More than 150 years ago, the constitutional writer Walter Bagehot suggested that “the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it”. Hand-wringing over the Lords has been a national pastime, long pre dating any recent controversies. For more than a century, complained the Liberal politician Joseph Chamberlain in 1884, the peers had “protected every abuse and sheltered every privilege”, while David Lloyd George enquired in 1909 why “500 men… chosen accidentally from among the unemployed” should “over-ride… the deliberate judgement of millions of people”. The historian AF Pollard thought it “a patchwork of legal fictions, inconsistent rights, illogical decisions and palpable uncertainties”. Logic, he noted, was rarely “an important ingredient in political institutions”, but the Lords was a particular triumph of irrationality.
The House of Lords as it exists today is not a timeless relic of antiquity, but a Frankenstein’s monster of shreds and body parts, assembled piecemeal over a century of constitutional tinkering. Liberal, Labour and Conservative governments have all sailed into the Bermuda Triangle of Lords reform, though few have completed the voyage. If we are to return to those waters today, we will need a clearer sense of our intended destination, and of the compass by which that journey should be guided.
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