Xander West is an independent writer and author of the Grumbling Times substack.
Although the passage of Labour’s House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill is almost a foregone conclusion, it should still be scrutinised and its foreseeable consequences highlighted. Conservatives must anticipate an attempt to abolish the House outright, especially if Labour retains their majority after the next election.
Second, an alternative path for constitutional reform, consistent with venerable conservative principles rather than those of its ideological opposition, should be conceptualised and well-articulated before the Conservative Party’s return to government. Third, perhaps most worryingly, the present Bill could precipitate a shift in the character of the Lords which may worsen the quality of lawmaking, whoever finds themselves in government.
Namely, the political expediency of unfettered Prime Ministerial patronage within a wholly appointed Lords might critically undermine the House’s relative independence from the ravages of party politics. Removing such freedom from politicisation and hyper-partisanship would jeopardise its valuable longstanding role as a revising chamber.
While certain individuals, such as the esteemed essayist Walter Bagehot, realised in the mid-nineteenth century that the proper purpose of the Lords within the then-burgeoning democratic system was in wisely revising legislation, it took nearly a century until the House fully embraced this idea.
During this time, one of a assertive and even aggressive Conservative dominance which ultimately resulted in the Parliament Act 1911, Labour emerged from the Liberals’ left flank, for whom disdain for the Lords in almost any shape was already festering. However, as this position became ingrained on the left in the early twentieth century, the now-defanged Lords slowly lost their partisan fervour and settled into the consistently temperate character they have been renowned for up to the present.
Perhaps the permanent shift of the executive into the House of Commons aided in this transformation by creating a distance from the centre of party politics. Even the stricter Parliament Act imposed upon the Lords in 1949 did not overly disturb the new constitutional balance, reflected in their temperament and purpose complementing, rather than competing with, the Commons. Additionally, it demonstrated the Lords were no longer able or willing to inhibit the democracy now firmly established in the Commons as they had earlier in the century.
It should be emphasised that although the membership of the Lords strongly tilted Conservative throughout the twentieth century, the party’s bills were not be immune from criticism, amendments or defeats. The Labour hereditary peer Francis Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, notes in A History of the House of Lords that Margaret Thatcher’s government had been defeated over 100 times in the Lords between the 1979 election and the end of 1986.
This included some major pieces of legislation, including an ill-advised attempt in June 1984 to abolish the Greater London Council and Metropolitan Councils before Parliament had agreed upon their replacements. Longford also stresses the number of defeats did not account for the numerous occasions where accommodations were reached between the Houses on amendments to prevent delaying the legislative process. Despite the Conservatives outnumbering Labour nearly four to one on paper at the time, there was relative independence of mind within the Lords, most explicitly amongst the Crossbench but doubtlessly elsewhere too.
Before the post-1911 system was shattered at the close of the last century, the Life Peerages Act 1958 brought about the most significant change to the Lords through its new and immediately dominant mechanism for membership. As has often transpired in recent political history, this attempt at modernisation turned out to be deeply flawed in its unwritten assumption that Prime Ministers would use their newfound powers to appoint peers with some caution and prudence, similar to the creation of hereditary titles previously.
Tony Blair appointing 203 mostly Labour peers by August 2000, partly to expel most hereditary peers faster, suggests expedience has proven a greater attraction to some governments in the years since the Act. Five years and several dozen more Labour peers later, he had engineered the first ever Lords plurality for the party to reduce the frequency of government defeats. David Cameron felt similarly unrestrained in reversing this situation as Prime Minister, also appointing over 200 peers during his six years in office.
The Coalition agreement contained an additional concept that the composition of the Lords should reflect the share of the vote secured by parties at the prior election. To assign such transient requirements to a naturally long-term body was bound to lead to a marked expansion in membership. Supposedly, many of the hundreds of peers discussed here were appointed under a ‘principle’ of ‘gradual’ change; if anything, it shows that ‘gradual’ must be a surprisingly relative term.
