PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES - United Kingdom Parliament

31 Debate on the Address
9 MAY 2012
Debate on the Address
32
[Mr Lammy]
and move our economy from over-dependence on financial
services and retail. When I heard the Business Secretary
arguing the case for the Sunday trading Bill, it was
again apparent that the Government would rely once
more on retail, consumerism, shopping and spending to
get us out of this mess. We will need far more than that
in this economy if we are to respond to the problems in
constituencies such as mine.
What about the gaps in the Queen’s Speech? Given
the importance of higher education to the UK economy
and all we have invested to support young people making
their way to university, why have the Government decided
that a higher education Bill is not appropriate? The
issue has been kicked into the long grass. Vice-chancellors
and young people face uncertainty because we have not
seen any Bill in that area of policy at all. Why are we
going to spend hours, in this House and the other place,
debating House of Lords reform when every Member
knows that no one raised that issue with any political
party on the doorstep during the campaign of the past
few weeks? Is House of Lords reform really where our
priorities should be?
Mrs Eleanor Laing (Epping Forest) (Con): Does the
right hon. Gentleman agree that the whole matter of
House of Lords reform could be dealt with quickly in
this House if, as the Prime Minister said a short while
ago, the Government brought forward a Bill that simply
brought the House of Lords into the 21st century
without trying to create another House of Commons at
the other end of the corridor?
Mr Lammy: I get where the hon. Lady is coming
from, but I want to bring the Government into the
21st century. For that to happen, we need some real
answers for the millennial generation who face decades
of unemployment in this country. We have to say something
about what we can expect for our graduates; we must
not just talk the talk in terms of families, but recognise
that the cost of living is going up, and we expect a
Queen’s Speech that will address those issues.
Against that backdrop, this Queen’s Speech fails. I
suspect that there are areas that the Opposition will be
able to accept, but there are many holes in this Queen’s
Speech. As the Prime Minister reflects and gets into the
detail, I hope that the House can expect a bigger, more
ambitious and more visionary legislative framework in
the next Queen’s Speech.
4.9 pm
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con): It
is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for
Tottenham (Mr Lammy). While I may differ with his
analysis, there is never any doubt that he holds his views
passionately. He certainly supports his constituency
and community passionately, and has done so in the
past several years in which I have watched him in this
House.
Let me say to the Prime Minister that it is also a
pleasure to talk about the real Queen’s Speech as against
the one that I and others proposed last week. This
Queen’s Speech has enormous merits to it, particularly
in the context of growth. I am particularly supportive,
as he will be unsurprised to hear, of his proposals on
bank reforms, competition law, and joint enterprise law
reform, including labour law reform. He will be happy
to hear me mention those, but I am afraid that it goes
downhill from here on in. [HON. MEMBERS: “That was
less than a minute!”] Well, I will make up the whole
minute by saying that the Government can be proud of
most of their record in the past couple of years on the
issues of liberty and justice, which the Prime Minister
knows I hold very dear. Their actions on identity cards,
on cutting down on the amount of detention without
charge, and on the misuse of counter-terrorism stop-andsearch
powers are all matters of pride for them.
Beyond that, however, I have three concerns: one
about a constitutional issue, one about state power, and
one about justice. Let me start with the constitutional
issue on which the right hon. Member for Tottenham
finished—the House of Lords. One of my concerns
about our whole approach to the House of Lords is that
we are arguing about its composition without worrying
enough about its purpose, which we have not done
enough to consider. There is a great deal of talk about
the House of Lords as a revising and reforming Chamber,
but it has a much greater function than that. Historically,
the House of Lords has been a serious check on excessive
Executive power. It was a check on the Government of
Margaret Thatcher when she had a very large majority,
on the Government of Tony Blair, and on the Government
of the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath
(Mr Brown), and no doubt it will be a check on this
Government as time goes on.
It is very important in Britain that we have this check,
because we are different in one respect from most other
democracies. Without any separation of Executive and
legislature, the power of the Executive in this House
means that this House is less good than it could be at
defending the rights of individuals when the Executive
impinge too much on them. We saw that very often with
the previous Government. There were a great number
of occasions when I am sure that many Labour Members
did not want to support some of their Government’s
more illiberal actions. That is why the House of Lords is
incredibly important.
Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con): My right
hon. Friend is making a case from a Conservative point
of view against reforming the make-up of the House of
Lords. If the House of Lords has the distinguished
record of preventing excessive use of Executive power
that he is suggesting, why does he think that Margaret
Thatcher’s first Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, delivered
a speech roughly 50 years ago in which he said that we
did not have sufficient checks and balances in our
constitution, which he characterised as an elective
dictatorship?
Mr Davis: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend,
because he goes right to the central point. The House of
Lords is not perfect, and there are many things that it
has wrongly allowed to happen. I am in favour of
reform of the House of Lords, but we must be very
careful to get it right. If, in our reform, we do away with,
or weaken or mitigate to any great extent, the check that
it provides, that check will never be returned, because
no Government will ever bring back a restraint on their
own powers.
I think it was the Deputy Prime Minister who
characterised his preferred state of the House of Lords
as being one that more reflected the political composition