The House of Lords can’t be reformed because Lords are the Problem

As the UK Government will fail to adequately reform the House of Lords because the Lords themselves are the problem. We should have a House of Citizens instead.

Image Source: UK Parliament

This week a new crop of Lords appeared at the top of our legislative food chain. They include John Redwood, one of the architects of Brexit even though the Brexit we got wasn’t nearly as damaging and self-isolating as the one he wanted (however much it has actually been).

Keir Starmer’s increasingly shaky UK Government came to power promising sweeping reform of the Lords but instead of removing the affront to democracy entirely appears to be focusing instead on merely removing the remaining hereditary peers – finishing the job that Tony Blair started over a quarter of a century ago but falling far short of the promises of total abolishment made by Starmer’s namesake Keir Hardie in the 19th century.

Ironically (or, perhaps, with this effect in mind) replacing the hereditary peers with peers appointed by the political parties would, if anything, put the Lords under the thrall of the parties to an even greater degree than they are now and would only increase the tendency to use the Lords as a permanent reward for party loyalists or as a dumping ground for those hit by scandal but too powerful to push out of the way (especially if they have an eye on becoming Ambassador to the United States).

The Upper House provides a vital function of scrutiny but in its current form, it is very difficult to do that job when the House itself is controlled by the people it is trying to scrutinise and there are rules in place to actively prevent that scrutiny from happening.

Though it should be said that at least one of those rules may soon become a problem for the Government more than the Lords.

This is the rule that states that the Lords are not allowed to block legislation – however incompetent or malicious – if that legislation was part of a manifesto promise at the last election. This rule is in place to try to ensure that the ‘will of the people’ as expressed in that election cannot be blocked by the unelected. On the whole, it’s a decent democratic safeguard but, as said, it can also lead to bad legislation based on data-free, ideology-driven policies being pushed through regardless of their impact.

It sometimes cuts the other way though. Should a party leader – like Starmer – ditch their manifesto promises, then the Lords can start to block things. Should a new party leader – like Starmer’s possibly upcoming successor – decide that the only way to save the party is to radically change policies, but they also don’t want to hold an election to cement their position, then the Lords can start to block things. This was one of the problems that faced the last few years of the previous Conservative Government where both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were both still technically operating under the shadow of Boris Johnson’s 2019 election promises.

While the Upper House is a vital safeguard, it can only be so if it is both democratic and not beholden to the political parties of the Lower House. This is why simply replacing the Lords with elected Senators, for example, is likely to work in the UK about as well as it does in the USA where political partisanship essentially either prevents any legislation from passing or enables all of it to pass with less than a rubber stamp.

For this reason, Common Weal supports another way. ‘Democracy’ needn’t mean ‘representative democracy’ but could take a broader view on what it means to govern by the ‘will of the people’.

For several years now, we’ve championed the idea that the Scottish Government (which has the even more acute problem of not having an Upper House at all and therefore must scrutinise legislation via small committees controlled by the political parties) should set up an oversight body built on the idea of the Citizens’ Assembly.

In our model, a number of residents of Scotland (they needn’t be actual citizens – Scotland has a much more civilised view that any adult legal resident in Scotland should have the right to take part in our politics regardless of the colour of their passport) are randomly selected, similar to the process for jury duty, and then a chamber is formed that is balanced according to the demographics of the country to form an assembly that is representative of the nation. This Assembly is then given powers similar to that of the House of Lords where they scrutinise legislation and pass amendments back down to the Parliament. They may also have powers to trigger or enact public inquiries or to call politicians and other stakeholders to given evidence on legislation or on their behaviour. Assembly members would serve for perhaps a year or two (paid at least as well as MSPs are and given jury duty style protections against losing their job while they serve) and the Assembly would rotate out a portion of its members every few months to ensure a balance between earned experience and not getting too embedded within the role.

There’s no reason why the UK couldn’t do something similar. The House of Commons was supposed, initially, to be the balancing act of the common people against the Lords but it has long since merged into the same kind of elite that they were supposed push back against. The House of Commons needs checks and balances. The House of Lords cannot be reformed into shape to do it. Perhaps now is the time for a House of Citizens instead.