If you want a lesson on how infantile Britain’s constitutional conversation is, just take a look at what’s going on in the House of Lords. We should be experiencing a once-in-a-generation moment of reform. Instead, it’s dissolved in a pointless, juvenile shouting match of nothingness, just like it always does. A historic opportunity is being thrown away.
Generally speaking, you get one chance for Lords reform every 30 to 40 years. There was a Parliament Act in 1911 and another in 1949, both of which reduced the Chamber’s powers. Things briefly sped up in 1958 when Harold Macmillan introduced the notion of life peers but they then went back to their normal languid pace, with the next major reform arriving in 1999, under Tony Blair. He got rid of most of the hereditary peers, leaving just 92 behind as a compromise.
Sir Keir Starmer’s Government is now having another go. And why not? It’s been about three decades, so it fits the glacial schedule of British constitutional thought. In the Labour manifesto, the party committed itself to removing the rest of the hereditary peers, setting an age limit of 80 on House of Lords members, reducing the size of the Chamber, and reforming the appointments process to improve the quality of new peers.
That last part was a response to Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, who treated the Chamber the way that a tinpot despot treats their parliament. Together they managed to appoint possible security threats, party donors, utter non-entities and an assortment of right-wing cranks and cronies.
It is also the most radical and productive part of Labour’s Lords agenda. Appointments to the Lords are currently vetted by the House of Lords Appointments Commission. It does a really good job, but it is powerless if the prime minister overrules it, as Johnson did, and appoints people despite its warnings.
In an ideal world, the prime minister should lose the power of patronage altogether, with the Commission alone taking the decision of who to appoint. But failing that, it should, at the very least, be put on a statutory footing with proper enforcement powers.
Labour’s plan was to quickly pass a short House of Lords bill which would dismiss the hereditary peers, then come back later for more thorough reform. They thought they could make quick progress with the least contentious elements of reform while they formulated their more wide-reaching plans. That proved to be a mistake. The bill is now stuck in the Lords and rapidly turning into a constitutional nightmare.
The Conservative Party in the Lords has thrown itself into a pointless doomed battle to save the hereditary peers. This is wrong on the basics – bloodline is not a good basis for establishing legislative scrutiny and no sane person would ever pretend otherwise. But it is also politically inane. Labour put the proposal in its manifesto. It has a mandate for it. And more importantly, it has the support of the Liberal Democrats, so the Tory defence will be defeated no matter what happens.
Yet the fact that something is completely irrational is no obstacle to the modern Conservative Party, so it has thrown itself into the battle with gusto. The party introduced countless pointless amendments and refused to co-operate on how they were bundled together – basically a kind of procedural guerilla war.
And in its own tawdry, pointless way, it has succeeded. It won’t stop the removal of hereditary peers. But it does seem to be killing the appetite for further reform.
Ministers are aghast. Tory opposition has slowed the progress of the bill to a crawl and therefore delayed the legislation behind it. They’re now much less likely to try a pass a second piece of legislation. Each new bit of foolishness makes a future reform of the Lords less likely.
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This week, one person had enough: Meg Russell, a political scientist who runs The Constitution Unit at University College London. She is probably the single most knowledgeable individual in the country on the study of parliament. She has spent decades fighting for modest, moderate constitutional reform. When she speaks, nerds listen.
In a searing blog post, she issued a warning to reformers. This bill is still going through the Lords. There is still one final chance to introduce the sensible amendments which Labour promised – on size, on standards, on the appointments process. But if that chance is not taken, it won’t come again for 30 years.
“The harsh reality,” Russell wrote, “is that those changes that require legislation (which in the end is most of them) are best made in this bill, as another is unlikely to come. This is a reality that ministers, as well as others in the chamber, need to recognise.”
It was a call of clarity, above the din of constitutional battle. It ignored the Conservative peers engaged in procedural nonsense. Instead it focused on two groups: Labour ministers who promised Lords reform at the election and peers of all parties who have spent years trying to improve the Chamber.
It was a simple message: ignore this foolish self-interested clatter. Do not say you’ll reform again later – you almost certainly won’t. Get the reforms you want right now, on this bill, through productive amendments. Labour and the Lib Dems together easily have the numbers to overrule any disruptive Tory peers standing in their way.
We should all hope they listen to her. This is a historic opportunity for Lords reform. Unless it’s grasped quickly, it’ll crumble before our eyes.
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