Sir Edward Leigh
MP for Gainsborough · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Those of us who love the Jewish people and faith know that the reason why they have overcome all the empires that have tried to destroy them is that they are primarily people of the book and not the sword, but what is happening in the west bank is violent and egregious.”
“I am grateful to the Secretary of State for looking again at Lincolnshire. I made the point to her predecessor that the proposal for a Greater Lincolnshire authority was, in the eyes of many people, just a gerrymander. Will she look again at it and stop dividing West Lindsey and North Kesteven in half?”
“If the centre does not take action, nasty extremes will take over. The fact is that we are in acute danger. These people can now launch from anywhere on the north French coast and are escorted to our shores. Frankly, we are being invaded, and the public are completely fed up.”
“May I congratulate the Prime Minister on what he said about Ukraine and on how he conducted himself there? Our enemies should know that this House is completely and utterly united in standing behind the Ukrainian people.”
“What concerns me is the jobs of my constituents who work at Scunthorpe. That is all I am worried about; I have no ideological objection. If it is what is needed now, fair enough. As long as the blast furnaces are totally uneconomic because of high energy costs, however, it can only be a sticking plaster.”
“One of the poorest wards in the entire country is Gainsborough south-west ward. Why is the Secretary of State splitting West Lindsey in half? Why is he taking Scampton away from Gainsborough? It makes no sense. Why is he cutting away the nuclear fusion site from Lincoln?”
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“It was a very good point made earlier that it is extraordinary that those most hellbent on creating an elected House of Lords, based on proportional representation to ensure that no one party can dominate it, are the same people who, precisely because they want a radical reform, insist on killing off every single modest reform ever attempted. That is an extraordinary constitutional notion. With this extraordinarily modest Bill, we are just trying to take one or two steps, and if it becomes law, there is no reason why we could not take two or three further steps next year. Of course, I do not think the Bill goes far enough. It does not get to the kernel of the problem, but that is not a good reason for denying my hon. Friend’s Bill progress today.”
“Edmund Burke, incidentally, was known as the “Dinner Bell” during his time in the Commons because his speeches were so long and so boring, but that certainly did not apply to the crisp way in which my hon. Friend introduced his Bill and replied to all our many points. What I like about the Bill is that it establishes the notion that it is possible to reform the House of Lords gradually and to remove its greatest faults without suggesting that we need an elected House of Lords. I am personally convinced that this is the way forward.”
“I also commend my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) for promoting the Bill. I hope he did not mind my intervening on him and suggesting that it would make very little difference. His reply was interesting; he said, “It’s going to make so little difference, it’s not worth opposing,” which is an interesting constitutional innovation. I think that my hon. Friend is going about this the right way, though. We are all familiar with the dictum that when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change. I think we can add to that: when it is necessary to change, it is necessary to do so very slowly. That is a gradualist, Conservative, Tory—high Tory, if I may say so—notion of constitutional reform, and Edmund Burke would have been proud of him today.”
“Such a dramatic, radical step would have offended many Conservative sensibilities, and the Government failed to achieve consensus on the Bill. They also tell us constantly that they are worried about the other place because there are too many people there, yet they go on stuffing it—I use the word advisedly—with more and more political placements. It has reached the stage where even someone like me could hope to go to the House of Lords.”
“Indeed. So that provision would hardly make any difference. The main problem with the House of Lords is that there are too many people there. It is not that the Benches are overcrowded or that people have to turn up early to speak. The problem with having too many people in the House of Lords is that it gives too much power and patronage to the Government. The Bill will make absolutely no difference to that. That is not a reason to oppose it, however. Our debating these important constitutional points today gives us an opportunity to say that the Government are in a difficult position on this matter. They introduced a massive Bill last year that would have fundamentally changed the relationship between the two Houses of Parliament. It would effectively have created an elected House of Lords and put people in there for a 15-year term.”
