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Constitutional Renewal

My Lords, on the question of the Human Rights Act, I think it would have been helpful to those who do not know about the noble Lord if he had declared his substantial remunerated interests in these subjects. We know it, but those outside the House do not. Further, to hear some of the Liberal Democrats speeches in this debate, you would think that all we needed to save Britain from recession was to tear up what was left of our ancestral constitution and invent something new. Before plunging into more so-called renewal, might it be wise to review the dubious success of the most recent renewals? I do not set my teeth against change; indeed, I think I am well known in this place for wanting to find a consensus for change here. We need a smaller House of Commons. Will that be in the Government’s Bill? If we want fair voting, we need rules to ensure that the sizes of each constituency are near enough the same. We need rules to ensure that political parties should not retain donations that are the proceeds of fraud or of crime. We need that massive transfer of power to local communities to which my right honourable friend Mr Cameron has spoken. So we do need some change, very often beyond local government and down to people. I am cynical about the constant delays in the Government’s constitutional renewal Bill—such a glorious title—first promised more than two years ago. Perhaps the noble Lord can tell us when it will be introduced. Instead of smokescreens of change thrown up by the Prime Minister to hide the problems in his own backyard, which targeted this House from the basis of what I can only describe as apparent ignorance, we cannot renew confidence in Parliament without giving the British people the chance to send fresh faces to Westminster in a general election. I have troubled your Lordships in the past with a modest maxim of my own, which I urge us to remember: things are not necessarily bad simply because they are old: they become old because they are good and have the qualities to endure. As I listened to the right reverend Prelate I thought that Durham Cathedral was not a bad example. Doubtless, if we had the faith and the genius we could build a new one, but I would be inclined to be modest about whether the result would be quite the same. So I am not an easy sell on change for change’s sake. Let us take that single case of proportional representation about which the Liberal Democrats and the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, get so excited, although I lean rather more in the direction of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, than the Liberal Democrats. One thing Britain has benefited from is stable Governments, with representatives at Westminster directly accountable to their electors and extremists shut out of office. Why on earth should we change that to suit the constantly thwarted ambitions of a third most popular party? Forgive me if my history is a little shaky; perhaps the noble Lords, Lord Howarth and Lord Wallace, can put me right. But am I not right in thinking that with the decades of Liberal control of Parliament from the 1830s to the 1880s and the great landslide of 1906, we were never given this incredible elixir of proportional representation? Indeed, when the first Lord Avebury put it to the vote in the Commons, just 17 of those massed Liberal MPs supported it. Mr Gladstone was not having any, and neither should we. PR is said to stand for proportional representation. We all know that what it means is permanent representation—permanent representation for Liberal Democrats in office, a glorious never-never land in which those great Platonic guardians will be immovable from office and decide which of the more popular parties will exercise it. We live in it every day in this House, as Liberal Democrat Peers decide which parts of the Government’s legislation will go through and which will not. I chuckle when I hear Mr Clegg saying that he wants PR to shake the hold of the two establishment parties. What he really wants is one establishment party—his own—with permanent representation in office. That is what PR is all about. Because time is getting on, let me conclude with two brief points. First, can I renew my suggestion of a regular Question Time for the two Secretaries of State now in this House? I am delighted to see the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, on the Front Bench. I do not want to break the valuable rule that Ministers in this House answer for the whole Government and that our Question Times are varied, but an additional provision to scrutinise these Ministers would be widely welcomed. Secondly, as we all come to write our manifestos for the election that the Prime Minister cannot indefinitely delay, can I research the status of an old wisdom? For this side, the Salisbury doctrine, as reinforced in the report of the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham, will apply if we are not elected. We have observed it scrupulously these past 12 years. I am not sure of the position of the Liberal Democrats but I think that they have honoured it and would wish to continue to honour it from now on. Will the Minister give an assurance that the Labour Party, if in opposition in this unelected House, would observe it again? This is one principle that surely needs to be explicitly and clearly reaffirmed. The real joy of this debate is that there will be, as we heard yesterday, a whole series of opportunities in the next few months to debate these issues many times again, with the publication of the constitutional renewal Bill, the clauses on reform of the House of Lords and, indeed, the short Bill on the new super-regulator for the whole of Parliament. There are many other things that I wish to say, but I know that I will have the opportunity to do so in the months to come.