It All Becomes Clear

We remarked upon the decision of Lyn Brown MP to stand down from her Stratford seat. We speculated that this presaged her elevation to the House of Lords.

This article from The Guardian kinda adds fuel to the speculation.

Labour’s obsession with constitutional reform is at best a distraction and at worst the harbinger of a new kind of gerrymander. Readers may recall that as former PM, Gordon Brown ran out of ideas, he revived (and failed to implement) the idea of House of Lords reform.

Starmer’s party, it seems, intends to tread the same path but without half measures. We are as yet unclear about what shape the new chamber will be, but we do know that in an attempt to redress the electoral balance (the Tories have a hundred more peers than Labour) and the sex imbalance (two thirds are men), Labour will flood the Lords with new members. (Remember Johnson had proposed the same thing regarding Brexit.)

Undeniably, the House of Lords is an anachronism. If you were starting from scratch, you would not have a chamber in which membership was determined by the status of your father. The preservation of hereditary Lords is difficult to justify for anything beyond ceremonial occasions. And we are not starting from scratch.

Labour insists that the reformed Lords will be an elected chamber, and this will inevitably bring the issue of which house will have the democratic legitimacy. The US experience (of Senate and Congress) suggests that when one party is ascendent in both houses, the governing party can legislate without hindrance; when different parties are ascendent in either house, there is a log-jam and legislation is stymied. 

For all of its failings, the House of Lords was once a decent reforming chamber with a significant number of men and women who were acknowledged global experts in their fields, having spent decades in science, medicine, business etc. One thing that marked them out was their independence of thought and their experience of a world outside politics. That is going to be lost and they are about to be swamped by a host of superannuated political hacks.

That is not to say that there should not be some improvement. Elevation to the Lords has been marred by accusations of cronyism, (think for instance of Boris Johnson and a Russian plutocrat). The continued presence of 91 hereditary peers is an anachronism without any counterbalancing merit.

But a reforming chamber that mirrors the lower house will not be a reforming chamber; it will be a rubber stamp. 

The proposals demonstrate a clear attempt to bulldoze legislation. The conventions that have governed parliamentary administration look likely to be overwhelmed and we will all be the worse off for it.

Couched in the language of inclusivity and equity, we risk opening the doors to increased authoritarianism and what a number of those ‘dead white men’ of the Enlightenment called “the tyranny of the majority”.