Cook urges Blair to avoid pitfalls of an election-free zone

Robin Cook, the Leader of the Commons, made a passionate appeal yesterday for MPs to back an elected House of Lords, saying a democratic second chamber could not exist as an "election-free zone".

Mr Cook opened the historic debate on reform with a clear rebuff to Tony Blair and other backers of an appointed upper house. He told MPs: "If we are serious about reform, we should have a largely or a wholly elected second chamber. In the modern world, legitimacy is conferred by democracy. That is why in our manifesto we committed ourselves to a second chamber more representative and democratic. I do not see how it can be a democratic second chamber if it is also an election-free zone."

He told MPs it was "crucial that the Commons comes to one clear, secure view on the way forward", warning that further obstacles to reform had to be "bulldozed out of the way". He said: "When we consulted on the White Paper on House of Lords reform a year ago, 89 per cent of those who responded favoured a majority elected house. A year later, the latest opinion poll showed that 83 per cent support a majority elected house. The public have not wavered in their support for a democratic solution, nor I think should we."

Eric Forth, the shadow Leader of the House, pointed to the "stark contradiction ... between the Labour Party manifesto, which said 'we are committed to completing Lords reform to make it more democratic and representative', and the Prime Minister's astonishing revelation last week that he now believes nothing of the kind. "It surely is right that we look to an upper house with legitimacy and self-confidence to do that job of holding the government of the day to proper account," he said.

Estelle Morris, the former education secretary, said she supported a majority elected second chamber as the only option that would "ring true" with the public. In her first speech since resigning from the Cabinet, she said: "Merely because no citizen thinks that they will ever stand a chance of getting into the House of Lords, I think it loses its legitimacy."

Gerald Kaufman, Labour MP for Manchester Gorton, said any elected house would create a "constitutional mess".

He said: "The electorate have got elections up to their throats ... How many or how few would vote? One lot of party hacks in the Houses of Parliament is quite enough."

But Andrew Tyrie, Tory MP for Chichester, warned: "We will not be taken seriously if we reject democratic options for reform of the second chamber."

George Howarth, Labour MP for Knowsley North and Sefton East, called for the Lords to be abolished outright. He said: "Reform leads either to corrosive rivalry, as would inevitably be the case with an elected chamber, or confusion and inconsistency in the case of a hybrid chamber."

Paul Tyler, for the Liberal Democrats, said an appointed house was a "complete aberration of parliamentary democracy ... A mixed membership works very well in other parts of the world; it works in other parts of this country."

Mr Cook clashed angrily with Peter Mandelson, the former Northern Ireland secretary, who warned that an elected upper house would increase pressure for a move to proportional representation. Mr Mandelson asked: "How long do you think it would take for it to become perfectly clear to everyone that to have two separate electoral systems for the two chambers would be absolutely untenable? Before long, inevitably, you would have to adopt a single system of electing members to Parliament and that would be a system of PR."

But Mr Cook said: "I do think we should show confidence in the wisdom and intelligence of the people who sent us here and their ability to handle the idea that democracy is something they are entitled to in more than one chamber in this place."