Is Labour really going to reform the House of Lords? The party has ended up in a bit of a pickle over abolishing a chamber that it also wants to stuff with its own peers. The party’s spokesman yesterday told journalists that there was still a plan to create a Labour majority in the Lords because it was ‘essential’ for the party to be able to get its business through the Upper Chamber. The party’s leader in the Lords, Angela Smith, also told Times Radio that ‘there are 90 more Conservatives than Labour. The priority for Keir will be ensuring he gets the Labour programme through.’
It isn’t mutually exclusive for a party committed to House of Lords reform to want to start out with more peers in the Lords while that Chamber exists. What is striking, though, is how few senior Labourites, even those tasked with working on this, privately think Starmer will get anywhere close to doing what he says he wants to with the Lords.
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