Labour wants to take power away from the people

Even its plans to abolish the House of Lords would make Britain less democratic.

World Economic Forum from Cologny, Switzerland, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The Labour Party’s annual conference kicked off in Liverpool this weekend. For the first time in years, delegates can enjoy being ahead in opinion polls. Some are now predicting Labour could win a sizeable majority at the next General Election.

But despite this we are unlikely to see many big policy announcements unveiled this week. Under Keir Starmer’s leadership, Labour’s driving principle is caution. To criticise Starmer for being boring is to miss the point: boring is now Labour’s chief selling point. The message to voters is ‘back Labour if you want to see ideology dumped for technocracy and politicians ditched for professionals’. So it is surprising to discover a leaked Labour policy report appearing to suggest something genuinely radical – namely, abolishing the House of Lords.

The constitutional review, undertaken by former Labour leader Gordon Brown, recommends abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an upper house of ‘nations and regions’. When Starmer launched the review last September, he promised it would be ‘the boldest project Labour has embarked on for a generation and every bit as bold and radical as the programme of devolution that Labour delivered in the 1990s and 2000s’. The Guardian has described it as ‘radical and far-reaching’.