House of Commons (Abolition) (Hansard, 18 July 1995)

§ Mr. Andrew Rowe (Mid-Kent)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to abolish the House of Commons in its present form. The House of Commons (Abolition) Bill has only one clause, which proposes the abolition of the House of Commons in its present form—and, of course, we have the power to do that. There is no doubt of the extent of the House's power; the debate must be about the use that we make of it. Are we effectively organised to lead the United Kingdom into the 21st century? I do not believe that we are, and I am not alone in that belief. In the past four years, the percentage of the population who believe that Parliament is doing a bad job has risen from 16 per cent. to 30 per cent.

The worst feature of our present state is not just that we have no effective mechanism for examining and reforming ourselves; it is that we do not care a jot about it. My right hon. and hon. Friends on the Procedure Committee work extraordinarily hard to improve the workings of the House: they have already altered the hours that we sit and amended the budgetary procedures following the change to a unified Budget, and may well provide us with a creche, in time. I do not belittle those improvements, but I doubt that they are the sort of changes that our critics have in mind.

What do those people have in mind? First, there are our procedures for examining the legislative proposals of the European Union. Every hon. Member knows that our present procedures are a sham. We have decreed that European legislation is decided by Ministers, reported to the House as a fait accompli and, very occasionally, debated, sometimes as long as two years after its introduction. The subordinate legislation goes to two Standing Committees, where my colleagues seek manfully to cope with a flood of regulations in which the House takes little or no interest, except in a handful of cases. No one here believes that that is adequate to protect the national interest; no one outside believes it either. Yet we do nothing to correct it, or even to consider how we might correct it.

This sovereign House of Commons is so careless of our own and the nation's future that we will not even look at the mechanisms that we have to scrutinise and debate European Union legislation whose impact on this place and on the nation grows daily. Any idea that we might copy Denmark, where the Folketing can ascertain whether Ministers have kept to their brief—or Belgium, where Members of the European Parliament have a role to play alongside Belgian national Members of Parliament—evokes contempt. Before we lambast the law makers of Brussels, we might look at ourselves.

Again, we seem wholly insouciant about who becomes a Member of Parliament. The Nolan committee makes recommendations that may radically affect recruitment to this place, and we still do not look at how Members of Parliament arrive here. In my lifetime, there has been a huge change in the attitudes of business to the political aspirations of its employees. Once businesses were often supportive of the ambitions of staff who wanted to enter Parliament: they would give them time off to fight elections, or sometimes offer to hold open a place for them if they were beaten in a subsequent election.

1489 That has all changed. Firms now tell an aspiring politician at an early stage of his career that he must choose between politics and the company. The result is that the House has fewer Members with business experience at even middle management level than for a century. The public, who know that our future depends on our ability to make and sell things, recognise that that is nonsense. It might not matter quite so much if Ministers were not drawn almost exclusively from Government Back Benchers, but they are, and we do not care enough to do anything about it.

Take our relations with parliamentary pressure groups. Fuelled by often colossal subscription income, becoming increasingly sophisticated every year, and able to command wide media coverage, single-issue pressure groups' influence over the House and the Government has risen to the point where one recently wrote to hon. Members to tell us what Bill it would be introducing next Session. I admire the colleague who wrote back robustly to say that she had always understood that it was for Members of Parliament or the Government to initiate legislation, but the pressure group was only stating the truth. Few large ones will have any problem about persuading a Back Bencher to pick up one of their Bills when Members have neither the resources nor the expertise to create a Bill on their own. That is a significant development and we all know it. It may be healthy or it may not, but we do not care enough either way to take the trouble to examine it.

Almost every week, a Member will rise and complain to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that some Government statement has been made outside the House, when propriety suggests that it should have been made to us first. It has become a meaningless ritual. We all know that if anyone in this place, a Minister or Back Bencher, wants to create an impact with an announcement, it is better to tell the media first. We know it, we pretend that we resent it, but we will not even consider examining our procedures to fashion a more effective partnership between this place and the media. The meaningless adherence to the shibboleths of a previous era simply brings the House into public contempt. We know it. We do nothing about it.

Take the roof off an ants' nest and one will see a myriad of ants scurrying about, all desperately busy. I have no doubt that, if one could ask them, each ant would say that it had never been so busy. Take the roof off the House of Commons and a similar scene would be revealed: hon. Members scurrying about, carrying heaps of paper, dashing to be on time for a Standing Committee, where they will be discouraged from saying anything at all, talking endlessly down the telephone to resolve a welfare case that in a citizens advice bureau would be pursued by a part-time volunteer.

I have no doubt that almost all my colleagues work desperately hard. I wonder how much of value we contribute to the governance of the United Kingdom. In 1991, the House approved more than 2,200 pages of legislation and 2,945 statutory instruments. That is 13 pages of law and 18 statutory instruments every working day. What a burden for all our citizens, which is largely unexamined in this place and which recently has got worse.

