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Dr. Ladyman: This has been a strange debate. I do not think that I have ever heard the official Opposition take up so many positions in such a short time, and I am still not entirely sure what their position is. Some Opposition Members seem to support the amendment, while others do not. There is no harm in that--it is reasonable. Labour Members are equally divided.
However, even Conservative Members who support the amendment have not described it as good or pragmatic. At least we recognise it for what it is--a pragmatic amendment, intended to achieve a specific purpose. Whether we like it or not, we see the benefits of that pragmatism.
We have heard much about the independence of the hereditary peers, and much about place men and cronies. Is it not extraordinary that everybody in the other place who represents the Labour party is a place man or a crony, while all those in the Lords who support the Conservatives--and there are a lot more of themthan there are Labour Members--are free-thinking individuals? Were they free-thinking individuals when they were bussed in to support the poll tax? Were they free-thinking individuals when they were bussed in a few months later to vote it out again?
Were Tory peers free-thinking individuals when they came in to the Chamber to support the Maastricht treaty? I suspect that they would pay their own bus fare if they had the chance to vote it out again now. The comments of Conservative Members about the need to preserve hereditary peers because of their free thinking and independence are hot air. They have no substance or credibility.
Opposition Members have said that the reforms should not go forward, as there would not be attempts in the Lords to block Government legislation if the amendment were not included. They seem to have airbrushed from history the fact that Lord Cranborne was fired for not being willing to oppose the policy outright. They seem to have erased from their memories all the commentsmade from the Opposition Front Bench about their determination to oppose these reforms. They seem to have forgotten many of the statements made on Second Reading and earlier, when many Opposition Members were clearly arguing for the retention of the hereditary peerage.
We have heard today that we needed both stages of reform at once. Does anyone seriously believe that if we had proposed a complete reform of the House of Lords in one stage, the Conservatives would not be opposing it today, hook, line and sinker, and that they would not have fought it every step of the way through the House of Lords?
The amendment is pure pragmatism. I want to make some comments to my hon. Friends who have spoken against it. I do not believe that the Bill has been improved by the amendment, but I believe that we will get our Bill because of it. By being prepared to compromise and accept it, we have got several of our other Bills through the House of Lords. The Leader of the House mentioned the Food Standards Bill and the Railways Bill. They were the tip of the iceberg because there are also other Bills that we would have lost if we had had to fight this all the way through the House of Lords. It is pure pragmatism.
Unfortunately, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) is not in his place. I reminded him on Second Reading of the years when he used to tour the country telling Labour party members how it would be necessary to create 1,000 life peers to vote the House of Lords out of existence. He used to tell us that that was the only way we could do it. Today, he tells us that neither hereditary nor life peers have any legitimacy and so we must get rid of them all as quickly as possible. Why was it better to create 1,000 life peers without legitimacy than to allow 92 hereditaries to stay for another a year or so to get our Bill? We have achieved something that the party of which I am proud to be a member has been trying to achieve since the day it was set up. We are within hours of that historic achievement, purely as a result of a piece of pragmatism.
I do not believe that this pragmatism has improved the Bill, but it has made it possible for us to get our Bill. The right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) described the amendment as a dog's breakfast. If one wants to feed a dog, a dog's breakfast is sometimes the best thing to have. We have never denied that the amendment is anything other than pure pragmatism. It makes the reformed Chamber less legitimate than I would like, but a lot better than it would be without it. I shall support the amendment, as I shall support the Government as we bring through stage 2 reform and finally achieve the goal of a reformed Chamber and the end of all the hereditary peers.
Mr. Mike Hancock (Portsmouth, South):
I am disappointed this afternoon. I had hoped that, even at this 11th hour, the Government would think again, do what most people thought that they would do and abolish the House of Lords once and for all. The right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) and the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mr. Fisher) pointed out that the only legitimate second Chamber is a directly elected one. I can find no excuse to vote for the amendment tonight. I certainly shall not abstain. I shall vote against, because I do not believe that anything else makes sense.
The hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mr. Bradley) suggested that the amendment was a temporary measure. He is not here, but I asked him in the Corridor what he meant by temporary. He said "Anything but permanent."
It could have been a decade or 50 years, but he did not want anything that suggested permanence. The problem for most of us is that there is a sense of permanency about the amendment. There is an element of doubt even in the minds of the most ardent supporters of a compromise. They must have serious reservations about the amendment's implications.
Other hon. Members have paid tribute to the other House and the hereditary peers. I have had the pleasure and privilege of serving with many of them on the Council of Europe and the Western European Union. The likes of Lord Ponsonby, Lord Newall, the Earl of Dundee, Lord Grenfell and many others have put in distinguished service in the House of Lords and outside it on behalf of all parties in Parliament. They will be sorely missed, but if we had gone for a democratically elected second Chamber, they would have had the opportunity to seek election to it and continue their work. The suggestion that there is some benefit in allowing 92 hereditaries to remain is nonsense. It is a stitch-up--tokenism. We are trying to avoid dealing with the issue.
The hon. Member for Basildon (Angela Smith) talked about how many electors had told her that they wanted the matter at the top of the Government's agenda. My mind goes back to the days when I used to listen to the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) speaking to Labour party meetings, when I was a member of that party. I well remember his speech in which he said that we needed to create 1,000 life peers to abolish the House of Lords. He used to go on to say that we would then establish a democratically elected second Chamber. He wanted the 1,000 peers to be created only for that moment to get rid of the second Chamber altogether. How right he was. It was right then, and the overwhelming majority of people recognise that. People did not queue at my advice centre, or on the campaign trail in 1997, 1992, 1987 or 1984 to say that they wanted the matter high on the agenda. Most thinking people, the overwhelming majority of people, expected the Labour party to abolish the House of Lords and create in its place a democratically elected second Chamber. That is the failure.
The Leader of the House and others have said that the reason that they did not pursue that endeavour was because they would have been held to ransom. She said that they would have lost precious legislation. She was probably right. There would have been some delay. I do not think legislation would have been lost because I do not think that the House of Lords and its Members would have wanted a confrontation with the nation. Does she seriously maintain that the hereditary peers, the House of Lords and the Leader of the Opposition would have advocated to the nation that there was a legitimate role for them to frustrate a Government with a 170-seat majority simply to keep unelected people in office? I do not believe it.
There is a second and more compelling reason. Some people were nervous about what would happen with a democratically elected second Chamber. They thought that the ballot box would not deliver what they wanted and looked for excuses for not going down that line. That will be the stumbling-block over the next few years, as they try to create a second Chamber that will deliver what whichever Government are in power want. The ballot box is not prone to doing that. Many of us who have been in the House and out again have suffered from that. Governments would suffer, as they do in the United States
and many other places with democratically elected second chambers. The people have the habit of going against the Government of the day in second chamber elections. The distinct possibility of that happening is what made the Prime Minister and others nervous and take the cautious line that I think will turn temporary into semi-permanent. We will end up with a stitch-up. We will not have improved Government or scrutiny. We will not get better Government by flooding the place at the millennium with another 200 life peers, as someone speculated that the Prime Minister intends. That will not make anything better. What I suspect that the House will vote for tonight will diminish not only the second Chamber, but this Chamber. This country will get worse, not better, government. That is a denial of what most of the nation's electorate expected the Labour Government to deliver.
We are to have a second-rate solution to first-class problem, but what we in this country need is the support and the conviction to ensure that, sooner rather than later, we get a democratically elected second Chamber. I am sure that there will be endless debates in the royal commission now sitting--and the next, as I am sure that the first will not come up with a solution that satisfies everyone.
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