Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I shall confine my remarks almost exclusively to part 3 of the Bill, on the House of Lords. I agree with most of the Bill and with quite a number of the remarks that I have heard this evening suggesting that some good things that should have been in the Bill were left out—concerning the Attorney-General, for example. Several people suggested that after the Prime Minister's speech announcing all these wonderful constitutional changes, it must be Christmas—but it turned out to be Christmas in the workhouse, not the Christmas that most of us are fortunate enough to enjoy these days. The Lords provisions are pretty meagre, as I have just said, but at least clause 26, which will slowly remove the hereditary peerage, is on the right track. It is certainly overdue and it will finally break the link between the House of Lords and the hereditary principle. That must be right. There are those who still challenge the constitutional notion that in the 21st century only those who have been put into Parliament by the electorate should have the right to make our laws, but there are now very few takers indeed for the notion that people should inherit the right to legislate—although, who knows, there may still be a few. It is often forgotten that clause 26 is necessary, and that the hereditaries are still in place, because it suited the Blair Government's purpose to keep them there. Not only did the Blair Government beat a hasty retreat from their pre-election promises of democracy for the Lords, but Tony Blair personally negotiated and stitched up a backroom deal with Lord Cranborne to perpetuate the hereditary peerage. That deal was subsequently given legislative effect in clauses in the House of Lords Act 1999. I broke a three-line Whip to vote against those provisions, finding myself voting against both my party and the Labour party. In fact, in all three of the major rebellions that I have undertaken since I became an MP, I have been in the happy position, over 12 years, of voting against both the major parties. It is those provisions in the 1999 Act that clause 26 will reverse. If there is a vote on them, I certainly shall not vote against clause 26. It is worth reminding ourselves just how pernicious what was done in 1999 is. It enables deceased hereditaries to be replaced by an electorate restricted to hereditaries of the same party. Lord Steel gave an interesting description of this. He said:""We"—" that is, the Liberal Democrats—""had six candidates for a by-election and four voters. Before the Great Reform Bill of 1832, the rotten borough of Old Sarum had at least 11 voters. In the Labour Party, there were 11 candidates and only three voters, and we had the spectacle of the Clerk of the Parliaments declaring to the world that a new Member had been elected to the British Parliament by two votes to one."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 July 2007; Vol. 694, c. 485.]" We need to move on from that. The effect of removing the remaining hereditaries and the clauses on the removal and resignation of Members will reduce the size of the House of Lords. That is much needed, for many reasons. First, the House of Lords is the second biggest Chamber in the world. The only larger Chamber claiming to have any democratic legitimacy at all, and that is pretty thin, is the Chinese National party congress. Moreover, the UK is the only bicameral country where the second Chamber is larger than the first. The second reason why the House of Lords needs to be reduced in size is that the problem of size has got worse under Labour. That is because the Government have created peerages at an unprecedented rate. Most of the hereditaries who were removed in 1999 never attended anyway. Half the active hereditary peerage survived in 1999 and became more active. Meanwhile, the Labour Government have appointed a huge number of peers— 386 out of a total of about 740. More than half the Members of the current House have come in since 1997. Labour, albeit understandably, because it was under-represented in the Lords, has been packing the second Chamber since it came in.