“It would also prevent Governments from threatening to create extra peers if they could not get their way in relation to a particular Bill. I cannot believe that there cannot be a mechanism for retirement. I am not talking about a voluntary mechanism. After all, if cardinals have to retire at the age of 80, why should not Members of the House of Lords do so?”
“The same people are now there, and I believe that that gives far too much power and patronage to the Government. For what it is worth, I would reform the House of Lords by going a lot further than the Bill and getting rid of the fundamental iniquity whereby the Government can go on appointing more and more people to it. I would set an upper limit on the number of its Members. It would be reasonable to set a maximum size of 650, the same as the House of Commons. That would concentrate minds and ensure that only the most distinguished people, such as former Deputy Speakers of the House of Commons, could end up there. We should aim for that level of distinction, Madam Deputy Speaker. My serious point is that setting an upper limit would concentrate minds.”
“I am perhaps not quite such a reactionary as my hon. Friend. I fear that his idea of reforming the House of Lords would be to get rid of all the life peerages and to return to the hereditary principle. I do not go along with the Groucho Marx rule that it would not be worth being a member of any institution that would have me as a member. We all know, however, that in the past the House of Lords was reserved for people who had delivered extraordinary service to the nation, for example by serving in the Cabinet. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) said that only a quarter of the Members of the other place were former politicians, but when I go there these days, it is like looking at the House of Commons of 10 years ago.”
“That is what we are doing with this Bill: we are slowly changing things over time. This adaptability and the ability to bend is a strength of the British parliamentary system and of our common law: it bends rather than breaks.”
“These conventions are important and bear repeating: the Salisbury convention regarding Bills implementing manifesto commitments; the convention that the Lords do not usually object to secondary legislation; the convention that the Government should be able to get their business done in reasonable time; the financial privilege of the House of Commons; and the convention on the exchange of amendments between the Houses. These conventions are not unimportant. They are central to our constitution and I believe they have to be preserved because they conserve the supremacy of the elected House of Commons. I am not in favour of these conventions being codified, because the lack of codification gives them a flexibility whereby they can adapt and change slowly over time.”
“No consensus will ever be found in the House of Commons to create any kind of elected House of Lords, and that is why the approach we are trying to follow today is right and important. The addition of any element of a reformed Chamber that includes directly elected Lords threatens the whole raft of conventions that have been carefully built up over 100 years, and which determine the relationship between the Commons and the Lords.”
“What is interesting is the sheer number of reports that have followed it: the Wakeham commission of 2000, the White Paper, “Completing the Reform”, of 2001; the first and second reports of the Joint Committee on House of Lords Reform of 2002; the Government consultation paper, “Constitutional Reform: next steps for the House of Lords” of 2003; the Labour White Paper, “The House of Lords: reform” of February 2007; and its Green Paper, “The Governance of Britain” of July 2007. These involved a wide variety of plans for mostly, or completely, elected Chambers. The point is that no consensus was ever found, and it is my contention that no consensus will ever be found, so let’s get over it. Perhaps we should send buses around London bearing billboards saying, “The House of Lords will not be elected: get over it,” because that is the reality.”
“The Life Peerages Act 1958 brought in life peerages, while the Peerage Act 1963 allowed all Scottish hereditary peers, previously subject to election as representative peers, as well as peeresses, to sit in the Lords in their own right, and we all know about the innovation of disclaiming a hereditary peerage, à la Tony Benn. The Parliament (No. 2) Bill 1968 would have introduced various changes so that primary legislation was subject to shorter delays and so that the Commons had the power to override a Lords veto of statutory instruments. Harold Wilson dropped the Bill in order to allow time for more pressing Government business. We are all familiar with what happened in 1999, so we do not need to rehearse it. That reform produced roughly the House of Lords we have today.”
