House of Lords Reform? Not on Keir's Watch

 A while back, I said I'd put writing about politics on the back burner. This is still my intention  but Keir has pressed my buttons on this issue. One that I feel very strongly about and one I really though he would deliver on. Silly me. Time to express my frustrations.

Starmer’s U-turns - or betrayals to some of us - are coming thick and fast. It wasn’t too long ago that he was promising draconian measures for the House of Lords. In 2022 he vowed to abolish it and replace it with a fully elected upper chamber. Yet the Labour manifesto for this year’s general election contained only a promise to get rid of the remaining hereditary peers in parliament, impose a mandatory retirement age of 80 for life peers and hold a wider consultation on the future of the chamber. Only the first of these measures has made it into Labour’s legislative program for its first year in office. Everything else has been kicked into the long grass. Hands up everybody who is surprised by this. Pretty predictably, I see no hands in the air.

This is all very reminiscent of Tony Blair’s promise to abolish the Lords when he won his landslide victory in 1997. The pledge kept being watered down until what we ended up with was the removal of voting rights from most – but not all – hereditary peers and the transformation of the Lords into the unelected Palace of Patronage we have today. Blair and successive governments have continued to stuff the Lords with cronies, donors, and failed politicians who have been turfed out of office by the electorate. In any other country this would be denounced as corruption. In the UK it’s an integral part of the system of government.

Starmer gives every indication of following in this line of corrupt and self-interested British Prime Ministers who have had no intention of abolishing the Lords for two main reasons. Firstly, and most obviously, because the existence of the Lords gives the Prime Minister immense powers of patronage. The potential of a peerage is a useful means of encouraging wealthy donors to give money to the party and an even more useful bauble to dangle in front of party colleagues who might have issues in supporting a particular policy that the Prime Minister seeks to get through.

Secondly, as a chamber bereft of democratic legitimacy whose members owe their position entirely to the Prime Minister’s grace and favour, the Lords provides merely a token brake on the exercise of unfettered power by the Prime Minister. An elected upper chamber would possess democratic legitimacy independent of the Prime Minister and as such could act as a real check on the Prime Minister’s power. Starmer is not about to surrender an iota of the near absolute power he has spent the last few years scheming to get.

We can tell as much as Starmer’s first step is to – in his words – “rebalance” the Lords by stuffing yet more compliant Labour party hacks into an already bloated chamber. With his massive Commons majority, he could have forced through an act to reduce the number of life peers and bring their party affiliation more into balance with the voting habits of the electorate. But instead he’s chosen to pump even more hot air into an already over inflated balloon. He’s balancing an undemocratic pile of ordure by dumping more undemocratic crap on the side that favours him.

Thirty new Labour peers have been appointed to go and get their noses into the trough. One of these is the political reject, Thangam Debbonaire, who had been the Labour MP for Bristol West until the recent election when the voters of her constituency ditched her in favour of Carla Denyer of the Greens. Debbonaire has accepted the peerage despite previously denouncing the awarding of peerages to political cronies. The Greens had warned that Debbonaire would be given a seat in the Lords if she lost the election in her constituency, something she had angrily denied. Talking of political rejects, there are peerages for Sue Gray and Therese Coffey. Hardly political titans, either of them. Take a look at the justifications given in the official 'announcements' and you'll see that most, if not all, peerages are given to party hacks and acolytes. A reward for what has been rather than for what is to come for the country. 

Moving on to something else, it was reported over the weekend that Starmer and Labour ministers are resisting calls to block Elon Musk from donating millions to Nigel Farage and Reform UK. The Observer reports: “There are concerns at the heart of the government that a hurried attempt to introduce rules targeting a Musk donation could backfire and hand Farage the chance to claim that Reform UK was being sabotaged by the establishment.” 

And if you believe that you probably also believe that Thangam Debbonaire was shocked and amazed when Starmer offered her a peerage. I don’t believe for a single second that Starmer doesn’t want to ban Musk from donating millions to Reform because he’s afraid it might backfire. It has everything to do with Starmer not wanting scrutiny of the sources of Labour’s own donations, and overhaul of a system that permits Starmer and his allies to rake in the cash from private healthcare companies or property developers. Party before country as always. But let’s suppose it were true, this very Westminster type of complacency is infuriating, lazy, and reminiscent of the useless Remain campaign in 2016. You’d think by now people would have learned that the lying, fear-mongering and manipulative far right doesn’t play by the same ethical rules as democrats, has no sense of honourable conduct and sees fair play as weakness. Due to his complacency, Starmer is sleep walking us all into a buy out of democracy by the fascist enabling Elon Musk, and that is perhaps his greatest betrayal of all. A pox on all of their houses.