Oh, my Lord! - political sketch

With everything else going on in the world right now spending half a day of valuable government time in the House of Commons yesterday debating a relatively minor reform of the House of Lords might seem a self-indulgence.

Well, removing the remaining hereditary peers from the Upper House was in the Labour Party election manifesto so it seemed a perfectly legitimate debate to have. However, many speakers debating the second reading of the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill questioned whether it might have made more sense for the government to bring forward a substantive abolition motion rather than what was dismissed by some as mere tinkering. 

A suspicion was voiced that the bigger issue of abolition would be kicked into the long grass. (Surely not!) For its part, the government responded that as the reform process would inevitably be a lengthy one it had to start somewhere, and where better than with the indefensible retention of the ninety-two hereditary peers decades after reform of the Lords was first introduced by Tony Blair's Labour government?

To be fair, most speakers in the debate were in favour of abolition of the remaining hereditaries, though several Tory MPs praised them for their contribution to the democratic process. Following Lords debates and select committee hearings avidly as I do, I have to concur - not that their wisdom or commitment is enough to justify the continued participation of a group of barons, viscounts, earls, marquesses and dukes by virtue of their birth.

As was to be expected, there was much lofty talk of Burke and Bagehot but only Andrew Rosindell (Con) went so far as to try the patience of the House, and the Deputy Speaker, by trotting out at great length the tiresome traditionalist tosh. He condemned the move as "constitutional vandalism" and went further by suggesting that getting rid of 'the hereditary principle' would undermine the monarchy and encourage republicanism. Bring it on, I say!

It is a convention of the Commons (see Erskine May) not to bring the monarchy into debates and doing so raised a groan in the House, although the Deputy Speaker let it pass (unlike the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, who once rebuked the then Leader of the Opposition, one Sir Keir Starmer, for doing so). Logically, of course, abolition of the monarchy does indeed follow from such a move but since when did logic have anything to do with the continuing role of monarchy in the British constitution? That proposition, though, remains a red line very few MPs are willing, publicly at least, to cross.

There was surprising unanimity across the House in the debate when it came to the presence of the twenty-six Anglican bishops in the Lords, a privilege uniquely accorded to religious leaders of the Protestant Church of England that goes back to the Reformation under King Henry VIII. The oleaginous Sir Gavin Williamson (Con) (yes, sadly he's still there - one has to wonder what the good folk of South Staffs see in him that the rest of us don't) boasted of his radicalism in advocating the removal of reserved places for senior clerics in the legislature. He said it is something Britain has in common only with the Islamic Republic of Iran, likening the presence of the bishops in the Lords to the ayatollahs in Tehran. (Ah, the liberation of Opposition!)

Pete Wishart (SNP) gave a typically corruscating critique of what is normally referred to in the Commons as 'The Other Place'. The people's Pete dismissed it with a contemptuous wave of the hand as "that place down the corridor". The strawberry-blond bombshell, Dr Ben Spencer (Con), was pro-reform but against election of members to the Lords, something on which I actually agree with him, preferring independent appointment instead. Tim Roca (Lab) said the Lords had proved to be a bulwark of democracy in the recent past but nevertheless needed to go. Amen to that.

Richard Tice (Reform) was, perhaps unsurprisingly, in favour of, well, reform. He said that rather than waste time tinkering the government should just "get on with it". Sir Ashley Fox (Con) made the fair point that Phase 2 of reform was promised twenty-five years ago once wider reforms had been fully implemented but that had never happened so here we were. He feared the same thing would happen again once the remaining hereditaries were abolished - a reasonable concern in the circumstances I think. Remember HS2.

The unpalatable truth of the matter is that Prime Ministers of all political stripes have found irresistible the potential for patronage afforded by the freedom to make appointments to the Upper House, packing it with placemen and -women at every opportunity. Cronyism and the rewarding of political donors is a powerful weapon in any PM's armoury. It seems talk of reform is all very well until it comes down to implementation, when reforming zeal suddenly evaporates, giving way to institutional inertia. 

To its credit, the Labour Party under Sir Keir Starmer did at least put abolition in its election manifesto and has made a prompt start on debating it but let's see how it goes from there. And it's not as if there hasn't been sufficient time to think about a suitable replacement. Talk of reform, even outright abolition, has been doing the rounds for over a century, during which time a viable alternative should surely have emerged but if such an 'oven-ready' blueprint exists I'm not aware of it. This leaves the door wide open to rounds of consultation leading to yet further delay, prompting justifiable fears of ultimate abandonment.

Much was made of the fact that the House of Lords in its present size (around eight hundred) is second only numerically to the Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. It is also the only upper chamber of a legislature in the world larger than the lower. The Senate of the United States, for example, consists of only one hundred senators to four hundred and thirty-five members of the House of Representatives, both houses being elected.

Several Conservative speakers in yesterday's debate said that the issue of Lords reform hadn't arisen on the doorstep during the election campaign. It's hardly surprising if that didn't happen spontaneously as it's not an issue at the forefront of most voters' minds but then why didn't more campaigners prompt it? Had they done so I'm pretty sure they would have received some interesting responses. Maybe Tory door knockers just weren't bothered as it wasn't in their own party's manifesto? Or maybe they simply didn't want to open Pandora's box.

Unsurprisingly, given its huge parliamentary majority and the irreproachability of the proposition, the government won the motion yesterday by a handsome majority, though the process of implementation will be a protracted one and no-one seriously expects a senate to be in place by the next election.

The long-delayed departure of the remaining hereditaries, though, will be a welcome start.


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