“The Marquess of Salisbury proposed a scheme based on the Bryce idea and that received a Second Reading in 1934, but again no progress was made. An inter-party conference on Lords reforms in the late 1940s agreed on nine principles, and I do not think any of them would be affected by this Bill, and none of them would fall foul of the notion of gradualism. They included the principle that no party should have overall control of the reformed House, that life peerages would be created, that women would be allowed to be Members and that allowances would be introduced. They at least had the right idea, therefore, which was that they should reform gradually.”
“All along, however, and even in those early days, and there was a determination not to upset parliamentary conventions, as does this Bill, which I like, so there was no power to amend or reject money Bills and the Parliament Act would not apply. The gradualist notion that my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire is talking about is important because it means that the fundamental conventions, which primarily ensure the supremacy of the elected House of Commons, are not affected. All those who take part in these debates must constantly repeat the point that no Bill should so radically alter the House of Lords or make it democratically justifiable in some shape or form that the supremacy of this House of Commons, which has been supreme now for over 100 years, would in any way be questioned.”
“I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) would agree that it is a sad fact that there are probably now more social conservatives in the House of Commons than in the House of Lords. Without wishing to get into the whole subject of gay marriage, we saw that, when that legislation was passed. The membership of the House of Lords is not spread widely enough, geographically. If it had more Members from the midlands and the north of England, we might get a more representative debate. I have mentioned the initial reforms that attempted to achieve such a geographical spread, and the Bryce commission, which proposed those ideas in 1922. At that time, people were still talking about limiting membership of the House of Lords to hereditary peers, albeit with some kind of election by the House of Commons.”
“We started with the Parliament Act 1911, after which came the Bryce commission, which was set up by Lloyd George following the interregnum of the first world war. The commission failed to agree on any proposals. It is interesting to note that most people then favoured a House of Lords with 246 Members, chosen by MPs, from different geographical regions. I have said that there is something wrong with the size of the House of Lords, but there is also something wrong with the geographical spread of its membership. About 22% of Members of the House of Lords come from London, and 18% come from elsewhere in the south-east. Only 2.94% come from my region, the east midlands, and 2.2% come from the north-east. That geographical concentration on London is a problem, and the House of Lords has become the home of the metropolitan liberal elite.”
“I did know that. I share with my hon. Friend a certain interest in those matters. It would be perfectly possible to allow Members of the other place who were over 80 to attend and go on using the facilities, but not to vote. That would put them on a par with the cardinals. I believe that setting a sensible retirement age and placing a limit on the number of peers would solve many of the problems. The importance of this very small Bill in terms of constitutional change is that, if by some miracle it gets through its Second Reading by 2.30—I hope that it does, and there is no reason why it should not—and if it proceeds through the House of Lords in the ordinary way, we will have established the principle that it is possible to make these small, incremental changes. We have been talking about these matters for a very long time.”
“Perhaps, like me, he thinks that there should be some sort of retirement age and limitation on numbers, but he knows that if he takes one step too many—if he takes four or five steps, rather than one or two—those who are determined to kill off anything but the most modest of reforms would ensure that this Bill never made any more progress. So he has conducted himself wisely on constitutional reform.”
“Of course our own prejudices occasionally come into play, but we do attempt to reflect public opinion. The House of Lords is not there for that purpose. It is a Chamber of experts, and it does its job in those terms in an excellent fashion. People should not criticise my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire by saying, “He’s had the opportunity of a whole day for his private Member’s Bill and he could have done something far more radical.” I am sure he could intervene on me to give me a dozen ideas of how he would wish to improve the House of Lords further.”
“Friend the Member for North Warwickshire was making. When we talk about House of Lords reforms, we focus far too much on structures. We should be focusing instead on this question: does it work? Does it do its job as a revising Chamber? The answer, surely, in terms of both quality of debate and its general ethos is that it does. That point was made by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset. It does not matter if somebody speaks in the House of Lords only once every year—or, I have to say to my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey), if they only speak once over 10 years—if they speak with sufficient knowledge from personal experience. That is what they are there to do. We are here in the House of Commons not to speak as experts; we are generalists. We are here to represent public opinion as we see it.”
