Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)

My Lords, in moving Amendment 87 I will also speak to my Amendments 88 and 89. These amendments have elicited a lot of attention from my noble friends since I tabled them. My noble friend Lord Forsyth of Drumlean singled them out during our debate on Amendment 1, when he promised that he would not speak on them. It is good to see him in his place to fulfil that promise this evening. I make it clear from the outset that I have nothing against Members of Parliament. Some of my best friends are Members of Parliament. For a long time, I wanted to be a Member of Parliament, and I tried—with conspicuous lack of success. However, the role of a Member of your Lordships’ House is different. This House is calmer, quieter and more consensual than the other place. It respects the primacy of the elected House and recognises that with nobody in the majority here, the way to get things done is by constructive debate and compromise. Some of the best advice that I received when I took my place in your Lordships’ House was to hold off making a maiden speech and to spend some time in the Chamber learning not only the rules of the House but its ways and its tone. It is very easy for those who have watched too many of the proceedings of the House of Commons to assume that that is how we behave here as well, but it is not. We are less partisan, less pointed and less pugnacious, although it is very easy to slip into those habits. I have done so myself on too many occasions. Those habits are even harder to give up for noble Lords who have served for many years with distinction in another place, as are the more innocuous but still alien habits such as repeatedly intervening on each other, thanking the Lord Speaker for calling us or referring to “honourable Members” rather than “noble Lords”. We are a self-regulating House. Our ways and procedures are set and policed by how we choose to behave. Even in my short time here, I have seen those ways evolving. A great deal was lost during the challenging months of the pandemic, when we had to do things differently. Some, but not all, of that has been clawed back. We are in a constant state of flux, with new Members arriving all the time, bringing new perspectives and new ways of doing things. As a self-regulating House, it falls to all of us to protect those courtesies and conventions that we think important. That is why I lament the way that this Bill will expel so many long-standing Members who know how important those conventions are, and many more recent arrivals who learned by watching them as apprentices before they were elected. I overlapped here only briefly with the Countess of Mar, but it was long enough to know how valuable a role she played, keeping us all on the straight and narrow. Lady Mar was a Deputy Speaker of your Lordships’ House for many years, and of the two dozen Deputy Speakers we have today, five are hereditary Peers drawn from the Labour, Tory and Cross Benches. Many others have served on the Woolsack previously. If they are to go, as this Bill proposes, we will have to work even harder to hold on to some of those subtle traditions that make this House such a pleasant and productive place to legislate.