'Let's Talk Lords' - Hari Bravery

'Let's Talk Lords' - 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 of the House of Lords was necessary. The subsequent Conservative-Liberal Coalition agreement that promised a wholly or partially elected second chamber – to sate the Lib Dems – was largely forgotten during the Cameron administration, particularly clear in the Conservative’s abandoning of the 2012 Reform Bill, leading to Nick Clegg’s disputed claim that the Conservatives had “broken the coalition contract.” No further modernisation attempts have been made by the Conservative party, with the 2014 Reform Act merely facilitating expulsion and resignation from the Lords.

Since 2000, then, we have seen the House of Lords reform agenda wax during the Blair years to fever pitch in 2007 and then wane dramatically throughout the Cameron administration, due primarily to a Conservative government that seeks the continuation of aristocratic privilege, masquerading as the continuation of British ‘tradition’. Yet, this is not to say that the issue has disappeared from the mind of the electorate. The most recent YouGov poll gives 28% approval of a partly or wholly elected secondary chamber, 22% approval for abolition and 15% approval for continuation as an unelected, appointed chamber; there is support amongst the British population for reform of the House of Lords - the Labour Party must remember this. When discussing House of Lords reform with others I am often met with the response that ‘this is not a vote-winner,’ yet why needn’t it be? There should not be a lack of public interest in what the 2019 Labour manifesto called ‘constitutional issues’ - Brexit and Scottish independence are themselves constitutional issues and have led to some of the most heated conflicts in contemporary British politics. Indeed, the exact same logic of ‘unelected officials’ that became rote for Leave-supporting populists is directly applicable to contemporary Lords, themselves unelected officials with the power to significantly alter the law, many of them lacking the expertise to allow them to fulfil their key role of providing checks and balances to House of Commons bills. House of Lords reform will not and cannot be a vote-winning issue if the Labour Party does not make it a priority in electoral policy, with clear messaging that the House of Lords existence makes every British persons’ vote matter less. Perhaps the most important statistic to take away from the aforementioned YouGov poll is that the largest majority of respondents indicated that they ‘Did not Know’ (31%) what the correct direction for the House of Lords is.

Let me simply set out my personal antipathy for the House of Lords in its present state. There are 92 unelected, hereditary MPs still sitting in the Lords, despite the 1999 House of Lords act removing their entitlement – all of these Lords are men, all of them are white and all of them only hold their position due to their aristocratic family heritage. The Prime Minister of a given day can elect as many lifetime peers as they desire; during Boris Johnson’s premiership over a hundred have been appointed, all too often to former Tory party donors (15 of the 16 past Conservative treasurers, all donating over £3 million or more), Conservative lobbyists and well-connected businesspeople (particularly relevant is the peerage of Evgeny Lebedev). The Lords includes bishops (the Lords Spiritual) with full voting rights, making Britain the only country other than Iran to automatically reserve spaces amongst its legislature for unelected religious figures. The House of Lords is bloated beyond functionality, with 767 seats making it one of the largest legislatures amongst developed nations, with many Lords barely even taking their seats. But above all, the House of Lords is damaging to British democracy. Take the House of Lords filibustering preceding the 2019 prorogation of parliament; the Benn bill passed through the House of Commons on a legitimate vote, but the Johnson government wanted to stop the bill passing before prorogation. 102 amendments were made by Conservative peers to slow the progression of Benn bill. It was only due to media and popular pressure that the Benn bill became law, just hours before parliament’s suspension; this is not scrutiny of Commons legislation, this is the rejection of parliamentary democracy by the House of Lords on the command of the government of the day - an institution with this much power cannot exist in its current state. It fails to function as a scrutinising body and serves instead as an extension of partisan politics. The House of Lords is a ridiculous anachronism, a shard of unashamed archaism in an already imperfect political system.

Yet, how does the Labour Party’s consistent commitment to a modernisation of British democracy through House of Lords reform or abolition square with the current leadership? Keir Starmer, though pledging to retain House of Lords abolition in the 2019 leadership election, has since rowed back on this promise. Starmer’s failure to abide by the Corbynite policies of his leadership campaign have oft prompted the ire of Labour’s left, his policy on the House of Lords is no different. Previously promising to “[a]bolish the House of Lords [and] replace it with an elected chamber of regions and nations,” Starmer has more recently refused to recommit to abolition in November 2021, instead only stating in an interview with Andrew Marr that “We certainly need change in the House of Lords”. This is the only significant mention of the House of Lords that Starmer has made in his whole time as Labour leader. The role of the modern Labour leadership must be to draw attention to the injustice of the House of Lords in its current state, its facilitation of Tory sleaze, its blatant blocking of the House of Commons’ democratic processes and failure to represent the nation in its majority white, male, upper-class makeup. It should be to stir up public resentment for this institution, one that has so intransigently refused to modernise. The House of Lords reform question, which too many have pessimistically claimed is a dead-end that cannot appeal to the electorate, can become a vote-winning issue if the Labour Party merely allows this injustice to ring true.

In the future of the Labour Party’s policy on the House of Lords, abolition must remain a serious possibility; I personally would present the case for a unicameral system as used by New Zealand, Norway and Finland, combined with greater powers for select committees and the backbenches, though that is a different issue, one that can only be countenanced once the Labour Party recommits itself to reform of the second chamber. Scrutiny of House of Commons bills is vital, but no one will convince me that the modern Lords, in all its archaic excess, is the most qualified institution to enact this. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party must reinject life into a debate that has the capacity to fundamentally alter British politics for the better; over two years of silence on the House of Lords is not the way to begin this.

[Hari Bravery is a second-year English student at University College. He is serving as OULC’s Co-Chair in Trinity 2022]