R. 318
AME
c.c. Mr. Carter
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Mr. Fairclough
Mr.
Jerrom
Mr. Sewell
G-66
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Confidential
Ar. Carpus.
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Mr. Martin Commonwealth Policy and Planning Department
Your minute of 10 June about the proposal that peers (presumably life peers) from the Dependent Territories should sit in a reformed House of Lords with the right to speak but not to vote.
2. I agree generally with your draft memorandum, subject to amplification on one or two points of detail which I will deal with later. But there also seem to me to be two other substantial objections, which might figure as additional items in the list in paragraph 5 of your memorandum, subject to any views by the other heads of political depart- ments to whom I am copying this minute.
3. I think that to create such peers would be bound to have a substantial effect on relations between the Secretary of State and the Governments of the Dependent Territories. For a generation or more it has been H.M.G.'s policy to delegate power progressively to locally elected Ministers or their equivalent; and insofar as there are limitations on this process, it is precisely because the circumstances of each case (whether international, internal security, economic or whatever it may be) necessitate keeping a measure of power in the hands of the Governor acting as the representative of H.M.G. and under the Secretary of State's directions. A "representative" peer from a Dependent Territory would be the obvious means by which any dissatisfied individual or political group in the territory could try to circumvent or reverse decisions taken by the responsible people on the spot. If the peer was of a different political colour from the elected Ministers or on bad terms with them, this could easily lead either to rows between the Secretary of State and the elected Ministers or else to the peer being so regularly saubbed in P.qs. that he could justifiably complain that his appointment was derisory. If the peer was on good terms with the Party in power in the territory, it would be the Governor's turn to be isolated and bypassed. It is tricky enough for Governors and Administrators already in these surviving small terri tories, without giving the local politicians a built-in short circuit direct to Parliament. The peer, being on the spot in Westminster, would always have an advantage over anyone who wanted to put the opposite point of view from thousands of miles away at the end of a bad line of communication.
4.
This leads to my second point, namely, the method of selection of these colonial peers. I suggest that para. 4(v) of your draft memorandum assumes too lightly that, as with English peers, nomination could be retained in the hands of the British Prime Minister, Subject only to informal local consultations. This would be all right if they were being chosen simply for personal merit and for the contribution
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