Don’t ‘reform’ the Lords – abolish it

‘The House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the people of England.’ These words were spoken by the House of Commons when it first abolished the upper chamber all the way back in 1649. They remain as true today as they were then. The Lords, tragically resurrected in 1660, remains a menace to democracy to this day.

No one expects Labour’s deathless technocrats to show the democratic verve of those 17th-century revolutionaries, yet even by the Starmer government’s knee-high horizons, its plans for Lords reform have been remarkably timid. So timid, in fact, that the first stage of the plan – the removal of the 92 remaining hereditary peers (the majority were removed by New Labour 25 years ago) has managed to irritate opponents and advocates of Lords reform alike.

Defenders of the absurdly archaic practice of placing aristocrats in the legislature are predictably outraged by the Hereditary Peers Bill. Ahead of its first reading last week, Conservative peer Lord Strathclyde condemned it as a ‘high-handed, shoddy, political act’ that ignores the hard work carried out by those 90-odd ermine-clad blue bloods. He suggested that Labour’s reforming energies would be better focussed on those politically appointed peers who rarely take part in debates and don’t pull their weight.

Other fans of feudal privilege have characterised the bill as constitutional vandalism. It’s an affront to ‘our historical DNA’, apparently. They claim this attack on hereditaries ignores the supposedly invaluable, non-partisan role they play in the re-drafting of legislation. Better a disinterested aristocrat than a self-interested politician, they argue – an assertion born of a cynical, patrician-like disdain for parliamentary democracy.

Yet advocates of Lords reform are no more impressed with Labour’s plan than its critics. They say Labour has not gone far enough, that they want proper reform rather than easy gesture politics. After all, getting rid of the last remaining aristos, from the 9th Duke of Wellington to the great-grandson of fascist Oswald Mosley, might be cheap, easy and have the ‘pleasing whiff of class warfare’, as one Labour insider put it. But it still leaves the Lords with some 650 more life peers, not to mention the 26 bishops that make up the Lords Spiritual. Little wonder that Green Party peer Jenny Jones called the bill a ‘meagre reform’, which ‘won’t solve the many problems with our current unelected chamber’.

Yet for all reformers’ criticism of ‘our current unelected chamber’, they miss the fundamental problem with the Lords – namely, that it exists in any form at all. To anyone serious about our democracy, it doesn’t matter if an upper house’s members are hereditary, politically appointed or made up of elite-approved do-gooders. For as long as the Lords exists, it will continue to be an inherently anti-democratic force in British public life. It sits above our democratically elected representatives in the Commons, exerting considerable power over our elected lawmakers – and yet we have no means to hold that power to account.

It should be said that thanks to the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949, the upper house’s power is no longer what it used to be – it certainly can’t block legislation in the manner of its 19th-century incarnation. But it can scrutinise, amend and send back to the Commons legislation drafted by those we as voters have authorised to act on our behalf. It has the ability to delay, to alter, to ‘correct’ the democratic will itself. It is not simply undemocratic – it is anti-democratic.

And here’s the thing: advocates of Lords reform see no problem with the anti-democratic role played by the upper chamber. The Electoral Reform Society states that a ‘reformed’ upper house should continue ‘to provide expert scrutiny and advice’ to lawmakers, while others go even further, and call for it to become ‘a chamber of genuine experts’. They object to the current upper chamber then not because it is anti-democratic, but because it is insufficiently technocratic. They want to replace what Tom Paine once called the ‘remains of aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the peers’ with the remains of establishment power in the persons of the experts. In both its current and proposed forms, the upper chamber is an impediment to the democratic will.

No one should underestimate the obstructive role the upper chamber is capable of playing. We’ve seen it in action all too often over the past decade. Filled with establishment Remainers, it was a key player in the long-running thwarting of Brexit between 2016 and 2019. Alongside the UK Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights, it repeatedly stood in the way of the Tories’ ill-fated Rwanda scheme. Indeed, in 2022-23 alone, the Lords defeated government attempts to pass legislation 128 times.

Champions of an upper chamber, whether aristocratic or technocratic, will see all these Commons defeats on matters great (Brexit) and small (say, allowing local authorities to meet virtually) as a good thing – a triumph of impartial wisdom over what they see as badly drawn legislation by bad governments and MPs. But this isn’t about the merits of any one law. It’s about the democratic unaccountability of those challenging those laws. It’s about an institution that exists precisely to modify, impede and undermine the democratic will.

Even proposals to have an ‘elected’ second chamber betray an anti-democratic impulse. It is assumed that our elected Commons cannot be trusted to do the job of legislating. Apparently, MPs need to be checked by an upper chamber, chosen either through a different electoral system or at a different point in the electoral cycle. The assumption is still that the power of the voters and their representatives need to be curtailed in some form. That General Elections don’t produce the ‘right’ results for running the country.

Perhaps we should listen to Keir. Not Starmer of course, but Hardie, the first parliamentary leader of the Labour Party. Speaking in 1900, he described the House of Lords as ‘a betrayal of the core democratic principle that those who make the laws of the land should be elected by those who must obey those laws’. It’s a lesson that both opponents of Lords reform and supporters of a new expert-dominated upper chamber seem incapable of learning.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.