The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to describe it to someone from abroad. To an American, you will have to explain why there are more than 800 people entitled to sit in our grotesquely bloated upper chamber when the US manages with 100 senators. To anyone from anywhere, you will need to tell them about the presence of 92 hereditary peers, embedded on the red leather benches because some distant ancestor fought for a long-dead monarch or gave a bung to a long-gone prime minister. When one of these hereditaries shuffles off this mortal coil, there is then the most eccentric kind of ballot. The vacancy is filled at a byelection in which only hereditary peers can participate as candidates and voters. The rest are the “lifers”, a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly. Some are dedicated people of genuine distinction in fields such as science, public service or business. It would be a pity to lose their wisdom and experience, but a price worth paying to purge parliament of the many peers who are only there because successive party leaders have stuffed the place with cronies, toadies and donors. The ranks of the placemen and women have enlarged over recent years, swelling the mob of mediocrities and gargoyles who serve not the public interest, but only their own interests.
The contemporary “nobility” includes Baroness Mone, a creation of David Cameron. She has announced a “leave of absence” to “clear her name” after the exposure of evidence suggesting she and her family secretly received vast amounts of taxpayers’ money by exploiting the crony express for lucrative PPE contracts. The lifers also include Lord Lebedev of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation, the party-throwing and newspaper-owning son of a Russian oligarch who was formerly a KGB agent. He was parachuted into the legislature by Boris Johnson who has reportedly submitted a resignation honours list demanding peerages for his Number 10 flunkies, Conservative MPs who defended his tenancy at Downing Street long after it was clear that he had to be evicted, and a Tory donor who facilitated one of his holidays.
The wholly undemocratic and ludicrously overpopulated chamber has become so discredited that the state of the place worries even senior lords. Yet there has not been serious reform in a generation. Tony Blair removed the majority of the hereditary peers during New Labour’s first term and then lost interest in finishing the job. Like so many prime ministers before and since, it suited him to keep the Lords, not least as an arena to exercise Number 10’s extensive powers of patronage. In 2010, the Tory-Lib Dem coalition pledged to replace the Lords with a chamber that was wholly or largely elected by proportional representation. Nick Clegg’s attempt to make that happen was thwarted by a Tory revolt and Mr Cameron’s lack of enthusiasm. He was another prime minister who liked the patronage privileges, though his ennoblement of Michelle Mone may now be added to the extremely long list of things he ought to regret.
It is bad enough that the upper house is used as a gilded retirement home for prime ministerial pals and a padded palace for people to whom they owe favours. It is worse that seats in our parliament can be bought. The sale of honours is against the law. Yet there is a strikingly high correlation between giving large sums to a political party and getting cloaked in ermine. It would be a more honest system if Number 10 held an annual auction of peerages. Your bids, please, to become Lord Loot of Slime Bucket in the County of Sleazeshire. At least we would then know the price tag on a seat in our legislature.
No one would invent it, but it kind of works. Apologists for the Lords always come up with this defence whenever reform is discussed. The truth is it doesn’t work and it must be fixed. One of the fundamental arguments for the existence of a second chamber is as a restraint on ministers bulldozing bad law through the Commons and as a backstop against anti-constitutional behaviour by government. Yet peers were powerless when Mr Johnson unlawfully shut down parliament in 2019. The supreme court had to step in to put a stop to that. The upper house has not been a brake on scandal. Rather, the Lords itself has increasingly become a source of them. Rishi Sunak professes himself “absolutely shocked” about Baroness Mone. The prime minister has somehow got to the top of the Conservative party while leading a very sheltered life.
The Lords has not prevented recent governments from inflicting a lot of rubbish laws on Britain. They were bystanders during the tawdry rule of Mr Johnson and the catastrophic reign of Mad Queen Liz. Peers occasionally resist enough to slow down the executive, but they almost always cave in when it comes to the crunch. The Lords is not so much a check and balance as a speed bump that can always be driven over by a determined government in possession of a Commons majority. This is one of the principal reasons why efforts to replace the Lords with a more respectable chamber have foundered. It has suited prime ministers to retain an upper house that is too compromised to act as a proper curb on excesses by the executive.
All this is going to change should Labour form the next government. So says Sir Keir Starmer. He has embraced abolition of the Lords and its replacement with an elected chamber representing the nations and the regions of the UK. That is one of a chunky set of 40 reforms proposed by a commission headed by Gordon Brown. The report also contains welcome ideas about cleaning up Westminster and redistributing power away from it, though there are things missing from this plan to reinvigorate our democracy. The most notable absentee is change to how we elect the Commons to make the primary chamber of the legislature more representative of the people it governs. The Brown commission won’t be the final word on the subject, but it has given us an excellent basis for discussing how we create a more transparent, accountable and plural constitutional settlement.
As was to be expected, suggestions of reform have been received with world-weary sneers from those who have seen previous plans come to nothing and mocking jeers from those who say there are more important things to think about than rescuing our democracy from public distrust. I really detest the contention that voters are indifferent towards the “boring” topic of how they are governed, an assertion as patronising as it is untrue. Surveys indicate that the British are very troubled by the decayed state of their institutions and how badly they are misruled. A poll commissioned for the Brown report found that a shockingly large majority of people feel “invisible” to their political leaders. The public are open to the case that our country has been held back by a power-hogging, patronage-based, over-centralised state.
The most insidious opposition to reform comes from Labour people who say that a Starmer government will have too much else on its plate to get “bogged down” in a “quagmire” of constitutional change. This kind of cold water pouring often comes from Labour peers who know they can’t justify the Lords, but do rather enjoy sitting there. I get it. What’s not to like about being a peer? Can’t be much, because their average age is 71 and so few of them voluntarily retire. The status is not the only attraction. There’s the handsome facilities in which to entertain yourself and guests, the freedom to turn up or not as you like, the untaxed attendance allowance of up to £323 per sitting day, the free car parking in central London for senior peers, ready access to ministers and legislative rights for life. Sir Keir can’t not scrap the Lords because the status quo is such a plush cushion for Labour peers.
There’s one semi-serious objection to replacing the Lords with elected representatives. The case goes that a more legitimate upper house would be a more assertive one and this could lead to gridlock when it clashed with the Commons. That’s not an argument against change, it is an argument for a careful delineation of the respective powers and responsibilities of the chambers. Many countries have two elected houses – Australia, France and Germany are among them – without it resulting in paralysed government.
And they don’t suffer the embarrassment faced by anyone British when asked to explain our absurdly archaic and disturbingly decadent way of awarding seats in our parliament.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
