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Coalition Government

My Lords, the first thing I would like to do is to congratulate the noble Baroness on proposing the Motion in, as we would have expected, a vigorous and forceful way. She may have been a bit luckier than she anticipated in exactly when her Motion came to be debated, but nevertheless it was a forceful speech. This is the first opportunity that I have of saying publicly to her, since she was very helpful to me on the committee we had dealing with expenses, how much I enjoyed working with her on that occasion. Once or twice I was not quite sure whether she was on my side but nevertheless she always made a constructive contribution to it and very much helped in producing the final result. I want particularly just to talk about the parliamentary aspects of a coalition. Much has been written about these things, and the noble Baroness has added a number of things to it. As for her quotations from the Joint Committee on Conventions that she did with her noble friend who was around a few minutes ago, I think that she perhaps chose that part which suited her arguments best. Indeed, in its report the committee says it believes that the Salisbury convention has changed significantly and does not believe that it should be called the Salisbury convention any more. At paragraph 102, it also indicated that, "““evidence points to the emergence in recent years of a practice that the House of Lords will usually give a Second Reading to any government Bill, whether based on the manifesto or not””." So we are in a new situation here. I do not want to dwell on the events of the past few days—except to say, if I may, that the exchange between my noble friend the Leader of the House and the noble Baroness the Leader of the Opposition, exactly a week ago today at Questions, was extremely helpful and was one which many of us appreciated. It is more than 30 years since I started to be involved in the management of parliamentary business. I cannot see that the management of parliamentary business or the rules that govern it have altered substantially since then. Of course, there have been changes. The noble Baroness talked about the number of new Peers who have come into the House. At the beginning of this Parliament, I think that I am correct to say that more than 50 per cent of the House had been created under the Labour Government, so a number of new Peers have been brought into this House by both Governments. The main problem now is to find a seat to sit on, but we all share in that responsibility—and of deciding how we will go on in this place. In the 30 years during which I have looked at parliamentary procedures, things have substantially deteriorated. To be fair, the rot set in in the House of Commons. I believe that the automatic timetabling of business was a great mistake. I very much regret that the present Government have not felt able to remove that from the House of Commons. Timetable Motions are, of course, sometimes necessary; in my experience, in many cases the Opposition want the timetable Motion because it is a very practical way for them to show complete opposition to a Bill. They would much sooner have a guillotine to demonstrate that point and then have some orderly planning of the rest of the debate than what has been going on in the past few days—I said that I would not talk about the past few days, so I will not.