Peer pressure

The Prime Minister had to appoint a raft of new peers after the election to ensure that the coalition’s legislation had a chance of being treated rationally.

If he had not done so, there was every prospect of those Labour appointees – including ex-Ministers like John Prescott who were elevated to the Lords in Gordon Brown’s resignation honours list – using their party’s majority in the Upper House for partisan reasons.

As such, the current concerns are a legacy of Tony Blair failing to fulfil his 1997 pre-election pledge to reform the Lords when his landslide victory – and subsequent Tory disarray – gave him a golden opportunity to prove his worth as a reforming Prime Minister.

Mr Blair’s cowardice, at a time when his party was united on political reform, makes it even more difficult for Mr Cameron to satisfy the competing wishes of his party, and those of the Liberal Democrats, over whether a new-look Lords should be fully-elected or not. These tensions are likely to be exacerbated by the May 5 referendum result on electoral reform.

However, the critique, House Full, makes it even more important that the coalition confronts this issue promptly and decisively as Parliament looks to regain the public’s trust following a series of corrosive scandals, including the misuse of expenses by several peers.

As well as giving greater legitimacy to those occasions when the Lords chooses to oppose any contentious laws put forward by the government of the day, it will also prevent Prime Ministers appointing peers in return for political favours – or party funding. They are compelling reasons why the coalition should acknowledge this peer pressure and bring about the “new politics” that it promised a year ago.