Goodbye (almost) to the hereditary peers, voted out on Tuesday night. But they didn’t go without a vicious tooth-and-nail fight. Labour should be making much more noise about how the Tories blackmailed and threatened to the very last to hold on to the hereditary peerage (almost all Tories), despite 66% of voters wanting a democratically elected second chamber.
Tories in the Lords, fully backed by Kemi Badenoch, did that despite the abolition pledged in Labour’s manifesto. They trashed the Salisbury convention, which expects the Lords to nod through anything in a government’s manifesto that has been approved in an election. But never mind conventions: the good chaps who are supposed to keep the unwritten constitution on its feet are no more. Instead of upholding convention, they vandalised it.
