18-02-2025
Inside the war over hereditary peers about to tear apart the House of Lords
Sir Tony Blair's message to the hereditary peers in the House of Lords was meant to be 'thank you and goodbye'. But it didn't quite go to plan.
His Labour government was forced into a compromise after months of backroom plotting, and 92 peers, around 10 per cent of their number, were allowed to keep their seats.
Fast forward 25 years and Sir Keir Starmer is hoping to succeed where his predecessor failed, by ejecting all those remaining from the upper chamber with a new Lords reform Bill.
But he faces a guerrilla war from the remaining hereditary peers and their allies who have claimed the legislation is tantamount to a 'purge' that would give the Prime Minister unprecedented powers.
Lord Strathclyde, one of the remaining hereditary peers and a key player in the talks between the Tories and Labour in the late 1990s, will not go down without a fight.
'There's no need to go to war on it, but I think we will,' the former minister under Margaret Thatcher declared in the House of Lords tearoom.
Lord Strathclyde and his band of brothers have pointed out that Labour, and Angela Rayner in particular, has been keen to champion its workers' rights bill.
But as Lord Mancroft, a fellow Conservative hereditary peer, says: 'Under her Bill nobody in any workplace in Britain would be allowed to be treated the way that Labour is treating us.'
And so the fightback has begun.
Series of amendments
A total of 91 amendments and counting have been tabled to the Hereditary Peers Bill that will be debated by the Lords next month, despite the text being just five pages long.
The amendments cover everything from introducing participation requirements for peers to an enforced retirement age.
One amendment, laid by the Earl of Devon, a hereditary crossbencher, demands a consultation on whether the name 'House of Lords' will be appropriate after reform.
Hereditary peers claim that they know their time is up, and they simply argue against their instant removal, with a lack of clarity about broader reform of the House.
Critics say the flood of amendments is simply an attempt to delay the legislation and force the Government to give ground, a British equivalent to filibustering.
Many amendments are unlikely to get through, but some about wider reform do have broad support. It was an amendment to the 1999 bill, by crossbench peer Lord Weatherill, that led to the remaining 92 hereditary peers keeping their seats.
If any amendment were to pass, the Bill would return to the Commons only for MPs to likely overturn any changes and send it back to the Lords once more, triggering parliamentary 'ping pong'.
It has also been suggested that a series of recent 'unnecessarily' long interventions on other Government bills has come about as an attempt to delay the Lords reform legislation, further frustrating Sir Keir's efforts.
Last week peers sat until one o'clock in the morning debating amendments to the GB Energy Bill.
The hereditary peers are, however, not without worthy opponents. Lady Hayter, a Labour life peer and former shadow deputy leader of the Lords, accused opponents of 'playing silly games' with the legislation.
In her view, they are 'obviously going to try and spin out the committee and the report stage' to play for time.
'They are trying to make us feel, 'Oh, God, this isn't worth the candle'. Well, that's not going to happen. There is no reason, no legitimate reason, for these people to be there.'
She believes that Tory peers are 'really messing up the way the House of Lords works' with their various interventions and cited an instance when the Opposition voted to adjourn House of Lords proceedings, breaking a long-held protocol that she said she had not seen in 15 years.
It is normally the government whip who moves the adjournment, in prior agreement with the other whips.
An unexpected adjournment disrupts the timetable for business in the House and throws plans to get through other key legislation out of kilter.
The number of hereditary peers who sided with the Opposition 'far outnumbered' those who backed the Government, meaning that, according to Lady Hayter, their might was used to defeat the Government.
Tory sources in the Lords described the claims of filibustering as 'nonsense', insisting that peers had merely been fulfilling their roles as scrutineers.
Hereditary peers, of which 45 are Tories compared with just four on the Labour benches and four Liberal Democrats, feel aggrieved that even those who regularly participate in the legislature will be ejected because they are there as a result of heredity.
Among peers facing the axe are those who have helped to secure changes to legislation to crack down on water companies, such as Lord Cromwell and Lord Roborough, and Viscount Camrose, who worked on outlawing deepfake pornography. Meanwhile, life peers who do not contribute will be used to force their hereditary colleagues out.
Lord Mancroft said: 'There are about 120 peers who don't turn up at all, really. So what they're going to do is they're going to use the votes of the 120 who don't turn up to boot out the 80-odd who do turn up.'
'Classroom rivalry between two eternal children'
There is some unease too among crossbenchers, over 30 of whom face the axe, including Lord Kinnoull, their most senior member.
A crossbench source said: 'There's always a classroom rivalry between those two eternal children, the Labour Party, with the Conservative Party.
'But there are other hereditaries who are not part of that, who are blowback injured by all of this.'
They added: 'I don't think there's anyone who feels that absolutely every hereditary should be just booted out.'
To many, it feels personal. Lord Strathclyde spoke of how they would see colleagues passing through the voting lobbies to get rid of them.
'I've lost count of the number of Labour backbenchers who have whispered to me that they don't support this either,' he claimed.
Lord Mancroft added: 'We all know each other very well. We sit in the bar together. We discuss our private lives together. We talk about the weather, whatever else.
'They're our colleagues, they're people we share offices with, and suddenly they're going to be asked to turn on us and boot us out.'
Constitutional concerns
Beyond the personal, there are constitutional concerns about Sir Keir's reforms.
If the hereditary seats – which under the 1999 law are put to a by-election among those eligible should a seat holder retire or die – are scrapped, that cuts down the routes by which people can reach the House of Lords.
Other than the bishops and crossbench appointments made twice a year, the prime minister would be the only person able to regularly choose whom to appoint to the Lords.
Lord Mancroft said: 'We'll have a second chamber which will be wholly appointed by the prime minister, who already has a majority in the first chamber. And that makes for a completely unbalanced constitution.
'The two most powerful chief executives in the world, the American president and the French president, don't have those powers, but we're giving it to Keir Starmer.'
Lord Strathclyde accepts it is time for the system of hereditary peerages to come to an end, but is hoping to reach a compromise where the current Lords can be made life peers and stay until they retire.
But he said he felt Baroness Smith of Basildon, the Labour Lords leader, was 'a brick wall' when it came to cross-party discussions.
The simmering discontent from all sides of the House of Lords will likely erupt in just a few weeks when the legislation is finally discussed. But the hereditary peers are refusing to become turkeys who vote for Christmas without a fight.