“Yes, I think one of the key elements of traditional Conservative thinking is that we do not necessarily think that in order to be representative and to feel justified we have to have some direct relationship with what happens in a general election, particularly one based on proportional representation. I therefore think that the Government should get all the extraneous and radical thoughts out of their mind. I know my right hon. Friend the Minister is a great thinker on these matters and he would much rather have extended his speech to include some of his thoughts on these wider constitutional conventions and ideas. I suspect he felt rather constrained—but that, of course, is in the nature of being a Minister. Although the House of Lords is fundamentally irrational in many ways, it fulfils its central purposes. That is the point my hon.”
“We do not know how any of the proposals for House of Lords reform will upset the conventions, which time, tradition and compromise have erected. Time, tradition and compromise are the essential agreements of any successful constitutional change. That is a conservative principle—a Burkean principle—and it lies behind what my hon. Friend is doing, and it is on those terms that I wish the Bill well in its passage.”
“So let us not focus on the structures or on creating an elected House of Lords; let us focus on the small and necessary steps that this Bill can take, and which a Bill next year might take one step further forward. As I was saying, the major strength of the British parliamentary system not just in the past century, but over 200 years, is that it bends rather than breaks. It does move very slowly, and people often criticise us for the slowness of our constitutional change, but its very slowness is its major strength. If we were to enact legislation to codify a convention—if my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire were to say that, as we have excellent conventions regulating the relationship between the two Houses, we should codify them—we would, in essence, kill it.”
“I agree with that point, and I think the House of Lords performs that function excellently. Those who believe that the House of Lords can have legitimacy only if it is elected forget what the result of an elected House of Lords would be: it would filled with elected politicians. We are called “politicians” because we are elected and too many of us believe that we can feel justification in our life only if we become Ministers. That is why on dozens of occasions, including the one to which my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) alluded, reason has come to see light in the House of Lords, whereas in this place it is almost impossible to defeat the power of the whipping system, because most politicians are naturally ambitious.”
“My hon. Friend is making a profoundly utilitarian point, with which I disagree. I think it was rather beautiful that there was a convention that former Prime Ministers used to get earldoms. Why not? I think it is rather lovely that we may have in our legislature Earl Lloyd-George or another great name from the past. What is wrong with that? What harm does it do?”
“Apparently in 1917 the House of Lords expelled two of its Members for being enemies of the King, so presumably there is a procedure whereby the House can expel its Members and it does not require legislation. Is that right?”
“Those who were arrested and charged with offences during the expenses scandal tried to use this argument and the judges struck it down. Were they right to do so?”
“Does my hon. Friend think this should actually be a Government Bill? Were he to push for a Division on the basis of his notion that it should be a Government Bill and be taken on the Floor of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) would have to ensure there were 35 Members voting. That underlines the fragility of private Members’ Bills.”
“Were we not promised by the previous Secretary of State that the cuts to the regular forces would happen only if it were clear that we could increase the reserves? Yet that is not going to happen, so what happened to the original promise?”
“Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), who is sitting next to me, will press the motion to a vote, so it will—I presume—be passed by the House. It is incumbent on the Government to listen to the House if it expresses an opinion in such terms.”
“It is a great honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) who has given distinguished service. I never rose higher than a most diffident and incompetent trooper in the Honourable Artillery Company, so I speak with some diffidence in this debate. I may be an amateur in military strategy, but I know a bit about parliamentary procedure, and I am concerned about the way that debates on our armed services are effectively being downgraded. The House is on a one-line Whip, and we are debating a motion that we have not heard a lot about. The motion “urges the Government to delay the disbandment of regular units until it is established that the Army Reserve plan is viable and cost-effective.” My hon.”
“Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier) has played a distinguished part in this debate, and his independent commission concluded: “Our Reserve Forces are in Decline.” Why are they in decline? The commission concluded: “We have failed to modernise Reservist Roles.” We must ask my hon. Friend, and the Minister, whether we can increase the burdens we place on reservists when we are still modernising their role. The 2013 MOD White Paper “Reserves in the Future Force 2020: Valuable and Valued” was produced in response.”
“I hope that was not a Freudian slip, Madam Deputy Speaker, and by the way, welcome to the Chair. Thank you for calling me; you are doing wonderfully well so far. We all know the pressure that those on the Front Benches are under, but that does not absolve them from answering the central question in this debate. We can argue about the relative costs of reservists compared with regular forces, but we cannot deny that the previous Secretary of State made a pledge to the Chair of the Defence Committee that we would not reduce the Regular Army unless we were sure we could recruit these reservists. That is the nub of this debate, and we must not get lost in the detail. We must keep our eyes firmly focused on the issue. My hon.”
“I agree with my hon. Friend. When I arrived in the House we had an annual Navy debate, which was the only debate in which Mr Bonner Pink—a great man who represented Portsmouth—spoke in the course of an entire year, so important was it. We greatly respect my right hon. Friend the Minister of State, but we would like the Secretary of State to be present on these occasions and in these most important debates. We are, of course, sympathetic to Defence Ministers, and we know the intolerable pressure they have been put under. I will not get into a debate about the £35 billion black hole, just in case the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) intervenes on me, but as we know, the money has to come from nowhere—or rather, from somewhere—and difficult decisions must be made.”
“These regiments have long and proud histories that have come under sustained attack over the past half century.”
“A think-tank suggests that current defence policy is “merely a mechanism to slash defence spending.” I do not accuse Ministers of that, but they must reply to the charge. Is the policy a mechanism to reduce defence spending, or does it hold up? Even the Liberal Democrats, our coalition partners, have expressed concern that the changes envisaged “have not been adequately thought through and could pose risks.” In conclusion, I believe history has shown that a standing Army adds tremendous value to Great Britain. During the first and second world wars, it was immensely easier to mobilise the male population, because we could add them to pre-existing units. It was both easier and wiser to add another battalion—or two or three—to an existing regiment, than to imagine an entire reserve force almost ex nihilo.”
“Many colleagues, as well as other commentators, have been just as suspicious of the MOD’s ability to recruit and train so many recruits in such a short time span, and the more the debate continues, the more some of us worry about that. How many regulars will sign up as reservists? They entered as career soldiers and many may feel betrayed at being forcibly deprived of their jobs. Will they be keen to join as reservists? What preparations have the Government made for the loss of those skills and experience? The redundancy notices that the soldiers have received are real and can be held in their hands; the reservists who are meant to replace those soldiers are merely theoretical. My hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay pointed out that the plans are “flawed” and present a “high risk”.”
“Is that really the right, hands-on way to recruit our Territorial Army and reserve forces? The Army is reducing the Regular Army by 19,500 personnel, and working to increase the Army reserve to 30,000 from a current trained strength of 19,000. That is fair enough. It has been said in the debate that we need to recruit 20 people per constituency, so why are we not doing so? We must get a grip on the issue and understand from the Minister exactly what is happening on the ground. Why are we cutting people who have done their jobs well and who would like to continue in the Regular Army in the hope of promotion and a career? Why are we cutting them and recruiting reservists when we are still not meeting our quotas?”
“We all hope that that is true and will happen, but the fact is that we are still faced with what appears to be a crisis in recruitment. My hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay has ensured that two national papers gave enormous prominence to this subject this very day. There is a leaked report in The Daily Telegraph —perhaps the Minister will not want to comment on that—but we do not need a leaked report to know that the recruiting drive is in trouble. According to The Daily Telegraph “only 50 per cent of the overall 2013-14 target of 6,383” has been met. Clearly, something is going wrong. Why have we closed recruiting services and placed the emphasis on Capita? I have some experience of dealing with Capita from the Public Accounts Committee.”