The public are better educated, better informed and more sophisticated than ever before. They sent us here to call the Executive to account, but we allow the Executive more power and less accountability with every passing 1490 year. We have required every institution in the land—universities, the professions, business, big and small, schools, hospitals, and local authorities—to subject themselves to rigorous testing and radical change. They have mechanisms for passing on from one generation to the next the wisdom learned through experience; we do not. They learn from organisations all over the world; we do not. Only here, where their revolutions have been demanded or approved, is no planned change discernible. Only here do we make no provision even to consider whether we should change. No one in here cares. A swollen Executive relies on its existing members, the ambition of its aspirants or the exhaustion of its former members to keep this sovereign House in its posture of supine subservience.

Today, I have not sought to list solutions; those come later. Unless we first demonstrate an interest in self-improvement, there is no point in bothering about detailed proposals.

This sovereign House of Commons, whose power is, to all intents and purposes, absolute, once before got out of touch with public sentiment. On that occasion, an hon. Member came to the Chamber with soldiers and told the Members debating on these Benches: You have stayed in this place too long and there is no health in you. In the name of God, go. If we are not one day to suffer the same fate, we need to ask ourselves how best to fit ourselves for the next millennium.

§ Mr. Tony Banks (Newham, North-West)

I wish to oppose the motion moved by the hon. Member for Mid-Kent (Mr. Rowe). It is not fair for him to say that none of us cares and that we might as well leave this place. Perhaps he has been listening to the advice of his hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Mr. Evans), who said, "If you're fed up with being a Tory Member of Parliament, vote for John Major." I do not know how the hon. Gentleman voted in that leadership election, but it is wrong to say that people do not care about the procedures of this place and about the need to make it more responsive to people's wishes and needs.

I agree with many of the sentiments that the hon. Member for Mid-Kent has expressed and some of the analysis, but I do not agree with his solution, which is to abolish the House of Commons in a one-clause Bill. That is a ludicrous proposal. It is like saying that I have a bad headache and to deal with it I will knock my head off. That seems a rather extreme cure to offer.

Much needs to be changed in this place and in the way in which we organise both government and politics. The hon. Gentleman should have dealt with some of the solutions. He was good and long on analysis, but incredibly short on solution. He said, for example, that we do not hold the Executive to account, but we have spent three hours attempting to do so through questions to Ministers and the Prime Minister. We have had three statements and an opportunity to cross-examine Ministers. Ministers do not like that experience and it is ludicrous that, on Thursday, we will start a summer recess that lasts right through to 16 October. Despite what some hon. Members say, that is not a holiday for Members of Parliament, but it is a rest cure for Ministers because they 1491 will not have to come to the House and account for their actions. It makes a manifest nonsense of the claim that the legislature controls the Executive.

During that long summer recess, government will continue, but without the inconvenience of Ministers coming here to expose themselves to examination. [Interruption.] I am sorry. That is not a felicitous phrase to use in the context of Conservative Ministers these days, but hon. Members on both sides of the House know what I am getting at. We know that there will be press conferences, and initiatives. On Friday, the summit on Bosnia which the Prime Minister was talking about will take place, but we will be safely away in our constituencies and we will not be able to ask the Prime Minister, Ministers, or the Foreign Secretary when he returns from Washington, what is being done and said in Parliament's name. Parliament has no say in those decisions.

We need to reorganise the year, with sittings interspersed with regular and shorter recesses. Even when we are here during a Session, we are often denied the opportunity to debate and decide on issues of national and international importance. That is why Members are forced to raise what are in effect spurious points of order. Before the debate on this Bill, we had one of the most genuine exchanges on points of order that I have heard for many a year in this place, but normally it is not like that. We are forced to use Standing Order No. 20 applications and spurious points of order—[Interruption.] Hello! The mafia has turned up—to raise issues that we feel strongly about.

In this place, I want us to debate what people are debating in the Builders Arms, my local pub. It is ridiculous that people can debate and discuss significant issues outside this place, but that we are denied the opportunity to do so.

One of the main reasons why we are often treated with contempt by the Government is that the Government do not need us; nor do they even need the payroll vote in some important respects. Far too many decisions are taken in the House using royal prerogative powers. The Prime Minister is an elected dictator. Hailsham said that about a Labour Prime Minister, but it could more accurately have been said about Baroness Thatcher, who was an elected dictator. Her majority meant that she had no need to apologise to the country or the House. Had she wanted to 1492 add an eighth day to the week, she had the political majority to enable her to do so. We do not want dictatorial powers being exercised by the Prime Minister through the royal prerogative.

Tomorrow we are going to have a debate on Bosnia. It is only a debate—no one will ask us anything and we shall not vote on what we should do. Ministers can ignore us or heed us, as they please. The decision as to whether our troops should become involved in military activity or withdraw will be taken using the royal prerogative powers rather than following a decision taken by the House. In effect, a raft of decisions affecting every single man, woman and child does not even have to be discussed in the House. The House of Commons is not asked for its permission. [Interruption.] I am disagreeing with the solution suggested by the hon. Member for Mid-Kent. He should have specified ways to change the House to make its operation more efficient. There are so many changes that could be made.

Personally, I believe that we need to change the way in which we vote. Let us have proportional representation; we might then achieve a balance in the House that is far more in keeping with the wishes of the people. Let us have fixed-term Parliaments; let us abolish the House of Lords and the monarchy. Those are ways to make the House more efficient. We should not follow the path outlined by the hon. Gentleman and abolish the House of Commons in a single-clause Bill.