Hari Bravery
The 2017 Labour manifesto, For the Many not the Few, pledged to “end the hereditary principle and reduce the size of the current House of Lords” as part of the party’s bid to ‘extend democracy’. Yet Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto, It’s Time for Real Change, went further, cementing the House of Lords at the centre of UK constitutional failure and seeking its wholesale abolition, in favour of “an elected Senate of the Nations and Regions” though asserting that “the people must be central to historic political changes.” The 2019 resolution to abolish the House of Lords was caveated by popular approval, but a resolution to abolish the House of Lords it was nonetheless. Labour criticism of the House of Lords should not come as a surprise; in recent history, the Labour Party has consistently called for modernisation and constitutional reform. It was after the 1997 general election delivered Tony Blair’s a landslide majority that House of Lords reform was seen as an actual possibility, culminating in the passing of the 1999 House of Lords Act, reducing the number of hereditary peers by more than 600 and freezing the number of hereditary peers at 92 until further constitutional reform. The subsequent establishment of the independent House of Lords Appointments
Commission in 2000 aimed to make the appointment of Lords more impartial. However, modernisation under the Blair administration came to an end with the 2007 debate on the governments House of Lords: Reform white paper. In a series of indicative, but non-binding, votes the House of Commons voted by a majority of 113 for an all-elected House of Lords, something celebrated at the time by Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell as “a famous victory for progressive opinion both in Parliament and in the country.” Indicative House of Commons votes also showed support for the abolition of both bicameral and hereditary peers. The House of Commons resolutions were then resoundingly rejected by the House of Lords, whose indicative votes unsurprisingly showed a strong preference for a fully appointed house, as Lords voted for the preservation of their existing privileges. The point to take away from the Blair-Brown years is that there was a legitimate appetite in the House of Commons for reform of the House of Lords, and a partial success in the removal of a vast number of hereditary peers. Faced with popular approval of Labour’s modernisation motions, during the 2010 general election the Conservative Party agreed for the first time in its history that reform
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Let’s Talk Lords
