Labour’s crackdown on hereditary privilege is hard to stomach

Do our new Labour rulers ever pause to think about how something they say or do might look to others? Do they consider, even for a nanosecond, how their behaviour in office or in private stacks up with the public positions they take, or how all this might look to ordinary voters outside the confines of Westminster? The whiff of brazen political hypocrisy – one rule for us and another for everyone else – hangs like a cloud over the new government. It goes some way towards explaining why this summer’s donor scandals, involving free clothes, spectacles and tickets to Taylor Swift concerts, have resonated so strongly with the public.

Yet even now the government appears incapable of learning lessons. Ministers continue to give the impression that they simply don’t get it. The latest example of this tone-deaf failure to read the public mood came during the second Commons reading of the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill, aimed at kicking out the 92 peers who inherited their seat.