Voting Rights of Ministers and Other Officers

Part of Orders of the Day — PARLIAMENT (No. 2) BILL – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 14 April 1969.

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Photo of Mr Robert Sheldon Mr Robert Sheldon , Ashton-under-Lyne 12:00, 14 April 1969

That is a valid point for which I am grateful. It is worthy of a reply from the Under-Secretary of State.

If there are ways in which Members of the House of Lords can obtain voting rights in any manner other than those general ways specified in the White Paper, any ingenuity which we can use to discover such means should be used by the Committee so that we can examine all the possibilities which inevitably will be discovered in the House of Lords. On a matter like this, we must make sure that there is a proper regulation of all the ways in which Members of the House of Lords can obtain voting rights. There must be no shadow of doubt at the end of these discussions that tucked away in one of the Clauses there may be provision for the creation of voting peers by means of a strategem which we have not discovered. It is right that we should spend time in delineating every way in which such voting peers may obtain their right to vote.

The right to vote is the right to receive money. In discussing these political pensioners, which was the phrase used by the right hon. Member for Kingston-upon-Thames (Mr. Boyd-Carpenter), we must always be aware of the many strands of patronage which run throughout this Palace—the House of Commons, the House of Lords, Ministers and ex-Ministers.

Throughout our debates I have tried to avoid any charge of direct filibustering. Therefore, I should like to draw attention column 530 of HANSARD for 2nd April. The Under-Secretary of State said: I recollect an occasion when for two hours and 20 minutes all the speeches about the Bill came from my side of the Committee. The Chairman then said: I hope that the Under-Secretary will not proceed in that vein. I am then reported as having said: Because it will happen again"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 2nd April, 1969; Vol. 781, c. 530.] It would appear from that as if I were threatening to speak at great length purely for the purpose of delay. I took up this matter with the Editor of HANSARD earlier this evening, and he accepts that this comment was wrongly attributed to me. I wish to bring this matter to the Committee's attention because I think that it will accept that this is very much out of character. Perhaps it was a remark of one of my hon. Friends. I have never threatened, or even vaguely threatened, unnecessarily to delay the proceedings. I have always argued, and will continue to argue, that the Bill should receive the greatest scrutiny of which we are capable. This I have tried to do, though frequently, I must confess, to the annoyance of certain of my hon. Friends on the Government Front Bench.

There have been three main reasons for my opposition to this part of the Bill. First, I have been most concerned about the powers of the House of Commons being diminished as the powers of the House of Lords are increased. I have always felt that the two went hand in hand. Once we increase the effective powers of the House of Lords, we reduce the effective powers of the House of Commons. Secondly, patronage permeates the political life of Westminster—in the House of Commons, the House of Lords, among Ministers and ex-Ministers.

The third has been the quality of decision taking, which has been quite deplorable. The way in which I always foresaw we should have gone about it was quite different—purely as a question——