Tom Baldwin, Socialist Party National Committee
We’ve all seen pictures of peers dozing on the red benches of the House of Lords. The unelected ‘vermin in ermine’ can claim £361 per day, plus expenses, just for turning up to parliament. The impression that many of them spend their time there sleeping off an afternoon brandy contributes to the overwhelming public desire for abolition of this feudal relic.
The Labour government has introduced a bill to remove the remaining hereditary peers from the Lords. But it has stopped short of wider reform, let alone abolition and replacement by elected representatives, which it promised before the election. So, what do Labour’s plans entail and why has there been such hesitancy to wind up an institution that appears to be hundreds of years past its sell-by date?
In 1999, Blair’s New Labour government ended most hereditary peerages. This is where seats in the Lords were passed down through generations of ‘noble’ families, along with their titles. Hundreds of these hereditary peers were removed from the Lords, cutting its size almost in half. However, promises to remove all hereditary seats were watered down. 92 were kept, mostly elected from amongst themselves with quotas for different parties, a majority being Tories.
Archaic
Only now is Labour finally ending this archaic practice altogether. The idea that Lords and Ladies should hold any political power because of a distant ancestor is widely opposed. It should be a gimme, but the legislation itself has spent several months held up in debates in the House of Lords itself!
Yet the public mood for change goes far further. A YouGov poll last year showed 59% of people favoured abolishing the House of Lords and replacing with it with an elected second chamber, with just 13% opposed. Majority support for abolition existed across voters of all major parties. Most establishment parties themselves also claim to want greater reform but, as usual, their words aren’t matched by deeds.
Way back in 1649 the Parliamentarians of Oliver Cromwell did away with the monarchy. They also abolished the House of Lords by an Act declaring it to be “useless and dangerous to the people of England.” That remains evident to many, but no government has dared to be so bold since the monarchy was restored in 1660.
The ‘Mother of Parliaments’ is not the paragon of democracy it is portrayed as. It wasn’t until the Reform Act of 1832 that the supremacy of the House of Commons over the unelected Lords was established in law. Even then the Commons was highly undemocratic, a far cry from the equal constituencies and universal male suffrage that the working-class mass movement of the Chartists fought for. The latter wasn’t given up until 1918 and the vote was only extended to all women in 1928.
In 1911 the Lords was finally stopped from being able to block legislation passed in the Commons. But, even after further tweaks to its powers, the unelected Lords can still delay and frustrate the passing of new laws.
The Lords is a historical hangover from the days of feudalism; it was originally the organ of power of the landed gentry, who have long since been supplanted as the ruling class by the capitalist big business owners. But it’s not just an anachronism or a quaint British tradition. Like many pre-existing institutions and attitudes, it has been appropriated by the capitalists to help strengthen their domination over society.
In this case, it’s as a potential restraint on the elected government. The Lords can delay legislation by up to a year and can propose many amendments to try and water down new laws.
Today’s Labour government is a naked representative of the bosses. Far from bringing forward positive reforms, it is attacking the working class, as have successive governments before it.
But, if the capitalist class was faced with a future workers’ party enacting radical reforms, the Lords would be a useful tool of the capitalist class to frustrate and disrupt its agenda.
There might be those who argue that the Lords needs to exist as a check on governments of all types. There are instances where the Lords has curbed some government excesses. For example, the last Tory government’s hugely anti-democratic Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill was returned to the Commons with numerous amendments tempering its attacks on the right to protest. This reflects the fact that different sections of the capitalist establishment have different views over how best to govern in the capitalists’ interests.
The fact that the Lords occasionally puts up more opposition than MPs is a testament to the terrible state of the parliamentary parties in Britain. It isn’t something that can be relied on and it doesn’t justify a role in law-making for people who’ve never faced any kind of election.
It could also be argued that the Lords is a means of allowing experts in some fields to be able to scrutinise laws, not just leaving it to professional politicians. These appointed ‘experts’ often come from the world of business and carry with them an agenda, even those that are nominally independent of any party.
In fact, a huge, largely untapped, reservoir of expertise exists amongst workers in any particular field. The Socialist Party argues for working-class democratic control of society, which would mean more oversight and scrutiny at all levels.
Typically, peers find their way into the Lords for reasons of political expediency rather than any expertise. Alongside the 92 hereditary peers sit 24 Church of England bishops; no other religion is represented in this way. But all the other members are appointed life peers, proposed by the Prime Minister and confirmed by the monarch.
Cronies
This system means the political makeup of the Lords is not very responsive to elections, especially in this febrile period when faith in capitalist politicians is at rock bottom and parties are without a stable basis of support. It also incentivises governments to pack the Lords with new appointees, ensuring a role for key cronies. With the wave of a hand, political allies can be handed a cushy job and a seat at the table of power.