“It may take only 40 days of a year to train a reservist, but we may lose centuries of tradition if the reforms are implemented in the wrong way.”
“I cannot. I will keep going for the last few seconds of my time. Obviously, not every regiment can last for ever, but tradition is a priceless, incorporeal thing that takes centuries to build and yet can be destroyed in an instant. We must again remember Admiral Cunningham, who was criticised for the heavy losses his Navy ships suffered when they were exposed to German air assault as he protected the Army. He said: “It takes three years to build a ship, but it takes three centuries to build a tradition.” The tradition of our Regular Army is a real thing that we still have in this country. The reforms seek to replace that with a continental-style citizen army, and to do so stealthily without properly saying so.”
“Order. In addition to the Opposition spokesperson and the Minister, three hon. Members have intimated that they wish to catch my eye. I am sure that they will keep an eye on the clock.”
“The convention of the House is that if a Member wants to contribute after the initial speech, they must have the agreement of the person who secured the debate and the Minister. I remind the hon. Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) that we must leave adequate time for the Minister to sum up.”
“I saw yours in the Westminster dog show last year and many people think that your breed of dog is quite powerful, but I know from having witnessed your dog that it is well brought up and peaceable. Let us be sensible about this. I know that new clause 3 is well intentioned, but it could have draconian effects. All it states is: “Where an authorised officer has reasonable cause to believe that a dog is not under sufficient control”. It requires a reasonable belief—that is not probability. We all know that there are disputes between neighbours, or that people have rows with other people. That is such a small bar to get over for an “authorised officer”.”
“I support the Government’s gradualist and sensible approach and I urge the Minister to resist new clause 3. We all regret and are desperately unhappy about vicious attacks by dogs, particularly on children—although also on anybody else—and if legislation could solve that problem and new clause 3 could deal with it without causing massive potential inconvenience to millions of peaceable people who own dogs, I would be in favour of it. However, like all such amendments, it would probably, sadly, do little to control the vicious people who use dogs as weapons and it could impact severely on millions of ordinary, peaceable dog owners. I declare an interest because, like you, Mr Deputy Speaker, I am a dog owner. My dog, a little border terrier called William, is a lot smaller than yours.”
“New clause 3 is just one extra bit of legislation that will not impact on the people who really cause trouble, but will, as I said, impact on millions of dog owners. We should be calm, take a gradualist approach and support what the Government are doing.”
“They did not look out of the window for 18 seconds and they killed a cyclist, and they went to prison for three years. We all think that is ridiculous. Are we really going to send someone to prison for 14 years for this offence? Let us be honest about it. Dogs have been bred for thousands of years to be guard dogs. Even my pathetic little border terrier, William, barks when people come up the garden path. That is what dogs are bred to do. All this nonsense about Liberal party canvassers who are scared of getting their fingers bitten when they put a leaflet through the door—I have delivered thousands of useless Conservative party pamphlets through the door. When I see a dog behind the door, I am delighted not to put the pamphlet through the letterbox. Just show some common sense. Dogs are dogs. We cannot change dogs with legislation.”
“I had better not give way, because I do not want Mr Deputy Speaker to set his dogs of war on me. I shall be very brief and will not take any interventions. Let me make a simple point. Who is this “authorised officer”? What is this “reasonable cause”? Simply because that officer of the state has some sort of belief, which might have been motivated by other people, the dog might have to be muzzled, neutered or prevented from going in particular places. I am very worried about that. I am also very worried about the other amendments. I do not agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller), who was talking about 14-year sentences. It was in the papers last year that somebody had driven their car dangerously and killed somebody while they were looking at their global positioning system device.”
“What discussions has the Minister had with the private sector? Is there not a danger that in moving to a progress measure we are moving from absolute standards to relative standards because we are taking account of where people come from as opposed to where they are? Parents want a measure of how good a school is now and the rigid academic standards it is achieving, and nothing else.”