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Lords of Appeal in Ordinary

My Lords, I suppose that this is, in a sense, the last day on which we can refer to ourselves as the high court of Parliament, with all the confusion that that has left for many of us. Certainly, when I first became a Member of this House, I had to explain to many of my cousins and American friends that when they read that the House of Lords had ruled or decided, I had not personally been involved. The confusion was there for many people outside. When I arrived here, I was puzzled at first by the little knots of people that would form on occasional days around the newspapers in the Library, almost as if unintentionally and unconsciously, and then would suddenly walk out together. At times I thought that they were a closed circle into which one could not insert oneself. Happily, because of the European Union Committee and the appointment to the Law Lords of someone with whom I used to drink in the pub as a junior law lecturer very many years ago, that circle has been broken and many of us have become good friends with members of the Law Lords as a group. We also benefit in this House, as the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said, from retired Law Lords and the many contributions that they make. The process of constitutional reform, of which this is now a part, leaves open the question of whether we will find many more retired Law Lords coming to us. Yesterday we had some controversy about whether this House has too few lawyers, or too many lawyers, already. The process of constitutional reform has been a slow one and will no doubt continue to move slowly. We on these Benches have supported the separation of courts from the legislature for a mere 200 years. I have heard much in the past few days about the principle of unripe time, and that this is a little too early. I would simply remind the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, of Francis Cornford’s definition of the principle of unripe time—that time, ""'like the medlar … has a trick of going rotten before it is ripe"." When Titus Salt, the man who built Saltaire, stood for Parliament as a Liberal MP, reform of the courts and of the Lords were two of his 10 points. I am happy that most of those points have now been achieved. His 10th, which was fixed-term Parliaments, remains for a future date. Perhaps that is something that we will move on to shortly. It was the Palmerston Government in 1856, after all, that proposed for the first time that legal Members of the Lords should be given life peerages, something that aroused furious opposition from the Conservative Members of the Lords—how unlike their approach to constitutional reform today. No doubt the Conservatives also opposed moving the Court of King’s Bench and the Court of Common Pleas out of Westminster Hall, which took place at the same time. It was the Gladstone Government in 1873, with Lord Selborne as the reforming Lord Chancellor, that proposed the separation of the Supreme Court from the Lords, and it was Benjamin Disraeli, when he returned the following year, who refused to implement the Act. Well, here we are, only 130 years later, putting through one of Gladstone’s measures. After all, part of the tragedy of British constitutional history over the past 150 years is that many of the measures that Gladstone proposed were not implemented because of Conservative opposition in this House. Incidentally, I note that the Law Lords moved in 1948 from the Floor to upstairs, to Committee Room 1, primarily because of the noise that workmen were making in repairing the war damage around the House. The splendid new accommodation to which they are to be moved in Middlesex Guildhall will perhaps be less cosy and intimate than the second floor and Committee Room 1, but we look forward to seeing them across the square. Some of us perhaps look forward to the square being closed to traffic so that we can walk over there. The message from these Benches to the Law Lords must be that we have appreciated your company and look forward to seeing more of you. We do not want to lose you, but we think you ought to go.