House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-09-07
Topic: Government Operations
Andrew Adonis (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, Amendment 35A had an unusual genesis. I sought to table amendments to the Bill to provide for an elected House. As I have now said several times in my fundamental commentary on the Bill, that is the big issue before Parliament and should be addressed sooner rather than later. The clerks said that it was not possible, within the scope of the Bill, to move for elections which involved members of the public being elected. However—wait for it—it was within the scope of the Bill to make it possible for the public to elect hereditary Peers from the register when a vacancy arose. That is why the Committee has before it an amendment providing that, in future, the entire national electorate would vote when hereditary Peer vacancies arose I am not proposing this as a serious proposition for the future composition of your Lordships’ House, but I unapologetically move the amendment because it puts into the debate the central issue of moving from a nominated/hereditary House to a democratic one. I have always believed that we should do so. I believed it when I was writing the constitutional reform policies for the Liberal Democrats and when I was advising Tony Blair on constitutional reform. My noble friend Lord Grocott and I disagreed all the time about this fundamental issue My noble friend has, as I see it, a very conservative view of the constitution, which is basically that the constitution circa 1950 was jolly good and we should not make any changes. My view is that we should carry on modernising; part of that is more democracy, which means really substantial devolution, a fair voting system and a democratic second Chamber. Those, to my mind, are fairly sensible propositions that, sooner or later, we will have to address as a country. The reason I believe that they have much greater urgency than before is that the whole context in which constitutional reform is now being debated is that of the single biggest constitutional reform this country has undergone in the last half-century, and that is Brexit In my travels across the country, which I have been engaged in intensively in recent months, I can tell the House that—as many noble Lords will know from their own communities—there is intense discontent at the state of governance in this country at the moment. It is particularly intense in the Midlands and the north of the country, where there is a great sense of alienation from the centres of power and a significant feeling that parliamentary institutions are not working effectively. There are many things that I believe need to be done to address that. My own view is that we should have significantly more devolution—part of the problem in the Midlands and the north is that we have inadequate devolution. We had good devolution settlements for Scotland, Wales, London and, when it was operating, Northern Ireland, but we have only scratched the surface of devolution in the Midlands and the north and we need to address that seriously. Reform of Parliament has a part to play in that too. The conclusion that I have reached—though I put this forward tentatively and believe that we should have a constitutional convention to discuss it—is that we should now have a democratic second Chamber, either directly elected or representing the devolved elected institutions of the country. I think an argument can be made either way for a directly elected second Chamber, as in Australia, for example, or an indirectly elected second Chamber, representing what would become a federal structure of the United Kingdom, like the Bundesrat in Germany. There are arguments for and against, but what there is no argument for, in my view, is a perpetuation of a wholly nominated second Chamber, which, by the way, we got by accident We got to a wholly nominated second Chamber through a series of incremental reforms to what was a hereditary House. No one at any stage set out to create a wholly nominated Chamber. When Harold Macmillan introduced the then Life Peerages Bill in 1958, it was to complement what was still predominantly a hereditary House. Indeed, ironically, a large part of the reason he introduced the Bill was that members of my party, the Labour Party, were quite rightly not prepared to accept hereditary peerages. Lord Attlee, much sainted in the memory of my party, was one of the very last members of the Labour Party to accept a hereditary peerage; others simply would not do so. As part of a classically Tory attempt to keep the House of Lords going at all, the Life Peerages Act was passed We have had a substantial debate on what happened in 1999 and 2000; I know about it intimately because I was advising Tony Blair at that time. We gave firm commitments that the nominated and part-hereditary House that would replace the substantially hereditary House that applied before 1999 would be interim. It was deemed interim in the report of the royal commission chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, which of course recommended a predominantly elected House. For various reasons, not least the strong advice of my noble friend Lord Grocott, who was always passionately against any public elections to this House, those proposals were not taken forward, which I believe was a mistake.