PARLIAMENT (Hansard, 4 May 1965)

§ Mr. William Hamilton (Fife, West)
I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to abolish the delaying powers of the House of Lords in respect of legislation. The House will recall that the Parliament Acts of 1916 and 1949 successfully reduced that power so that it operated for only one year. My view is that the period is still one year too long. No one could logically defend such a right residing in such an undemocratic, unrepresentative, archaic, museum - like Tory-dominated Chamber. My action today is not inspired wholly by the episode of the War Damage Bill on 13th April, although I must put it on record that, to use a current phrase, it "put a tiger in my tank".
The House will recollect that the Second Reading of that Bill was passed by this House with a majority of 93. It was also passed in the House of Lords on Second Reading by 45 votes to 22. I ask the House to note those figures—45 to 22. In the Committee stage of the Bill, on 13th April, the Government were heavily defeated in the House of Lords by a vote of 144 to 69, allegedly on grounds of principle, that retrospective legislation was involved and that the Government were infringing the rule of law. On the face of things, it seemed to lend force to the observation by Walter Bagehot, 100 years ago, that The order of nobility … prevents the rule of wealth—the religion of gold. Having an inquiring nature, I decided to make an analysis of the 144 peers who voted "Content" on that occasion. I found that 54 of them had not voted before in this Session. Indeed, one of them took his seat that very day, and was a Burmah Oil shareholder. The aggregate directorships involved in the case of these 144 amounted to 415, an average of three per peer. These included 110 chairmanships. There were 21 banking directorships; 14 chemicals; 11 property; 7 steel; 6 oil; and the usual Tory "beerage" amounting to 6—a genuine cross-section of the British public.
One of them, Lord Strathalmond, took his seat in April, 1955. He had not 1118 opened his mouth for 10 years. Maybe there were good reasons for that. It may be that the reasons were just as good as those for which he attended on 13th April, because he was, until last December, a director of Burmah Oil—

Hon. Members
Oh.

§ Mr. Speaker
Order. The hon. Gentleman has full scope to develop his point, but I think that to ensure he is within order he should make clear once and for all now that he is not suggesting that votes were cast in another place because of any unavowed motive. If he makes that clear, he may go on.

§ Mr. Hamilton
I was about to come to that point, Mr. Speaker. You anticipated me by about three seconds.
I have here a list of the titled shareholders in Burmah Oil. It runs to 60 foolscap pages and about 170 peers are involved. Thirty-eight of them voted, "Content" on 13th April—a very good word that, "Content".
To come to the point you have just raised, Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to believe that 38 were motivated solely by a high regard for the rule of law and their dislike of retrospective legislation. I should be very glad to make a supreme effort to believe that their presence in the House of Lords when the Burmah Oil interests were being considered was purely coincidental. It seems to me, on the evidence I have been able to collect, that the House of Lords was not so much acting as a Chamber of Parliament and debating matters of fundamental principle as a shareholders' meeting discussing future policy. Indeed, I would say that at the last general meeting of the Burmah Oil Company there were probably fewer shareholders than there were in the House of Lords—

§ Mr. Speaker
Order. The point about this is that the other place is not here to defend itself. I therefore must assume a mantle which will ensure that no discourtesy as between the Houses should occur. I would ask the hon. Gentleman to couch his brief explanation of his Bill—which is all that I am permitted to allow—in terms which would not be discourteous to the other House of Parliament.

§ Mr. Hamilton
That is an extremely difficult exercise, Mr. Speaker. I am trying to do my best.
The point which I am trying to make is quite simply that, along the corridor, there is another Chamber which can delay, thwart and defeat every single bit of legislation which is introduced and passed by this House. When the Lords claim, as they did on this occasion, that they were doing it on grounds of high principle, that they objected to delegated legislation and to the infringement of the rule of law, that is denied by another case which I shall mention in passing.
I refer to The Gambia case. Hon. Members may recall that on 28th May, 1963, the Commonwealth Relations Secretary announced in this House that he was setting aside by Statutory Instrument—by delegated legislation—the judgment of the West African Court of Appeal invalidating certain elections in The Gambia. That matter, which involved precisely the same principles as Burmah Oil, was not even mooted in the House of Lords.
I come directly to the purpose of my Bill by reference to what has happened in the Lords this Session. I have just given what amounts to the hors d'oeuvres about Burmah Oil. The main meal will come when the Amendments come back to this House. Meanwhile, I want to put on record what has happened in the Lords this Session. There have been 10 Divisions and the Government have been defeated on six occasions. The average number of defeats per Session during the last 13 years, under a Tory Government, was two, or, at most, three. In some years it was never defeated at all. Clearly, they are "chancing their arm" in this Session, with the Government constituted as it is.
The intolerable fact, as I have said, is that the House can delay, thwart and defeat at will any Measure passed and accepted by this House and in this Parliament. The most controversial legislation is yet to come—steel, the Lands Commission, and the rest. In my view, the threat to create a sufficient number of peers to outnumber the Tories in the other place is no answer. Nor is it sufficient, in my view, to wait for a mandate, as the Prime Minister himself suggested. We should accept the challenge now and, if need be, cut the Summer Recess to do so.
1120 My Bill would be short, simple, unequivocal and moderate. It is in this conciliatory spirit that I ask leave of the House to introduce it.