Sir Julian Lewis

The elements that make up the House of Lords consist of different groups of people: some have got there by accident of birth and are now going to leave; some have got there as the result of political horse-trading of some sort, and perhaps should not have been put there in the first place; but a great many have got there, as I said earlier, by having reached the heights of their various professions and having proved themselves to be outstanding intellectuals who can bring a level of specialisation to the scrutiny of legislation. Even if we in this House were on exactly their same level of accumulated knowledge, we cannot bring that same level of scrutiny because of the demands we face on our time and in looking after our constituents, which inevitably works to the cost of the amount of attention we could give purely to focusing on improving legislation. I wish to place on record that the reason why I became an ardent advocate of an unelected second Chamber—and why I would rather have no second Chamber at all than two elected Chambers—is precisely that it is impossible to whip such a Chamber to prevent people with good ideas from persuading peers of the virtue of those ideas. Members of an unelected second Chamber are able to have at least a sporting chance of amending legislation in good ways that would not get beyond first base in this House, because the elected Members, for the most part, almost all the time, obey the whipping. Before I was an MP, when I was a political activist, I and my colleagues managed to get four pieces of legislation into law. Since I have been an MP, I have got only one, on the privacy of Members’ home addresses, on to the statute book, because, exceptionally, that was a free vote. How many free votes happen in this House? Hardly any. The equivalent of free votes in the upper House happen all the time. We required postal ballots for trade union elections, which was incorporated into the Trade Union Act 1984 and the Employment Act 1988. We outlawed political indoctrination in schools, which was incorporated into the Education Act 1986 and carried forward in the Education Act 1996. We prohibited local councils from publishing material that “promotes or opposes a point of view on a question of political controversy which is identifiable as the view of one political party and not of another”, which was incorporated into section 27 of the Local Government Act 1988. Finally, we more strictly defined the concept of “due impartiality” in the coverage of politically contentious issues on television and radio, which was incorporated into the Broadcasting Act 1990. Every one of those measures was got through the House of Lords first, and then either adopted in the House of Commons directly or brought forward by the Government in their alternative proposals. We do away with the expertise of the House of Lords at our peril. All we will be left with are machine politicians, whether they are in one elected House or two elected Houses, and that is to the detriment of our democracy, not to its enhancement.