A precedent thus exists for Starmer to make Parliament easier to manage alongside reform. Although Labour promised not to pack the Lords with loyalists prior to the election, they have regardless expressed a desire to draw equal with the Conservatives. This means up to 100 Labour appointees are all but guaranteed already, depending on how quickly they choose to expel the remaining hereditary peers. More than a dozen Labour peers have been created since the election, including several expressly to become ministers, with further peers sure to come.
The siren calls of political expediency, of course, demand yet more. After all, the current government poses as another heir to Blair and wishes to do plenty with its landslide Commons majority. There certainly remains a chance that further Lords reform, after the current Bill passes, will be shelved in some capacity, simply because of the continuing convenience of shaping the chamber to the governing party’s will and the inherent difficulty in crafting a formal replacement.
This indicates another ostensible motivation behind reforming the Lords, namely reducing the size of the House to a number acceptable to and probably lower than the Commons, which has never been as powerful as most assume. Despite worthwhile changes in 2014 allowing resignation from the Lords and frequent rhetoric about ‘ballooning’ size, the life peerage is now numerically equivalent to the hereditary peerage it essentially replaced.
It has always been misleading to focus on the total membership of the Lords anyway since their markedly different function to the Commons demands specific expertise for each proposal to best revise legislation. The working House, of more regularly attending peers, has remained around the numbers suggested by proponents of a fixed total size of the Lords for decades.
Lord Longford’s History provides evidence that introducing a sizeable proportion of life peers bolstered this number in the late twentieth century. Yet recent data reveals average daily attendance has scarcely improved from a majority hereditary to a majority appointed membership. Indeed, the large number of ex-politicians consistently appointed over the years cannot claim to be experts in all areas of policy, so the professionalism they may bring to the role does not drive attendance.
However, fuller professionalisation by forcing attendance levels more akin to Members of Parliament, something Labour promises as part of their constitutional reform programme, could quickly erode all advantages of the current Lords. The continued emphasis on specialisms over attendance in debates has succeeded in dampening partisanship and maintaining quality amongst appointed peers.
Yet in altering this format, perhaps by empowering the Whips to compel more Lords to take sides more often, there are hundreds of potential party politicians ripe for activation. It is difficult to foresee a situation where all except a few dozen bishops and people’s peers, by owing their positions to a Prime Minister or party’s favour, do not steadily forsake their independence of mind and action when the governing party wants to push copious legislation through quickly and opposition parties wish to resist.
We know this rapid politicisation could happen because it has happened before within the history of British democracy. In a way, it would be coming full circle from the Parliament Act 1911, except the domineering force this time could be a Labour-Liberal Democrat amalgam rather than a Conservative. The Crossbench, having been amputated by the expulsion of most hereditary peers and due to be wounded further by ditching the rest, maybe too diminished to counterbalance such a shift in the Lords’ character. What will become of the quality of deliberation and legislative revision then?
Still, the alternative to the politically expedient Lords of Labour’s impending plans, the Council of the Nations and Regions, would prove much worse if the mere existence of the Lords cannot be adequately defended by Conservatives. The benign aloofness and non-partisanship presently enjoyed would be cast off, replaced by pointless party conflicts and competing petty provincialisms that will only serve to fracture the country. It would be a bleak version of the Holy Roman Empire’s dysfunctional Imperial Diet, obviously shorn of any pomp and ceremony, an institution befitting the federalised Britain Labour ultimately intends.
To top it off, there would likely be arbitrary majority thresholds to prevent substantive change when it is needed, most of all the restoration of something more sensible, subverting the parliamentary sovereignty vested in the Commons. Averting this potential future should be a paramount objective of all Conservatives; the sheer ramifications of indulging those who act as if this country was created yesterday are barely comprehensible.
Although the traditional constitutional arrangements might not be rational or eminently suited to modern sensibilities, their centuries of evolutionary development mean they fundamentally work well. The contemporary House of Lords, even its majority hereditary incarnation before 1999, provides ample proof.
It was under a constitution with many more archaic elements than today that Britain was held to be the mother of parliaments, within which a strong, representative democratic core was allowed to flourish, without the need for revolution or effacing the historical inheritance. If the Conservatives claim to be the duty-bound custodians of institutions, it ought to be kept that way from the needless and radical propositions laid before them.
