House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2021-12-03
Topic: Government Operations
Benjamin Lloyd Stormont Mancroft (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, the ostensible purpose of the Bill is to dispense with what are called the ridiculous and embarrassing by-elections of hereditary Peers. If they are ridiculous, which is a subjective and therefore obviously biased view, they are embarrassing only to those who introduced them. There can be no embarrassment to the rest of us for something that we did not initiate. Indeed, I have always had a sneaking suspicion that some of those who support the ending of by-elections do so because they are worried that any criticism that the by-elections attract impacts the reputation of the whole House, and thus risks their own rather comfortable seats in it. I hope that is just me being cynical and is not actually right. The reality is that nobody is particularly interested in the composition of this House except us. Most people know or care little about how we get here, and probably no one would ever notice if the Electoral Reform Society—a sort of Lib Dem fan club, and therefore very small and inconsequential—had not managed to wind the Sunday Times around its little finger. To put that in proportion, I say that only about 1% of the British people read the Sunday Times. We are not, therefore, debating what could be called a very hot topic It is important to remember that what we are being asked to do today is clear up the mess of another failed Labour policy. We are all used to Labour Governments destroying the economy—it goes with the territory—but the House of Lords Act 1999 was an unbelievably badly botched constitutional reform. All Governments legislate incompetently because that is the nature of Governments but, sadly, Labour Governments also legislate vindictively, which means against groups they perceive have done them wrong. Revenge is a very unpleasant and destructive trait in a political party The debates over Lords reforms have, as we all know, run into the ground over the vexed question of whether to have an elected or appointed House. That question was unresolved when Labour introduced its Bill in 1999, but it argued that, once the hereditary Peers had been expelled, the question that came to be called stage 2 would be relatively simple to resolve. We now know that this argument was a deception. We were all deliberately misled. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, who is sadly not in his place, has confirmed that there was never going to be a stage 2. We must therefore assume that the sole purpose of the Bill was to extract revenge on the hereditary peerage by expelling it from Parliament. It is pathetic, really No thought was given to whether it would be a good or bad thing; it just had to be done to satiate Labour’s class warriors. But the price they had to pay was to leave 100 hereditaries in place and the by-elections to replace those who die and now those who retire. Those 100 hereditaries act as an open sore in the side of old Labour, which is why we are here today. No one outside this House and the Westminster bubble is remotely interested. This Bill is not about improving the House of Lords; it is about clearing up Labour’s mess. For the old Labour dinosaurs, it is about completing unfinished business—another battle in the class war that is Labour’s obsession and is of no interest to anybody else in the country today. It is last-century stuff, and a poor reason to legislate It is important to focus on where we will be if this Bill passes. We will become a wholly appointed House by default, one of only 15 in the world—mostly small Caribbean islands and Canada, and most Canadians are not great fans of what they have. We will also become the only legislature in the world in which the leader of the party with the majority in the first Chamber has sole power of appointment to the second Chamber. That really would be ridiculous and very embarrassing for those who vote for it, particularly Liberal Democrats, who apparently favour an elected second Chamber—although, let us face it, they have always had rather flexible principles. We will also become the only legislature in the world that is using its second Chamber as a retirement home for Members of its first Chamber. More than once the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, who is always the very model of courtesy, has made clear that we hereditaries should not take his Bill personally. I hear and understand that but, if it is not personal, I have to tell him that it sure as hell feels like it sometimes Similarly, I have many friends who are or have been MPs, for whom I have the greatest possible respect, so my concern about a preponderance of MPs in this House is not personal either. However, if the House ever becomes dominated by any one group, it will lose the diversity of views which is its strength, even more so if that group simply reflects the views of the current political establishment, which we saw during the Brexit debates The Bill is an indulgence. I imagine the House will give it a Second Reading, as is our habit, and after that, without government support, which it does not deserve and will not have, it will die and so it should. Your Lordships have better things to do than waste time on this nasty rubbish.