Starmer has raised 64 people to the Lords already, creating seats two-and-half-times faster than the average rate. Tory PM David Cameron appointed a massive 120 in his first year in power, buying a little more political stability for a coalition government beginning its brutal austerity assault on the working class. There is, in fact, no limit to the number of new peers that can be added each year. As a result, the House of Lords has swollen to 827 members, making it the largest parliament or assembly in the world, outside of China.
Democratic rights such as universal suffrage were not the gift of the capitalist class, they have been hard won by workers, and socialists have always participated in those struggles. But capitalist parliamentary ‘democracy’ has and will never give a true representation of the people. The institution of parliament is set up for rule on behalf of big business, not us.
The House of Lords is one of the means by which that is maintained. The heads of the civil service can also act to help or hinder governments and ensure that the will of the capitalist class is upheld. These are mainly drawn from wealthy and big business backgrounds – specially selected by education, outlook, and conditions of life to loyally serve the capitalists.
The monarchy remains the ultimate constitutional safety valve for the ruling class in Britain. It is no harmless tourist trap, the crown retains potentially dictatorial powers. The monarch, still an inherited position, must sign bills into law and so has the power of veto over parliament’s decisions. The King appoints prime ministers and governments, and can dismiss them and dissolve parliament, regardless of elections.
Back-pocket powers
In general, these powers are kept in the back pocket for emergencies, should the capitalists feel their rule is threatened. But there are examples of their use. In 1975, the Queen’s representative in Australia dismissed the elected Labour government there. In 2019, the Tories turned to her power of ‘prorogation’ to suspend parliament to try to avoid scrutiny over Brexit.
Together, these form part of the capitalist state, the institutions that exist to protect the rule of the tiny minority of big business owners. Russian revolutionary leader Lenin wrote that “it is impossible to compel the greater part of society to work systematically for the other part of society without a permanent apparatus of coercion.” At its sharpest point this means the hard power of the police and armed forces. These all swear their allegiance to the monarch and not the elected government, as do judges.
We’re still waiting for the Employment Rights Bill that Labour has promised to become law. In the meantime though, the government, Birmingham council and the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner – all Labour – are combining to use existing anti-union laws and direct police to arrest and intimidate striking Birmingham bin workers. This is just a small taste of the state repression that the capitalists would deploy against the working class if they felt it necessary to defend their interests. There are countless examples of the capitalists, historically and internationally, discarding the velvet glove of parliamentary democracy and revealing the iron fist of dictatorship. A glove they let slip slightly when, as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn was met with veiled threats of a coup by serving senior military officers.
The officer classes are generally drawn from privileged layers, similar to senior civil servants and judges, but that is not true of the rank and file of the military. Class divisions in society are mirrored, in however a distorted form, within the institutions of the state themselves. These can be split along class lines by effective appeals from the workers’ movement to the rank and file, appealing to common interests. At the same time the working class must also organise to defend itself.
Capitalist state
The capitalist state ultimately plays the same role of defending capitalism regardless of the nature of governance – monarchy or republic, liberal or authoritarian. But that doesn’t mean that socialists are unconcerned by those differences, we stand for the greatest possible freedom for the working class to fight for its interests.
The Socialist Party calls for the immediate abolition of the House of Lords and monarchy. Other important democratic demands include votes at 16, trade union freedom and the right to protest. We also call for a new mass working class party; the structure of parliament means little if our class has no means of making its voice heard there.
However, we can sow no illusions that reforms to the state will stop it being a tool of the capitalists. None of these democratic demands are ends in themselves.
To ensure, for the first time, the rule of the vast majority of society requires revolution; the working class taking power and replacing the institutions of capitalist rule with truly democratic ones. Ones in which the working class actively participates in decision making at all levels, and where representatives are regularly elected, able to be recalled, and only get the average wage of those they represent.
Capitalists try to equate their system with democracy but the opposite is true. Most decisions governing how the country is run aren’t made in parliament at all but in in the unelected boardrooms of big businesses. Taking big business and the banks into public ownership would mean they too can be run democratically and used to meet the needs of all, not to fill the pockets of fat cat shareholders.
Labour’s Lords reforms are laughably limited. The real interests of the working class aren’t just in phasing out the feudal relics of yesteryear but in ending the capitalist exploitation of today. This brutal system which brings with it poverty, war and environmental destruction must be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Introduction to Marxism – The basic concepts (Including chapter on ‘The state and class rule’)
£5 + pp, leftbooks.co.uk
