The stand part debate? Very good. I support the Bill that the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, has put forward, and congratulate him on doing it. I agree with the principle of it, but I do not agree at all with Clause 2, which seems far too long and detailed. We need to stop, reflect and think about principles. We need to start with a long period
of reflection. I am also against Clause 3, which sets a timetable. Like the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, I do not think it a timetable that could possibly work.
I was secretary-general of a convention which sat for 16 months, with four or five months of reflection, four or five months of working groups and then a drafting session at the end. We were overambitious and tried to do too much, and then were shut down by the Governments, who refused to extend our timetable. These were both mistakes. The idea of a period of reflection—which was President Giscard’s idea to begin with—was a very good one. That is how conventions should start. Clause 2 is overprescriptive in setting out the tasks that the convention should attempt—we are overdefining here.
My terms of reference would be very simple: “The convention must consider the governance of the kingdom, the relationships between its constituent parts and appropriate devolution of legislative and fiscal competence”. I would go back to principles. I do not think it a good idea to consider devolution to local authorities, as Clause 2(b) suggests. That is a secondary issue, and there is no reason in my view why there should be absolutely standardised devolution to local authorities across the kingdom as a whole. It could vary in the constituent parts.
On reform of the electoral system, I echo what the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said. It seems to me that there is no longer a single electoral system: there are a lot of electoral systems. I have no reason to think there should be a standardised electoral system. It is not necessary for the system for local elections in Scotland to be exactly the same as that for local elections in England, for example—if such was the agreement of a convention starting from principles, Parliament should be invited to devolve generally.
I absolutely do not think that reform of the House of Lords is appropriate to a convention that is looking at principles. The composition of the House of Lords should be a function of the House of Lords: one needs to decide what the House of Lords is for. A constitutional convention ought to fetch up consideration of what cements the union—what are the appropriate ways of holding the union together? In my view, there is a considerable role for the House of Lords in that. But it would be a mistake to consider reforming the House of Lords at the same time as examining the fundamental principles, before you have reported back to Parliament and the country about those principles and discovered whether they are to some extent acceptable. There is too much bottom-up in here. We need to start with thinking about general principles, rather than getting into too much detail.
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The case for the convention gets stronger every day. I agree with the examples that the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, gave of the mistakes we are making by proceeding piecemeal, but he was extraordinarily modest in his list of those mistakes. Where was EVEL? EVEL is a major constitutional change made by adjusting the rules of procedure in the other place, ignoring this place’s request by a very large majority for consultation on the matter. That is a very odd way to change the constitution of the country.
The noble Lord, Lord Steel, said that it seems that next week, we will receive proposals from the Government—or perhaps it is the Conservative Party, I am not yet quite clear; certainly it is from only one constituent part of those represented here—on how the functions of the House of Lords should be further reduced. On Monday, we are to consider whether it is appropriate to regard the EU Referendum Bill on the franchise for a referendum as a financial measure that is therefore not amendable in this House. If the EU Referendum Bill is a financial measure, what, among the things we consider, is not? What can we amend? I differ with my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, on the substance of the EU Referendum Bill, but on the issue of financial privilege, I would be very surprised if he did not on Monday find it hard to accept the new definition of how financial privilege is to be read.
The Scotland Bill, which the noble Lord, Lord Steel, mentioned, is a classic example of what a mistake it is to make constitutional reform on the hoof. I would have been in favour of a devolution max option on the ballot paper in Scotland. There was and is a case for more devolution to Scotland. That option was turned down, deliberately rejected, rejecting the chance for mature reflection and definition of devolution max; instead, it was defined it on the hoof with the help of a journalist from the Daily Mail, obliging a commission simply to write down the vow and tell us what it means, and then producing a Bill to turn the vow into law which is scissors and paste—taking bits of the Smith commission and simply writing them into law. We know what our Constitution Committee thinks of that; we know what our Economic Affairs Committee thinks of that.
I found the debate this week extremely painful, because it was not clear to me that the Government understood what was wrong with the Bill. I was very sad to see the Opposition Front Bench take exactly the same position—that because it is in the Smith commission, it must be there in exactly these words. It seems that the words of the Sewel convention may not be changed; they must be written into the Bill, even though we all know that if you make what is normal—the “normally” in the wording of the Sewel convention—justiciable you set yourself up for endless debate and difficulty. We need to go back to principles. We need to get out of this habit of making it up on the hoof and then trying to adjust the statute book to match it.