WHAT IS TORYISM FOR? c ences reliably had motions deploring the “unbalanced” constitution. Even two decades after the 1911 Parliament Act the complaint was still this: what matters about the House of Lords is not its composition but its powers.

This urge to do something about an act specifically intended to be a temporary expedient reflected a concern now completely absent in modern Toryism. Put simply: where once the constitution was the central purpose of Toryism — defending it, maintaining it, justifying it — this tradition is now effectively dead. Tories, as now constituted, just don’t care.

much sustained harm to the Union. He brooked no argument. And he made none for why the hereditaries had to go. They were intolerable.

Instead, Brown’s commission made the following set of assertions. What we apparently need is a “smaller, more representative, and thus more legitimate and trusted second chamber … capable of ensuring that power cannot be clawed back to the

“Reform” of the House of Lords is the perfect illustration of contemporary Conservative indifference to the constitution. The new Labour government intends to sweep away the remaining hereditary peers. We could laugh at this and do so from the Right.

The idea that anyone should be dying in the ditch to defend Robert Cranborne’s too-cute-by-half deal with Tony Blair in 1999 whereby some hereditary peers were saved as legislators for, it turns out, a quarter of century, is surely risible.

But this takes cynicism too far : a fighting retreat is a fighting chance. Or it is if you want to later do something with that chance when you finally get it. The tragedy for such Tory constitutionalists as remain is that we now know what the Tories did with their “chance” between 2010 and 2024: nothing. No effort — none — was made to defend any sense of a Tory constitutional order because there was and is no such sense of one.

’ and dishonest. Their manifesto commitment to get rid of the remaining hereditary peers tracks back to A New Britain, the fruit of a party commission in opposition chaired by the ineffable Gordon Brown (who feels to this day no more need for a peerage, or the disclosure rules that go with it, than does Sir Tony Blair).

Brown, (unlike Blair) is a long-term, and sincere advocate of the disastrous devolution settlement which has done so centre by future governments”.

Such obvious political fraud has the professional merit of being so comprehensive that to attack it anywhere is to lose the will to attack everywhere. Yet every last goal, ambition and claim it makes is equally untrue.

For a start : the hereditaries must go now, before the upper chamber is more widely reformed. But how and when will that vague promise of reform take place? It will not be in this parliament.

, unsupported claim that the size of the upper chamber makes any difference whatsoever to its functions. There is also the idea that a maybe elected, maybe not, maybe partially elected, maybe partially appointed chamber (but one certainly deferential, somehow, to the Commons’ own mandate) will be “more representative”.

Either an elected chamber will be representative or it won’t be. Labour’s claim that the vitally necessary new chamber — although not vital enough to bring to life before the next general election — will be elected on a “different cycle”, with the implication being that this democratic “legitimacy” will be subordinate to that of the Commons is absurd.

It is entirely feasible to have a bicameral system with two elected houses: many seemingly functional countries do. But the reason one chamber remains politically

Speaker of the House of Lords John McFall speaks with the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby at a service for the new Parliament in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster Abbey; July 2024

What is Toryism if it ’s not intrinsica lly pro-system? What has it done if it has not made a system it wishes to defend?

inferior to the other is because of its powers (and therefore its purpose inside the constitutional order) — the very nature of which Labour won’t address.

Vague rhetoric about an “Assembly of the Nations and Regions” for an upper house is an eyeroll emoji potentially expanded to a satiric novel-length document which Labour might in due course claim as a constitution.

’ rationale for attacking the House of Lords is that their new chamber, whenever it may one day come, will “[ensure] that power cannot be clawed back to the centre by future governments”. This is fascinating verbiage. For its authors therefore believe

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THE CRITIC 2 OCT 2024