Keir Starmer urged not to pack House of Lords with cronies
Labour has far fewer Lords than the Tories but campaigners want an elected chamber
Stuff the House of Lords with Labour cronies would send a “terrible signal to the public”, Sir Keir Starmer has been warned.
The Labour leader has been urged to resist the temptation to pack the Lords with supportive peers if Labour wins the next election.
Labour has far fewer peers than the Tories and is only the third largest grouping in the Upper Chamber. Campaigners have called on him to scrap the Lords as it exists today and replace it with an elected body.
Sir Keir pledged during the Labour leadership contest to “abolish the House of Lords” and “replace it with an elected chamber of regions and nations”. And in 2022 he reportedly told peers he wanted to strip politicians of their power to appoint Lords.
But a Labour Government can expect stiff opposition to its policies in a Lords where there are 275 Tories, 179 cross-benchers and just 172 Labour peers. Sir Keir may well come under pressure to redress the balance.
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A Labour insider said: “We have had so many Tory prime ministerial resignation lists that Labour is now only the third largest group in the House of Lords. For Keir Starmer to achieve his reforms he is going to have to put the numbers on equal footing in the Lords.”
They said only when he has done this will he have sufficient support in the Lords to remove the 92 hereditary peers.
During Tony Blair’s decade in power, 162 Labour peers were appointed. David Cameron created 110 Tory peers between 2010 and 2016.
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Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, urged Sir Keir to introduce radical reform.
He said: “Labour’s pledge in 2022 to abolish the unelected House of Lords and replace it with an elected chamber was a much-needed and long-overdue proposed reform. The current Lords is already embarrassingly bloated with around 800 members, making it the second largest legislative chamber in the world after China’s National People’s Congress.
“The scandals surrounding peerages in recent years have also done little the help public trust in politics. It would send a terrible signal to the public if it were to be stuffed with yet more peers after the election unless it was as a prelude to serious democratic reform of the upper chamber.
“The best way to clean up our politics and restore trust is by replacing the Lords with a smaller elected chamber where the people of this country, not prime ministers, decide who shapes the laws we all live under.”
