Such has been the recent turnover of MPs, that there has been a loss of corporate memory. Yesterday (15th Oct) we debated the second reading of very short five clause Government bill to remove the ninety-two remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords.
They had remained there on the basis of an agreement that was made by the previous Labour government to secure the passage of the 1999 Act which removed six hundred and sixty-six hereditary peers. The then Lord Chancellor, Lord Derry Irvine of Lairg , gave a solemn and binding undertaking that ninety-two would remain (having been elected to do so by the whole hereditary peerage) until a comprehensive measure to reform the whole of the House of Lords membership had been accomplished. The current bill, therefore, is in clear breach of that solemn and binding undertaking.
Throughout the debate, the principal argument advanced by Labour was that there had been fourteen wasted years in which there had been no attempt at a comprehensive Lord’s reform, and consequently, the current government is somehow absolved of its obligation to abide by its Labour predecessor’s undertaking.
They seem to have forgotten that the previous Labour government had a further eleven years of power after the passing of 1999 Act, in which it could have itself enacted the awaited comprehensive reform.
Nevertheless, their charge about the last fourteen years of alleged inaction is entirely mistaken.
The problem that has bedevilled Lord’s Reform for over a century is that, notwithstanding an appetite for reform, there has been little agreement on what it should actually be.
In 2011 the Conservative-led coalition went to considerable trouble, involving series of iterative votes to try and identify a consensus for reform around which the Commons could unite. On that basis it then introduced a bill that passed at second reading, and which, had it proceeded, would have put democratically elected peers into the Lords.
That bill failed, not because it was opposed by a minority, which included me, and who thought that it was dreadful. Rather, it failed because, in an act of party-political cynicism, Labour – having voted for it- then subsequently withdrew support for its accompanying and very generous timetable motion. This would have scuppered the whole legislative programme, so there was no alternative but to drop the measure in entirety.
Labour ministers were not lying when they insisted that they were absolved of the Lord Chancellor’s binding promise because of ‘fourteen wasted years’. Instead, they were just plain ignorant of their own complicity.