Keir Starmer urged not to abandon pledge to abolish House of Lords
Exclusive: Gordon Brown warns plans to flood upper
chamber with dozens of Tory peers proves urgent need for reform
Gordon Brown: Johnson is planning to fill the Lords
with cronies
Aubrey
Allegretti
@breeallegretti
Fri 29 Jul
2022 16.00 BST
Keir
Starmer has been urged not to abandon a key leadership pledge of abolishing the
House of Lords, with Gordon Brown warning that plans to “gerrymander”
parliament’s upper chamber by flooding it with dozens of Tory peers proved the
need for drastic reform.
Alarm was
raised by the former Labour prime minister over a proposal drawn up by a
political lobbying group for Boris Johnson to appoint up to 50 new
Conservatives to ram contentious legislation through given a series of
embarrassing defeats by peers.
Brown said
the leaked document he had seen from CT Group – run by Lynton Crosby, a key
adviser to Johnson – “legitimises straightforward bribery” by recommending
those who vote loyally be rewarded with special envoy positions, honours and
lunches at Chequers.
Nicknamed
“Operation Homer”, the plan also said new peers would have to give a written
undertaking to support the government in key votes on controversial
legislation, likely to include the Northern Ireland protocol bill that would
unilaterally override the Brexit deal.
Under the
cover of levelling up the Lords by picking peers from under-represented parts
of the UK, the paper admitted it was the “perfect excuse” to ensure a swathe of
loyalist law-makers are ennobled.
Writing in
the Guardian, Brown said the proposal “makes no bones about the defenestrated
prime minister’s aim to pack the House of Lords” that would see him “ride
roughshod over every convention and standard of propriety in an effort to
secure political nominees who will vote for the Tory government”.
He added
that the paper’s claim the media could be easily blindsided by the appointment
of a few controversial figures or celebrities to avoid criticism of the sheer
number of “cronies” appointed would amount to “gerrymandering”.
“The
solution is to reform the Lords, not reinforce its unrepresentativeness,” Brown
said, calling for Starmer to pick up the mantel of trying to abolish the
un-elected upper chamber in parliament.
Although
Starmer made it one of his 10 pledges during the 2020 leadership campaign, it
is one of several he is accused of backtracking on. Asked about his commitment to
“abolish the House of Lords” and “replace it with an elected chamber of regions
and nations” last November, Starmer did not repeat it but committed to “change”
instead.
Brown said
the current appointments system “calls into question the unfettered patronage
of the prime minister who alone can recommend appointments to the Queen”.
Both he and
Tony Blair declined a resignation honours list, which Brown said had
“undermined the reputation of a number of past prime ministers”.
“Johnson’s
latest attempt to manipulate the Lords’ system is the culmination of years of
constitutional vandalism,” Brown claimed, pointing out the “shameless”
appointment of Conservative party donors and eight former party treasurers.
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Although
defeated in 2008 when he tried to press ahead with Lords reform, Brown said it
was “time to flush out who really wants change and who does not”.
“The
abolition of the current House of Lords was one of the 10 commitments Keir
Starmer made when assuming the Labour party leadership,” he wrote. “Now Boris
Johnson and Lynton Crosby have handed him the strongest possible case for long
overdue reform.”
Starmer has
faced similar pressure from, Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader who has
said the Lords in its current form “has no place in 21st-century politics”.
A CT Group
spokesperson said: “The document you refer to was simply an early working copy
of a discussion paper prepared for a thinktank. It was not circulated outside a
small group of individuals and was not prepared for any audience beyond that
small group of people, to aid discussion.
“Even in
spite of this being simply a working draft of a discussion paper, it seems
incongruous that you would be against making the House of Lords more
representative of the UK people with under-representation of the north and
Wales, as you state, or that those who accept peerages do so in the full
knowledge and acceptance that they will commit fully and actively to their
democratic role, and have no conflicts which would prevent them from doing so.”
A spokesperson for both Starmer and the Conservative party were contacted for commen
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