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House of Lords (Amendment) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I commiserate with the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. It is bad enough to have to spend your birthday at work but being made a member of the Committee of Public Safety and compared with Gromyko must be special presents that he probably did not expect. I wish him a long life. I see that he shares a birthday with Bruce Forsyth, and that cannot be a bad sign. I have always been for a wholly elected House. Although the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, called his approach gradualist, it is not—we have been very gradualist about House of Lords reform as it is—it is incremental. I do not like incrementalism because, as I said in Committee on the Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, it is likely that a Bill like this, once passed, will make people think, ““Oh, we’ve reformed the House of Lords. What is there left to be reformed””? I want the big bang. I make no apologies for that. I very much follow the arguments made by the noble Earl, Lord Erroll. I want an elected House because that would be the only guarantee of a binding restraint on the Executive. As we are right now, talented and marvellous and handsome as we all are, we always hold back and say, ““Another place has been elected, therefore it must have primacy””. As long as that continues, the Executive here will misbehave. We know that Executives of all parties misbehave and that only a strong legislature can keep them under control. Having said that, the Bill before us is curious. It does not get rid of the hereditary peerage at one fell stroke, as it were, as the Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, was trying to do. It does not do very much except attempt a slow and steady erosion of the number of hereditary Peers. Therefore, I do not quite know in what sense it would reform the House. I know that people do not like the by-election clause. For historical reasons, 75 Peers—10 per cent of the 750 hereditary Peers—are elected from party constituencies, and 15 elected by all of us. If people do not like small electorates, let us assume that every vacancy could be filled by all of us. That is perfectly doable, and it would remove small constituencies in by-elections and give us all a stake in which hereditary Peer got in next. If the smallness of the electorate bothers people, it can be amended. If people do not want hereditary Peers here at all, they will have to remove the entire Section 2 of the House of Lords Act 1999, and not just reform it. Any parliament can change—