House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Lord Mancroft Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 8th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mancroft (Con)]

My Lords, there are two main premises to this Bill. The first is that the hereditary Peers’ by-election is a ludicrous and, to some, embarrassing measure that is past its sell-by date, and the second is that this is one small piece of incremental reform that your Lordships can enact without too much fuss, to modernise the House, and show the world how relevant we are. It is true that the by-elections are a bit odd, and may look even odder to outsiders, but they are no more half-baked than some of the other reforms that the Blair Government made such a mess of. There are lots of oddities in our constitution, but it is important to look at them not in isolation, but in the round, as a whole.

The more I look at your Lordships’ House in the whole, the more I have to conclude, reluctantly, because I am fond of it as it is, and even fonder of it as it was, that it does not work as well as it could. Sitting through our interminable debates on reform of this House, I have heard so many speakers tell the House and themselves what a very good job we do. Sadly, I am afraid that I do not agree. We do not do a bad job, but it is not as good a job as we could do or used to do. Our general and Back-Bench debates, which were often of such extraordinary quality and depth that they really were listened to around the world, and influenced thinking and policy-making at the other end of the Corridor and beyond, are now all too often pretty turgid stuff. Overlong speakers’ lists result in speeches so short that they are almost meaningless or, worse still, a series of individual statements, bearing little relation to previous speeches, and often followed by a ministerial wind-up on what often appears to be a completely different subject.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

Does the noble Lord agree with me that it would be appropriate for Members to pay attention to the Companion, which states that speeches should not be read?

[Lord Mancroft]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord for his comments, as I always am. I will pass them on to all noble Lords who may be tempted to read. Sadly, I am so blind I cannot really read any of it at all.

[The Earl of Erroll]

It is Questions that should not be read, not speeches.

[Lord Mancroft]

My Lords, I do not wish to get involved in that debate. The one initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is much more interesting.

Nowadays we also have unedifying and tetchy Questions—the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, may know a little bit about that—which seek and elicit little information of any use to anybody, but serve only to allow the usual suspects to grandstand, and junior Ministers to practise repeating the same bland, Civil Service jargon.

More importantly, it is difficult to conclude that we revise legislation as well as we used to, with a never-ending stream of Second Reading speeches in Committee, and too many important matters decided on Report on the Whip, without any reference to constructive input from the Back Benches. This is not, as some suggest and have suggested again today, because the House is too big. As we all know, it is actually rather smaller than it was 50 years ago. It is not a problem of quantity, but rather of quality. That is not directly because the number of hereditary Peers was reduced—by 90% on paper, or 45% in practice—but is a consequence of their departure en bloc. If the existence in the House of 92 Peers who owe their seats to their birth is an anomaly, it is not actually an outrage. I do not find that most people around the country are particularly horrified or embarrassed by it; they do not really think about it very much. What is an outrage—a genuine constitutional outrage—however, is that the Prime Minister who has the majority, or at least the control, of the other House, retains virtually sole power of appointment to it. That is a matter worth shouting about.

The red-top newspapers complain that this House is an old people’s home. They are not far wrong although they do not seem to have worked out that that is because your Lordships’ House has increasingly become a retirement home for Members of another place since the Life Peerages Act was introduced in 1958. In the old days when this House had 1,200 Members, 10% were retired Members of Parliament. Now we have 800 Members, of whom 25% are former Members of Parliament. There is nothing wrong with Members of Parliament individually—I even have a few friends who were MPs—and they are perfectly suited to the House of Commons. However, in your Lordships’ House, and in too great a number, they are an absolute menace: first, because, by their very nature, they want to do things and change things when they would be far better employed just paying attention, and, secondly because they think that being a Member of this House is a full-time job, so they turn up all day, every day and think that they ought to speak in every debate even when they have nothing original to say. That is why this House appears to the uneducated outside observer to be full to overflowing.

This House is often—erroneously in my view—referred to as a House of expertise. Of course, it is not. What it was when I first came here was a House of Members with a wide range of experience and independence of mind and attitude. That is why the Whips could not dominate it as they do the House of Commons. Where you have a group of experienced and independent-minded people, you will inevitably find that they have one or two areas of expertise, and that is what the casual observer saw and often remarked upon.

Members of Parliament by their very nature, after years of subservience to the Whip, are less comfortable with exercising their free will, which is so frowned upon at the other end of the Corridor. Their skill is not in revising legislation because, unfortunately, the House of Commons no longer deals with legislation, but rather in adversarial party politics, which is what we do not do here, or at least used not to. That is why the conduct of business has become so unruly and discourteous, aping the manners of another House.

I accept that MPs find this House more comfortable but it is not about their comfort or indeed my pleasure. It is therefore essential for the health of our system of parliamentary democracy that this House corrects and completes the reform that has led to this disastrous state of affairs. Some argue that incremental reform is better than none at all but it is clear to me that, whether deliberate or accidental, incremental reform of the type that this Bill seeks to achieve would make proper wholesale reform much less likely. That is not in the interests of this House, of Parliament or of the British people. I will therefore oppose this Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to the debate and massively grateful to those who have supported my position.

I do not know whether to take the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Young, as a clear rejection or as a possible consideration at a later date, and I am sure that that degree of ambiguity was fully intended by him in his remarks. However, I just want to emphasise that this Bill is not about reducing the size of the House. That would be a small net benefit of this Bill, but that is certainly not its objective—if it was, it would be a pretty poor tool.

In the 17 or 18 years since the passage of the original Bill, 32 new hereditary Peers have arrived, not by any means all of whom have replaced Conservative Peers. The inference of the contribution made by the noble Lord, Lord True, was that this Bill would somehow lead to a massacre of Conservative Peers. It would be a very slow process of attrition and I think it would be about another 40 years before the job was done which, having myself been here for a little while now, is about the pace at which this House likes to move.

What has been noticeable about the debate, and I shall read it carefully to make sure that my initial impressions are correct, is that the challenge that I put out during my opening speech, which was to hear some positive arguments for the by-elections in terms of how they enhance the House, has not been answered. Of course good people have come here by means of the by-elections—that is not in dispute any more than is the fact that good Bishops have come, as well as good life Peers. But as for by-elections being a mechanism for putting people into a House of Parliament in the 21st century, no one has offered any positive arguments in favour of retaining the system apart from, I think, the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, who was clearly nostalgic. I understand his nostalgia for a time when virtually everyone here was hereditary and of course most of them voted Conservative. I can understand why that would appeal to him. He described some wonderful debates to us.

[Lord Mancroft]

My Lords, I was not displaying nostalgia; I was reflecting upon the very real fact that the nature of the way the hereditary Peers operated was that, because they were hereditary, they had a degree of independence which was extremely desirable. I was reflecting on that point and it is not a nostalgic one at all. The fact is that the composition of this House today has by its very nature lost to a significant degree its independence from the existing political establishment, to the detriment of both this House and of Parliament.

[Lord Grocott]

I advise the noble Lord to stop digging. This wondrous independence and spirit of quality and intellectual debate invariably resulted in a House that always supported Conservative Governments and caused no end of trouble to Labour Governments. I will leave that one there.

I could not improve on my good friend Lord Snape. He has lost none of it in 50 years; he really can turn it on when he needs to. I was always deeply respectful of him. He reports the fact that I was his Chief Whip, but he was my Whip in the 1970s, when he reportedly put next to my name “WWWW”, which meant, “Works well when watched”.