Lord Cormack
Main Page: Lord Cormack (Conservative - Life peer)House of Lords: Reform
Lord Cormack Excerpts
Lord Cormack
My Lords, it is a very great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. This has been a quite remarkable debate. I begin by apologising to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, and my noble friend Lord Younger of Leckie, as theirs are the only two speeches that I did not hear. However, I am told that they were both excellent.
In opening the debate, my noble friend used the word “consensus”, as he has done so often. Consensus has been defined as a disparate group of people coming to a high degree of agreement. We have had consensus today because from all parts of the House we have had eloquent pleas for your Lordships’ House. We have had abrupt dismissal of the inadequacies of the White Paper, particularly in the brilliant, scintillating speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd. Even those who have given grudging support to the White Paper, such as the noble Lord, Lord Hoyle—I think that only three have given it total support—have dismissed it as an inadequate document.
No system is perfect, and our parliamentary system is not perfect, but it has some remarkable features. In terms of the distribution of power, it is, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Exeter said, close to a unicameral assembly because the real unambiguous power and democratic mandate are held at the other end of the Corridor by the elected House of Commons, and so it should be. As I said in my maiden speech, I believe that there is a great deal to be said for unambiguous holding of the democratic mandate.
Your Lordships’ House has many distinct and distinguished Members. The expertise encompassed in this place has been referred to many times in this debate. I will not repeat what has been said for fear of incurring the sort of wrath that I once heard from a doorkeeper in another place. When the doorkeeper was asked, “Has everything been said?”, he replied, “Yes, but not yet by everybody”. Therefore, I shall not repeat at length the admirable points that have been made about the composition of this place, nor do I want to rehearse—as has been done—the number of reforms that this House has gone through in the 100 years since the Parliament Act 1911. However, we are not debating another stage of House of Lords reform; we are debating abolition of the House of Lords and its replacement by a totally different assembly. It is a disingenuous use of the words “House of Lords” to call this House of Lords reform in the White Paper. It is also disingenuous to refer to it as the House of Lords in the paper when what is being proposed is a senate. We should talk in those unambiguous terms. We would be replaced by a senate. As one who before the end of the previous century was briefly a constitutional affairs spokesman for my party, I am deeply saddened that my party, which should be the prime defender of the constitution, should have got itself into this mess supporting such absurd proposals.
The underlying theme of the White Paper is a reluctant acknowledgment and praising of your Lordships' House for what it does and how it does it and assurances that the senate that would replace it would preserve our merits, our detachment from party domination and our powers. But that could not be. My noble friend accepted that the relationship between the new Chamber and the other place would inevitably be different. Some, such as the President of the Liberal Democrats—I referred to this in an earlier intervention—have said that an elected second Chamber would, if elected on PR, be more legitimate than the other place. Even if the actual powers were no different, as has been said several times, those powers would be used. My noble friend Lord Dobbs, in his extremely entertaining and amusing speech, made that point with real vigour and force. He was right to do so.
One thing that has not been said today is that the White Paper proposes a House with four categories of membership—the elected, the appointed, the Bishops, and the placemen, who would be an unspecified number of Prime Ministerial nominees and be Members only as long as they held office. It is not impossible to imagine a close vote in which the Government of the day were defeated by the 20 per cent or sustained by the placemen. The 20 per cent—the Bishops and the placemen—demolish the logic of the argument that only election confers legitimacy. If the Government concede that illogicality and go for the Deputy Prime Minister’s preferred option of 100 per cent being elected, we would create an expensive second Chamber of paid party politicians with no Cross-Bench element or expertise. If election is then held to be the only legitimacy, where does that leave those in our society who hold high office without election?
It may not be the intention, but the passing of this Bill would isolate the monarchy and make it vulnerable to future Cleggery. Almost as dangerous—this has also been referred to—is that the Bill would separate elections from accountability, because Members of the senate would have a single 15-year term, which would be a deterrent to any man or woman wishing to offer the state some service after a lifetime of achievement. Who at 65 wants to stand for a 15-year term, with all the answerability that a paid salary means they would have?
When a Government are legislating, especially on constitutional matters, they should eschew gimmickry, pseudo-populism and tokenism. This document smacks of all three. Far worse, it threatens that durable, priceless but fragile settlement that is the British constitution. It contains no coherent and well thought-out blueprint for a new settlement. Still less does it respond to public clamour.
Every so often in our history, those in power have an urge to tear down or to tear up, such as when they sacked the monasteries or when they abolished county boroughs. I remind my noble friend the Leader of the House that destruction is the easy bit. Destroying a unique forum for public service, where those who have held high office in government can sit with those who have achieved distinction in their various callings, may be within his power. But does he really want to have the epitaph, “He promised progress and created chaos”?
