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Coalition Government

My Lords, at the outset I thank my noble friend Lady Symons of Vernham Dean for introducing this very timely debate. Our difficulties are partly systemic and partly contingent. We are in danger of raising the contingent difficulties to be systemic, while the systemic ones we may just ignore. Let me explain. We have a coalition—yes, there were coalitions in the past, but this one seems to be rather a novel experience—and because our constitution, at least at Westminster level, is majoritarian, there is an assumption by an incoming Government who command a majority, whether that Government are of one party or two, that they get their legislation through, as the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, said. That is an assumption on which the system is based. In the devolved constitutions, we have overcome the majoritarian bias and deliberately encouraged what are called consociational arrangements, whereby parties co-operate and work out a compromise. However, in Westminster we have that majoritarian bias in the constitution. It is not true, as many of my noble friends have said, that this is the first experience of a built-in majority in your Lordships’ House. I arrived here in 1991. At that time, there was a built-in Conservative majority no matter who was in power, which is how we got the Salisbury/Addison convention. After 1999, when an arrangement was made whereby no single party would have a majority, the Salisbury convention should have been given its day off. Since then, it has not been relevant. A related difficulty with the Salisbury convention also arises from the majoritarian nature of the constitution: that, as my noble friend Lord Plant said, manifestos have acquired the sacred status of an implicit contract. If we have a coalition Government who do not have a manifesto, we begin to question whether the Salisbury convention can be applied even after 1999. One of the contingent difficulties of this coalition is that the coalition agreement is much more rigid than a party’s manifesto. I did not go to many Labour Party conferences, but every Labour Party conference was a discussion about how the Government in power had betrayed the manifesto. Now the coalition has decided that this is the coalition agreement and that it will not be deviated from by an inch. The present difficulty that we face in your Lordships' House about this Parliament et cetera Bill is that the Government have no room for compromise. In their coalition agreement, they left no room for manoeuvre. Having left no room for manoeuvre, no matter how long the minority may talk its head off, the Government will not concede. That is our dilemma. I agree the noble Lord, Lord Owen, and I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart. The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, said that there is a minority rampant in power. If only. The minority has no weapon in our system other than time and delay. In the Indian Parliament, there is also a coalition, and the Opposition have been so frustrated by not getting their way that they have stopped the Parliament working at all. Every day, it is disrupted. In the entire winter Session of Parliament, not a day’s business was done. It was the only way in which the Opposition could prove their power. If the Parliament met, the government majority would defeat any proposition by the Opposition. We are not in that bad a situation, but one has to recognise that here is a coalition agreement, not a manifesto that a party has some control over, that is like a prenuptial agreement, and people are afraid of deviating from it. In all the time I have been in your Lordships' House, and before that, we have relied on an implicit code of conduct and rules that are written down but very seldom invoked. In this House, we have had, at least since 1997, and even more since 2010, a big influx of people who have not really absorbed the behaviour and rules of your Lordships' House because you do not learn what they are until you have been here observing them for five or six years. No one actually tells you, and reading the Companion is like reading anything else; it does not tell you how to do things. We currently have the contingent difficulty of a Government who, on principle, have to be inflexible, an Opposition who are very frustrated that they are not being allowed to follow the ordinary procedures of negotiation, and a third of or half the membership of this place who have not, in terms of age in the House of Lords, even reached their teens. We therefore have this problem. One of the things we will have to do is re-examine our Companion. I had the privilege of twice being on your Lordships' House’s committee on the speakership, and throughout those negotiations, when we installed an elected Speaker the greatest care was taken not to give any power to the Lord Speaker and not to deviate at all from the convention that your Lordships' House is a self-governing entity. That is what we are about to lose, because if this sort of stalemate continues—and this Bill is just a beginning as there are three more constitutional Bills to come, and a health Bill—we will face the problem of the Government having a radical, revolutionary Maoist tendency and being in a great hurry, and I do not blame them. They consist of a party that has been out of power for 13 years and another that has been out of power for 50 or 60 years, so they are in a great hurry. They may not last, so they want to get a lot done. If those Bills come through, the strain on the Companion will be great. We should have a commission on the constitution, to which my noble friend Lord Wills referred, or a meeting of the men and women in grey suits, or whatever they are called, to discuss how in the next two or three years we will manage your Lordships’ House and get good work done. I know why we are behaving how we are. I also know that noble Lords opposite do not like the way in which we are behaving because they think that it is unreasonable, but we are in new times. A number of new things are happening. We need to understand our mutual problems. Away from the Floor of the House, there should be talk about how we can do better business on the Floor of your Lordships’ House. If we do not do that, we will be in a stalemate day after day. Even the newspapers will get tired of taking photographs of your Lordships half asleep at 3 am. This may be a coalition Government, but who knows whether there will be more? Imagine how much worse the situation would have been if there had been a grand coalition, German style, of Labour and Conservative Members. What would the situation of the Liberal Democrats have been? What would they have done? They would have had to go on hunger strike on the Floor of the House to get their voice heard. We have to be prepared for those things. To use a cliché, we must think outside the box. We still have a lot of good will in your Lordships’ House on which we should capitalise to make things better than they are.