House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report

Lord Maginnis of Drumglass Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass (Ind UU)]

My Lords, like the almost 100 noble Lords who have sought to intervene in this debate, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Burns, for his efforts to apply some degree of logic to the problem of this House being allegedly 35%—some might even say 60%—too large. Be that as it may, my conviction is that there are greater parliamentary problems which, if our little local difficulties are not carefully handled, may escalate beyond what we would seek to achieve.

Having served for almost 35 years in the Commons and this Chamber, it is my experience that the changes we require are not such as can simply be resolved here. By seeking to do so in isolation, we could create a disastrous knock-on consequence. Compared with 1983, when I was first elected, the overall standards across our democratic process are being eroded to a dangerous and damaging degree. We seem to have been conditioned to accept that raw academic ability is the sole arbiter in creating a foundation for success.

I still yearn for that breadth of commitment and experience I found all around me when I first came to Westminster. It combined years of experience among those who came from the shop floor and the mines, from management both of the workforce and of technical and financial resources, from military experience, and from professional know-how. Is that experienced-based criterion a thing that survives only in this Chamber? Could we be in danger of sacrificing that, not least with the 15-year option? I was already in my mid-40s when I arrived here—but, like so many of my colleagues, I had been tried and tested professionally, militarily and in business before I was asked to stand for Parliament. I was not imposed on my constituency by some remote and faceless party structure. Bluntly, I was more than some privileged or glorified “interim bag carrier” with a predestined ambition whose time had arrived.

The noble Lord, Lord Burns, has ably sought to give us guidance—but suffice it to say that leadership, planning and practical politics derive from experience, not from patronage. I want to see my United Kingdom with political acumen and with renewed moral standards, which sadly are being steadily and selfishly eroded. That will not happen by our performing some egocentric little local exercise here in this Chamber, and certainly not by increasing the authority and diktats of the faceless back-room shakers and movers, to the detriment of effective, experienced and principled government here in Westminster. Power must never be surrendered to popularity.

Without wanting to be too controversial, I simply ask noble Lords how long it has been since any UK Government articulated a coherent and strategic foreign policy that they would feel able to explain and justify? The House of Lords must change, but it must not end up neutering itself in the erroneous belief that somehow we alone are, or could be, the sole source of strength amid the United Kingdom’s diminishing national role and responsibility. I therefore conclude by saying that we should not merely identify cosmetic changes in this Chamber, and that it is our clear obligation to properly evaluate all the potential consequences. Let us not throw out the baby with the bath-water.