House of Lords (Cessation of Membership) Bill [HL]

Lord Soley Excerpts

Friday 29th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I will not be quite as brief as the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, but I shall do my best to limit my speech. I anticipated the noble Lord, Lord Steel, this morning: I came in thinking that he would not want a debate on the main Bill that we all saw the other day and the phrase on my lips was from the famous Monty Python sketch, “Don’t mention the war”. However, I shall mention it once and hope that I get away with it.

The noble Lord, Lord Steel, is taking the right approach to reform of the House of Lords. We will achieve far more than we would by bringing in huge Bills that, at the end of day, would cause more problems than they solve. When I have conversations with my colleagues in the Labour Party, we mention from time to time that we have promised for 100 years to either get rid of the House of Lords or reform it. When I am asked why we have not done so, I answer that you might know what you are against but, if there is a great deal of disagreement about what you are in favour of, it is very difficult to deliver it—and that has been the experience. We all remember, or at least know of, the way in which Enoch Powell and Michael Foot led their campaign, which is a classic example of not moving forward. Without mentioning the war for too long, it is a fatal approach if you do not work out clearly what you want the second Chamber to do, otherwise you will not get the rest of your questions right. If the answer to the question, “What do you want to do?”, is that you want this House to continue to scrutinise, as it does now, that would raise the questions of, “Why is it that the House of Commons cannot scrutinise better?”—I say that as an ex-MP with a great deal of knowledge of the subject—and, “Why is it that legislation reaches this place in such a terrible state anyway?”. It is an important point. Noble Lords will be pleased to know that that is the end of the war.

The noble Lord, Lord Steel, is taking the right approach, although we ought to consider doing this in other ways as well. There is a lot to be said for allowing a Member to decide when he or she wants to retire. It is not a good idea in any job to allow people to drift; to come in occasionally, less and less, and act as though they are retiring slowly. It does not make sense for the individual either. When I decide to go, I would like to make a clean break and retire. That would make much more sense because you would enter another phase of your life and move on. That is important. I think some of my colleagues here feel the same and would say, “When I decide to go, I want to go”. The advantages of this have been made clear.

My noble friend Lord Wills made a point about the expulsion issue. I am not sure, bearing in mind recent history in this House, that we will solve this problem until we have a clear procedure on how we deal with breaches within the House that fits with the rule of law generally and the way in which the courts are likely to interpret it. It is a difficult area. Although I do not dissent from Clause 3(5), it refers only to events outside the United Kingdom. We have either to remove those two words or leave them in and address the bigger issue in the way that I have described.

I turn now to a more contentious issue. I greatly enjoyed the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, and I agree with his comments about Nick Clegg and other MPs of all parties who slag off the House of Lords; they find it a cheap and easy line. That, though, is a terrible mistake; as the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, pointed out, it would be easy to reverse that and throw it back at them. However, we would get involved in a slanging match, and that does not make sense.

One of our problems—and this is the contentious part—is the name of this place. “The House of Lords” is increasingly seen as a very old-fashioned 17th, 18th or 19th-century name, and we have a problem with it. I remember one of my colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party, quite a few years ago, saying to me that his answer to the House of Lords was, “One Peer for every lamppost”. It is that kind of thinking that enables people to make insults about one place or the other. It also enables the general public to say, “Oh well, they are all the same”. They see a photograph in the paper—it is always the same photograph—of Peers sitting in their robes as though that is the way we are every day of the week.

At some stage we will need to address the name in order to convey to people what our job is and that we are part of the legislative system but we do not pass laws. This is one of the problems about the election issue. We advise, revise and recommend but we do not legislate. At the end of the day, we cannot force through legislation; only the House of Commons can do that. It is an important point.

If we support Bills of this nature and introduce others along the same lines, we might achieve far more reform of this place and win a great deal of public support. The Bill that the Government have brought forward will, quite frankly, confuse the debate and the war will continue.