Pete Wishart

It is a real pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Maureen Burke). I listened with great interest to her personal journey and her remarks about the transformative power of education, and she gave a very touching tribute to her brother, which I am sure the whole House appreciated. I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone), whose speech was a tour de force around his constituency and all the things he hopes to achieve in this Parliament. I wish him personally all the best for his time in this place. I thank the other Members who made maiden speeches: the hon. Members for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Claire Hazelgrove), for Mid and South Pembrokeshire (Henry Tufnell) and for Knowsley (Anneliese Midgley). I say to the hon. Member for Knowsley that if she gets the decks out again, we will see if we can get the Deputy Prime Minister to come and join her; and to the hon. Member for Mid and South Pembrokeshire that it is maybe not best to tick off your dad in the Chamber—that is a little tip as the hon. Member goes forward in this parliamentary Session. The first thing we have to try not to do when we consider the Bill is laugh. We have to try not to laugh out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of considering in 2024 whether places should be reserved in our legislature for a curious subset of a particular class of person, based on birthright. We have to try to stifle the guffaws that accompany the fact that a modern, complex, industrial, advanced democracy such as the United Kingdom can still have barons, dukes, earls and various other aristocrats deciding the laws of the land because they are their fathers’ sons. They secured that right in medieval times, perhaps because one of their ancestors won a decisive battle. This is parliamentary participation defined by the “Game of Thrones” principle, in which the great houses of olde England or olde Britannia knock seven shades of whatever out of each other for the right to run the country by breeding. In some way, they are our own Baratheons and Targaryens, but without the fun, the dragons and the box office appeal. It is time to break the wheel. For those down the corridor, winter must be coming. There is no other legislature in the world that comes close to having people there through birthright, save perhaps the Senate in Lesotho, where I believe there are still places reserved for the tribal chiefs. That is the sort of company we keep. My other initial main thought about the Bill is: is this it? We have heard about other things to come, and have been told that we should be patient because other Bills will be introduced. We have heard that from the Labour party for 100 years. For more than 100 years, Labour has promised to abolish the House of Lords, but there it sits, bigger and more bizarre than ever, awaiting the arrival of the new Labour Lords. Where is the Brownian vision of a senate of the regions and nations? Where is the “almost federalism” that we in Scotland were promised during the independence referendum? It is certainly not in the Bill. This meagre rubbish has not even got the credibility to call itself a reform. We will probably have to wait about the same amount of time that has elapsed since the barons and earls won those decisive battles for the Labour party to introduce meaningful reform. We are getting not abolition of the House of Lords, but the long grass from the Labour party in this Parliament. A consultation is about to be embarked upon as Labour prevaricates once again. Nobody in this country believes that the Labour party is remotely sincere about abolishing the House of Lords. From the contributions we have heard so far, no one can believe that Labour Members are in favour of genuine reform of the House of Lords. Even the watering down of the watering down has been watered down, as the proposal for a mandatory age limit of 80 for House of Lords Members has been dropped. That happened because the Government found that they are disproportionately hit by the proposals; their cohort in the House of Lords is older than that of the Conservatives. It is no wonder that few people take them seriously. What we have down the corridor is an embarrassment, an unreformable laughing stock, a plaything of Prime Ministers and the personification of a dying establishment that represents another age. With all its ridiculous cap-doffing deference, it represents almost the exact opposite of the values of my country. I am so proud that my party will never put anybody in that red-leather-upholstered, gold-plated Narnia. While we can laugh at the hereditaries, the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) and other Conservative Members are quite right to point to the ridiculousness of having 26 places reserved for Church of England bishops. We are the only legislature in the world that has places reserved for clerics other than the Islamic Republic of Iran. We can take comfort from the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury is not going to embark on some sort of religious jihad, but what strange company to keep. If there was an intra-parliamentary union of serving clerics, it would be exclusively comprise Church