Lord Liddle (Lab)

My Lords, I rise briefly to support the Government’s plan to remove hereditaries, finally, from this House. My preference—I would certainly have thought this a few years ago—would have been for a wide-ranging programme of constitutional reform in the first Parliament of a Labour Government. But I came to accept the argument, made strongly, that when faith in our democracy and politics has reached such a low point, it is right for us to prioritise the domestic agenda relevant to ordinary people’s lives—doing something about living standards, about the health service and about immigration, rather than spending lots of time on constitutional reform. My reaction to the hereditary Peers Bill is that it is long overdue. I was in No. 10 in 1998-99 and I still remember the sense of shock when we learned that the compromise deal had been done, because we thought it was obvious that the hereditaries should go as part of a wider reform of the House. Historically, when I think of a hereditary House, I think of the House that tried to block the reform Act in the 1830s or the House that voted against Irish home rule in the 1880s, leading to a century of trouble. I think of the House that defeated the Lloyd George Budget in 1910. Lloyd George actually made the best case against the hereditary principle that there has ever been, when he talked about this random group of a thousand people drawn “from the ranks of the unemployed” in one of his great attacks. He also went on to undermine the legitimacy of the hereditary House of Lords, of course, by selling lots of peerages to augment his political fund. It was the Life Peerages Act that restored the reputation of this House by bringing in Cross-Benchers and people from a wide variety of backgrounds. That helped the Lords to become the Chamber that it is today, one that is very good at reviewing legislation and doing a job that the House of Commons no longer does properly, as the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, said. Of course it is sad; I have got to know many hereditary Peers well, and for some of them I have the greatest respect. The speech by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, was a wonderful example from someone who has given very distinguished public service in this House. I hope that his points will be taken on board by our further consideration of what may follow the hereditary Peers Act. We should still think in terms of a wider reform of this place, but there is a lot happening. There is going to be a much broader devolution of power in England and, once that process of establishing devolved power in England is complete, it will become possible to think of the second Chamber as a body representative of the regions and nations. However, when this wider reform takes place, I hope it also does something that I feel strongly about: people who sit in the second Chamber should no longer have a title. That gives completely the wrong incentive for people to want to be in this Chamber. I would like to think that, before I die, people might perhaps refer to “that Roger Liddle who was once a Member of the upper House”, and not to Lord Liddle.