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Queen’s Speech

That could not occur according to the wording in my Bill, but I agree that the wording in the Government’s Bill is slightly ambiguous. That is certainly not the intention in the proposal as I put it forward, but there is some argument about the drafting, to which we will no doubt come when the Bill reaches us. The final item was to deal with the expulsion of serious wrongdoers from this House on the same basis as happens in the other place. It is wrong that legislators should be serious lawbreakers. The three proposals which have survived from my Bill are taken over by the Government. I say with some irritation that it is a great shame that they did not accept the offer I made so many times for them to take over the Bill as I presented it. If they had done that, it could have been in law by now. It was clearly overwhelmingly supported in all parts of this House. Instead, we now have simply the current legislation, to which I shall return later, plus the offer of a draft Bill which will propose an elected House. The Government are going forward with that on the basis that it will be a firm manifesto commitment. I do not want to go back over previous manifesto commitments, but this Government have had manifesto commitments on Lords reform which have simply been ignored at election after election. Why should one place any more faith in a new one? As for the Conservative Party, we remember on the last occasion when we debated my Bill a moving speech from the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, who said that he was off to see Mr David Cameron to make sure that this matter would receive priority attention. We were all deeply moved by this. There has been a deafening silence since and the press continues to report Mr Cameron as saying that he regards it as a priority for his third term. I have great scepticism about whether this elected Chamber will ever be legislated for. Political history demonstrates that my scepticism is worthy. The last White Paper presented by Mr Straw on this subject was the fifth substantial document on Lords reform since the Government took office. It still leaves major issues undetermined. Will the House of Lords be wholly elected or partly elected? What will the electoral system be? They are not minor issues. Mr Straw has changed his mind so often from 50 per cent elected to something else that he has appeared like a man who says, "These are my principles and if you don’t like them I have others". I ask the Minister: will these unresolved issues be firmly put in place in the draft Bill or will it simply echo what is in the present White Paper? If so, it is hardly worth pursuing at all. When the Minister winds up, I would press him to answer this: when this train load of legislation hits the buffers, as it inevitably will when Parliament is dissolved in a very short space of time, will he rescue from the wreckage this part of the constitutional Bill and make sure that it goes through before the Parliament comes to an end? At least when we come back after the election, whatever the result, we will have a House of Lords which has moved with the times.