of England bishops and ayatollahs. It is not even the hereditaries or the Church of England bishops that concern me most. The group that concerns me most in the House of Lords is the appointees—the donors, the cronies and the placemen who end up with a role in running our country and making the laws of this land because of prime ministerial patronage. People have a place in our democracy whose only qualification seems to be an ability to give substantial amounts of money to one of the three major establishment political parties in this House. We have evolved a legislature that is at least partly designed by one person: the Prime Minister decides who has the opportunity to take a role in running this country by appointment, based on lists drawn up by him and other British party leaders. No other party leader or Head of State has this power anywhere in the world. It is a prerogative that would make a tinpot dictator in a banana republic blush, yet we on these Benches lecture the developing world about good politics and democracy. The temptation is to stuff the Chamber full of friends and the politically useful. It is a place to reward the servile, thank the time-servers and compensate the downgraded. Only this week, we are considering such an example; there is talk of Sue Gray ending up with a place in the Lords as some sort of compensation for her sacking. I suppose that when she goes down there, she will get an ermine coat to accompany the envoy’s ostrich feather for when she visits her most northern territory, Scotland, as the British envoy. Already, her loyal subjects are practising their haka to welcome their new envoy when she makes that journey north. To see how bad things could get, we need only remember Boris Johnson’s list, which was full of friends, donors and former staff—a list that could not be more gratuitous. Notionally, there is a House of Lords Appointments Commission, but it is an utterly toothless body that Boris Johnson simply ignored. It has done nothing to stop the accumulation of cronies and donors: 68 out of 284 nominations from political parties between 2013 and 2023 were political donors handing over £58 million to the political parties, and 12 of those appointed gave over £1 million. That was the price during “cash for honours” in the early 2000s. We might think inflation would at least be factored in when it came to getting a place in the House of Lords, but not a bit of it: the going rate is still £1 million. “Cash for honours” led to one of the most dramatic police investigations during the 2005 to 2010 Parliament, when a sitting Prime Minister was questioned by the police under caution. Some of his staff were actually arrested. We might think that, after all that, the establishment parties would be a little more circumspect, but not a bit of it; the cash keeps coming in, and the peerages keep getting rolled out. Even as recently as 2021, I asked the Metropolitan police to investigate the Conservative party when we found that 22 of the Conservatives’ biggest financial contributors had been made Members of the House of Lords in the past 50 years. This Government have no plans whatsoever to do anything about the appointees in the House of Lords, save to make more of them. One of the reasons we are getting this Bill so early in this Parliament—the Conservatives are possibly right about this—is to clear the place out, so that the Labour party can put in more of its donors, cronies and place men. It is making sure that there are spaces available, and that the other place does not look so big. The House of Lords is the most absurd, ridiculous legislature anywhere in the world. Famously, it is second in size only to the National People’s Congress of China. Bloated, ermine-coated, never been voted—it is the antithesis of everything we know about democracy. Increasingly embarrassing, probably corrupt and certainly rife for all sorts of abuse, it is an institution whose time has surely come. We put forward a reasoned amendment to the Bill, because we want to hold the Labour party to its historical commitment to abolishing the House of Lords. Unfortunately, that amendment was not selected, but there will be opportunities as the Bill goes through the House to come back to the issue. I say to the Government, “Yes, bring forward your step-by-step incremental changes, but what the general public want is meaningful action on the House of Lords.” A YouGov poll out yesterday showed that the vast majority of the British people no longer want the House of Lords. They specifically and defiantly want it reformed. It is not good enough continuing to pass the buck for another 100 years; something has to be done. I say to Labour, “Pick up Gordon Brown’s report, for goodness’ sake, and have a look at what he says.” The Labour Government should try to enact some meaningful reform. Who knows? It may even make them popular again. It seems to be what the public want. This could be something that they do that the public would actually genuinely support. We have waited centuries for action from the Labour party and we have got next to absolutely nothing. Now is the time for action. No more prevarication—take real action, and get dealing with that place down the corridor.