B

Baroness Berridge (Con)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 9 July 2025

Debate

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Contribution

I am grateful to the noble Lord for that, but we are now in the situation where we have the Parliament Act. I was just moving on to the point that any Prime Minister of the day could reform and make the situation a unicameral situation, but that would of course require the Parliament Act and would mean a delay of a couple of years. We all know how important it is to take your time in politics sometimes, particularly when you are doing constitutional change. This is more analogous to the situation that happened in Hungary in 2010. Hungary set up its constitution with a President, obviously, but also with a unicameral situation, with a two-thirds supermajority needed to change the constitution. It never envisaged, of course, that one party would bust that majority, but it happened. Subsequently, the EU no longer fully regards Hungary as a democracy. It would be such a shame—I try not to use melodramatic language, but it would be a tragedy—if the Mother of Parliaments ended up in the situation of having what is described now in Hungary: you govern by law, so the Executive just bring their legislation to Parliament and rubber-stamp it. I say this to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman: it really matters that we, as a Parliament—at a time when, for very sad reasons, we thankfully have primary legislation—might not be looking at the main thing that we need to ensure. So I fully support the noble Lord’s amendment.

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