The cellars beneath the House of Commons have been searched according to custom for any lurking Guy Fawkes, and Parliament is back at work. The House of Lords kicked off with a debate on its own reform. For forty years successive Governments have talked about reforming the Lords and for forty years the issue has been shirked: the only “reform” which has taken place has been a steady erosion of the powers of the Upper House by socialistic legislation until the only power which the Lords have left is a short suspensory veto and that not applicable to finance bills.
The Labor Party would like to see the Lords stripped of even this brief authority, if not abolished altogether. The paradoxical result is that proposals for Lords reform have been largely blocked by the Socialists for fear that the Upper House might be strengthened. Because of this curious deadlock, the Government is even now making only the most tentative proposals: that women should be allowed to sit in the Lords and that there should be life peerages. Lord Salisbury’s much more comprehensive plan to reduce the number of Peers entitled to sit and thus to strengthen the deliberations of the House by confining them to its best members has been ignored.
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