Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)

Not all the speeches, no: my noble friend Lord Howard was indeed one who spoke in favour of the education centre. It seems to me that, once we start making these changes, the pressure is going to be for widening rather than narrowing the route by which people come here. In other words, there will be more pressure for some kind of direct representation, some democratic element. I put it to those noble Lords—I suspect the majority on both Benches—who do not want a democratic Chamber that their best tactic was just to lie low and do absolutely nothing and allow this House, in the words of the Gilbert and Sullivan song, to do nothing in particular and do it very well. Once you open the issue of the composition and function of this Chamber, you invite the public into a conversation which I can guarantee will not end with a consensus around putting more power in the hands of some appointed committee rather than an elected Government. To go back to something that my noble friend Lord Strathclyde said in a previous group, there is a very strong case—now that we have decided to open the issue and change our composition by removing our remaining hereditary colleagues, in my view mistakenly—for having a royal commission and looking in a measured and judicious way at how this Chamber can be made more democratically accountable. If we do not do so in a timely and temperate spirit, it is very likely that a future Government will make changes that the majority of noble Lords gathered here would not like and they would do so in a spirit of frustration, having been defeated on some measure. They would lash out in anger and legislate in haste.