It has been presented by the government elected in July as a short, focused piece of legislation designed to remove a glaring anachronism left by Tony Blair’s 1999 reforms, which saw the former Labour PM strike a deal to preserve some hereditary members in order to get rid of most of them.
Yet dozens of peers lined up to argue for changes to the bill, with Conservatives particularly unhappy at what they saw as a partisan measure, since most hereditary peers are Tories.
Opposition leader in the Lords Nicholas True described cheers which greeted the bill in the chamber as “hurtful” and accused Labour of creating a situation where “we will be seeing some of those who do not participate very often being whipped to vote out those who do.”
Bearing a grudge
His party colleague Thomas Galbraith, known formally as the second Baron Strathclyde, condemned the measure as “a thoroughly nasty little bill” enacted by “those who have bourn a grudge against the Lords for the last 100 years.”
Tory peer Benjamin Mancroft argued that as a hereditary he had the advantage of learning about the Lords from his father, who “taught me that all governments legislate incompetently, but Labour governments also legislate vindictively — and this bill is a classic example.”
Fellow Tory David Maclean, a.k.a Lord Blencathra (a life peer, meaning he was appointed and did not inherit his title), accused the government of committing “class war” akin to the Blair-era fox-hunting ban, motivated “not by the love of foxes but the hatred of the people who did it.”
