House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2021-12-03
Topic: Government Operations
Bruce Joseph Grocott (Labour, Centre-left): Sorry, there is one from Wales; I will correct that. There is one Peer from Wales, the West Midlands and the north-east combined and there are 19 from London and the south-east If we look at occupational backgrounds, we find just one who is an engineer and 27 from business, industry and finance. If we look at educational background, we find that 21 of those Peers, or 45%, went to Eton. I hear much approval for that from some sections of the other Benches. I would be very interested to hear from the Minister when he winds up how all these facts assist the Government with their levelling-up agenda The truth is that the few Members of this House who still support the by-elections are bereft of any credible case. The one argument they have kept repeating for 22 years is that a deal was done in 1999 which promised to keep the remaining hereditaries until such a time as there was a fully reformed House of Lords. I can see the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, in his place, and no doubt he is itching to make the same point in today’s debate. Well, I really am delighted to tell the House that that argument has been blown completely out of the water by no less a figure than the Marquess of Salisbury. I remind the House that he was the Leader of the Opposition in the run-up to 1999 and led the negotiations to protect the 90 hereditaries. I will quote from an interview he gave to the Financial Times on 11 November this year He told the FT he had warned Tony Blair—who was, let us not forget, a Prime Minister with a majority of over 150 in the Commons—that, unless some hereditaries were retained, there would be carnage in the Lords which would wreck the Labour Government’s whole legislative programme. He said: "My whole tactic was to make their flesh creep … I threatened them with the Somme and Passchendaele." He offered to call off the threat, but only if some hereditaries were retained. How many? He demanded 100. He went on to say: "I thought we might need some kind of rationale for this. So I said that 75 would be about 10 per cent of the existing hereditaries, then we’d need a few more—perhaps 15—with experience of running committees, that sort of thing, to help with the transition" He concluded: "It was frightful bullshit really." That is the Marquess of Salisbury. I will be interested to hear from those Members who speak against my Bill later today how he got that wrong. So there we have from the horse’s mouth the whole outrageous detail of what happened in 1999, from the Marquess of Salisbury, which some in this House have used for 22 years to defend the indefensible We can all understand those few hereditaries who want the by-elections to continue; they have a clear personal interest. I have to confess to the House that my own parliamentary life might have been a lot easier if there were 90 places reserved for the eldest sons of railwaymen. The idea is of course a joke, but the persistence of these by-elections is not. By continuing with them, we make ourselves not just indefensible but plain silly—the worst criticism in any argument that I can think of. It is silly. Scrapping them would, albeit in a small way, show everyone that we can make improvements and reform ourselves We have had seven of these wretched by-elections this year, which is more than in any previous year. So let us make our own little bit of history by putting this Bill on the statute book and making the by-election held last month the very last one of all. I commend the Bill to the House.