am environmentally unfriendly””. In this House, we are more representative than anybody else. If noble Lords look at my paper they will find that in the regions there are more Members of the House of Lords than Members of the House of Commons. We have more women and ethnic minority groups and more of Jewish faith. It is an amazing place which could not have been created other than by accident—and I hope that the accident continues.