Member

As my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) said, it is good to see that the Labour party has finally rejected the idea of a democratically elected upper House. That was always a bad idea—something that would impose upon the primacy of this place—and, after the better part of a century of to-ing and fro-ing on the issue, at last we see the Labour party put that bad idea to bed. However, it has other bad ideas, and what we see here today is really an attempt to gerrymander the membership of the House of Lords under the cover of a reform.