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, referred to the Liberal Democrats’ murky waters whose depths she could not fathom on the issue of Lords reform. To me, the waters are as a,
“crystal fountain,
Whence the healing stream”,
of democracy,
“doth flow”.
Noble Lords would expect me to quote a Welsh hymn, I am sure, but I am reminded that in January 1907 Mr Lloyd George, speaking at Caernarfon, declaimed:
“I would say this to my fellow-countrymen. If they find our Liberal Government manoeuvring their artillery into position for leading an attack on the Lords, any Welshman who worries them in attending to anything else until that citadel has been stormed ought to be put into the guard-room”.
The phalanx who guard the citadel today in this House are largely former Members of the other place, enthusiastically supported by the survivors of the hereditary Peers and the Cross-Benchers. These former Members of Parliament, across party, have enjoyed and fulfilled distinguished careers, many in the heights of government, and I respect them for that. It is true that in the past they walked across Central Lobby once a year to the House of Lords for the opening of Parliament, but otherwise they never came near the place and are surprised to find how potent it is when they arrive. Their main motivation for retaining appointment as the way to membership is expressed as a fear for the primacy of the Chamber where they made their mark—they have their misty memories to preserve. My noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames has no doubt soothed their fears on that score and I will not repeat his compelling arguments. The attitude of former Members of Parliament was encapsulated for me by a comment from a noble friend, an ex-Member of Parliament, obviously with warm memories of his local cinema in his youth. He said to me, “You must realise, Martin, that this place is the second feature”.
However, when did noble Lords ever hear it said of a proposal for a government Bill, “This will never get through the House of Commons”? How often, by contrast, have we heard, “That will never get through the Lords”? While we debate each amendment in a Bill and scrutinise each clause, and while we have been able in opposition or even from these Benches to win changes to legislation and even to defeat the Government, the other place has given up and swathes of legislation are presented to us undebated and undigested. The public perception is that debate in the other place has degenerated into point-scoring with half an eye to personal and party advantage at the next election. It is a potent reason for public disillusion. When in ping-pong we finally defer to the so-called elected House, we are deferring not to the elected Members of the other place at all but to the Government of the day who control it completely. The Whips were, and remain, absolute. Government business must be delivered. The other place is no more than an arm of the Executive.
The noble Lord, Lord Hoyle, referred to these proposals to introduce democracy into this House as a dog’s dinner. I was reminded of the words directed by Mr Lloyd George at the House of Lords, which I suggest should now, after the experience of the past 20 years, be directed to the other place. He said:
“This is the loyal and trusty mastiff which is to watch over our interests, but which runs away at the first snarl of the trade unions … A mastiff? It is”,
Mr Balfour’s,
“poodle. It fetches and carries for him. It barks for him. It bites anybody that he sets it on to. And we are told that this is … the safeguard of liberty in the country. Talk about mockeries and shams. Was there ever such a sham as that?”.—[Official Report, Commons, 26/6/1907; col.1429.]
Today, I might suggest that the mastiff has a tendency to run away at the first snarl of the red top press. That other place, the safeguard of liberty, endorsed, in the grip of the Government, the Iraq War, the control order, the special courts, the indeterminate sentence and all the paraphernalia of an intrusive and watchful state.
When the Members of this House exercise its undoubted powers and influence, they do it in the name of the people, but they do not have the people’s mandate to do so. It is a fundamental principle of democracy—the rule of the demos, the people—that parliamentarians should subject themselves to election. Is “election” an inconvenient word? A former Conservative Home Secretary, leader of his party and a recent Member of this House railed against the judges in January of this year. He said:
“More and more decisions are being made by unelected, unaccountable judges, instead of accountable, elected Members of Parliament who have to answer to the public for what happens”.
The Conservative Benches are currently pushing through elected mayors and elected police commissioners who are to answer to the public for what happens, but they seem—some of them, at least, in this House—to baulk at the idea of elected legislators.
It is argued, and has been argued today, that we will lose all the expertise on the Cross Benches because Cross-Benchers would never stand for election. I am very wary of that argument. There is, of course, expertise enough on the political Benches in this House. We heard today a very funny speech delivered with enormous panache by the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, but when she reads it tomorrow she may recognise that it actually denigrated politicians—those who tramp the streets, who talk to people on their doorsteps, who prepare and deliver leaflets to try to explain their policies and purposes and who listen and respond to people’s concerns.
Lord Cormack
My noble friend should remember that the noble Baroness was elected many times to the House of Commons and that there is no one more familiar or adept at electioneering than her.
Lord Thomas of Gresford
Of course. She is a highly popular Member of this House and a highly respected person. Yet it is easy and populist to attack politicians. It is almost as easy as attacking lawyers. If Cross-Benchers want to serve the people, they can knock on doors with the rest of us. As the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has said, the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, did so with success—far more success than I had in the past.