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Constitutional Reform

Let us say three years. We have the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill limping through the Commons with much delay in the calendaring of additional Committee days, which will come to the Lords when we will have very little time to consider it. There is much argument within the Labour Party about whether it could make a promise to have a referendum on the alternative vote, apparently having forgotten that that was one of its clearest pledges in the 1997 Labour manifesto, on which some Members on the Labour Benches of this House were standing for election to the other place. It is now agonising over whether it can get quite as far as it did 12 years ago. That is not a bad definition of a dinosaur; namely, someone who is not quite sure that he wants to stay where he was a long time ago. As regards this House, there is one particular thing on which I should like to ask the Conservatives Benches to make a pledge. I refer to the question of making it easier to retire from the Lords. We know that after the election we will have a substantial addition of new Members nominated to this Chamber. The Conservative Benches will need reinforcement. It is the oldest group in the House. Others will come in to sit on other Benches. We will become well over 800 again and all the talk about economy and the costs of the Lords will come back to bite us unless we keep in a reform of that kind. I think I know the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, well enough to suggest that he will want to knock it out. I should like the noble Lord, Lord Luke, to have a quiet word with him and say that the effectiveness and reputation of this House depend on getting through that interim reform. We are badly governed as a country. One looks at the churning of ministerial departments; we have had a number of education Acts—one a year since 1997—and two or three Home Office Bills a year since then. We recognise that the myth of strong government does not provide us with effective government. We have fast government which, rather like fast food, gives the people indigestion. We need slower and more considered government. I recommend to those who are interested the speech that Nick Clegg gave to the Institute of Government on Tuesday, which set out very well my party’s views on the direction in which constitutional reform needs to move. It includes a rebalancing of central and local government relations; a radical decentralisation of power; control over executive dominance; voting reform, of course; and a number of other measures. On voting reform, I welcome the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. I was in Yorkshire last weekend discussing our targeting of seats there. We are targeting about one in five of the seats in Yorkshire and—what really strikes me from the discussions—so are the other parties. This means that there will be quite a lot of seats in Yorkshire that no one will do much work in. They are almost all Labour safe seats. It is a part of the democratic desert in Britain, and that should worry us. The Labour Party introduced the single-member constituency—we used to have multi-member constituencies—and it ought to think seriously about whether it wants to retain a system which allows you to parachute people in. There are several former Islington councillors in Labour safe seats in Yorkshire—indeed, several members of the Cabinet have been parachuted into seats in Yorkshire—and that is not very democratic. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that if we had had a single-member constituency system for the European elections, perhaps only two or three Labour MEPs would have been elected—probably fewer than UKIP—and that might have left us all a little uncomfortable. Executive dominance is a real problem for all of us. The Government promised to do something about it but have not; they retain their prerogative powers, including those in relation to the dissolution of Parliament. Some Members who were at the last Ecclesiastical Committee meeting may remember David Cameron’s parliamentary private secretary raising the question of whether we could go back on having the Prime Minister choose between different candidates for bishops. That is a real reassertion of prerogative powers. After the next election we could have a Government with a bare majority—or even without an effective majority—taking executive power and choosing to have an early second election without a parliamentary majority vote, thus increasing popular cynicism about politics as such. I regret that, in power, the Labour Government have done so little to spread power and wealth and to increase fairness. On democracy and constitutional reform, I do not believe that the current Conservative Party benefits from being a liberal Conservative Party, as David Cameron loves to say. The principles of liberal democracy are, I repeat, to spread power, wealth and income as widely as possible, and we have failed to do that in the United Kingdom over the past several decades.