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The Economist

23 Apr 2024

Blighty newsletter: The paradox of the House of Lords

https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/04/23/blighty-newsletter-the-paradox-of-the-house-of-lords

Britain | Newsletter

Blighty newsletter: The paradox of the House of Lords

Apr 23rd 2024

This is the introduction to Blighty, a weekly, subscriber-only newsletter in which our correspondents turn their gaze on the latest developments in Britain.

Sign up for Blighty.

Matthew Holehouse, our British political correspondent, explains why Britain’s weak upper house suits the executive

Last night the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill completed its final stages through Parliament. The legislation is intended to close off most legal challenges to the government’s scheme to deport asylum-seekers to Kigali. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, hopes that the first flights will get away within 10-12 weeks—and elevate his dire poll ratings with it.

Set aside the wider politics of the scheme and the nature of the Rwandan regime, and focus for a moment on the House of Lords. Many had expected the Lords to pick the scheme to pieces. The Conservatives do not have a majority in Britain’s upper chamber. Many of the former diplomats and judges who sit there found a law declaring Rwanda a “safe” country—directly contrary to the finding of the Supreme Court last year—to be both legally absurd and a sinister form of executive overreach.

Lord Carlile, a cross-bencher (ie, an independent peer) and leading barrister, declared it to be “the worst Bill I have seen in my 38 years” in Parliament. Lord Anderson, another cross-bench peer, said it created a “legal fiction that makes the law look like an ass and those who make it asses”. Many Tory peers agree.

Yet the bill passed all the same, after “ping-ponging” between the Commons and Lords five times before peers accepted that the Commons could get its way. Conceding defeat, Lord Anderson said that governments usually sought to compromise with the Lords in these stages but that Mr Sunak’s had “refused pointedly”. It was time to “acknowledge the primacy of the elected House and to withdraw from the fray”.

The episode underscores why, despite occasionally tinkering with the Lords, governments have consistently held back from replacing it with an elected chamber: its weakness is useful. Even handling a bill that its members find odious, and facing a prime minister with historically poor ratings, the Lords ended up deferring to the Commons. On April 22nd, before the debate, Mr Sunak had called a press conference in Downing Street to theatrically rail against Labour peers, much as Theresa May did during the Brexit years. Thus the least justifiable bit of the British constitution ends up being the most enduring.

Labour has talked about reform for years but it hasn’t fully answered what relationship a more democratically legitimate upper house would have with the Commons, or what that would mean for the party’s agenda for government. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, appears to be cooling on plans for an elected chamber in his first term, to focus on the economy instead.

That reasoning would be familiar to Harold Wilson, Labour’s prime minister in 1964-70 and 1974-76. In his address to the party conference in 1965, he explained to his comrades why he had been too busy to reform their Lordships:

“Frankly, we have been more concerned with the citadels of effective power than with its external embellishments…This may be disenchanting, but we are more interested in the monthly trade returns than in Debrett*, more preoccupied with reading what is said by the industrial correspondents and economic editors than what is said by William Hickey…much more with the action that will need to follow the Report of the Estimates Committee on the Recruitment, Training and Structure of the Civil Service than in altering the layout of Burke’s Landed Gentry.”

The passage of the Rwanda law was a reminder both of how flimsy those “external embellishments” can be, and how convenient that is for the government of the day.