This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

A century ago Tory party conferences reliably had motions deploring the “unbalanced” constitution. Even two decades after the 1911 Parliament Act, the complaint was still this: what matters about the House of Lords is not its composition but its powers.

This urge to do something about an act specifically intended to be a temporary expedient reflected a concern now completely absent in modern Toryism. Put simply: where once the constitution was the central purpose of Toryism — defending it, maintaining it, justifying it — this tradition is now effectively dead. Tories, as now constituted, just don’t care.

“Reform” of the House of Lords is the perfect illustration of contemporary Conservative indifference to the constitution. The new Labour government intends to sweep away the remaining hereditary peers. We could laugh at this and do so from the Right.

The idea that anyone should be dying in the ditch to defend Robert Cranborne’s too-cute-by-half deal with Tony Blair in 1999 whereby some hereditary peers were saved as legislators for, it turns out, a quarter of a century, is surely risible.

But this takes cynicism too far: a fighting retreat is a fighting chance. Or it is if you want to later do something with that chance when you finally get it. The tragedy for such Tory constitutionalists as remain is that we now know what the Tories did with their “chance” between 2010 and 2024: nothing. No effort — none — was made to defend any sense of a Tory constitutional order because there was and is no such sense of one.

Labour’s case is simply incoherent and dishonest. Its manifesto commitment to get rid of the remaining hereditary peers tracks back to A New Britain, the fruit of a party commission in opposition chaired by the ineffable Gordon Brown (who feels to this day no more need for a peerage, or the disclosure rules that go with it, than does Sir Tony Blair).

Brown (unlike Blair) is a long-term and sincere advocate of the disastrous devolution settlement, which has done so much sustained harm to the Union. He brooked no argument — and he made none for why the hereditaries had to go. They were intolerable.

Instead, Brown’s commission made the following set of assertions. What we apparently need is a “smaller, more representative, and thus more legitimate and trusted second chamber … capable of ensuring that power cannot be clawed back to the centre by future governments”.

Such obvious political fraud has the professional merit of being so comprehensive that to attack it anywhere is to lose the will to attack everywhere. Yet every last goal, ambition and claim it makes is equally untrue.

For a start: the hereditaries must go now, before the upper chamber is more widely reformed. But how and when will that vague promise of reform take place? It will not be in this parliament.

Then there is the implied and unsupported claim that the size of the upper chamber makes any difference whatsoever to its functions. There is also the idea that a maybe elected, maybe not, maybe partially elected, maybe partially appointed chamber (but one certainly deferential, somehow, to the Commons’ own mandate) will be “more representative”.

Either an elected chamber will be representative or it won’t be. Labour’s claim that the vitally necessary new chamber — although not vital enough to bring to life before the next general election — will be elected on a “different cycle”, with the implication being that this democratic “legitimacy” will be subordinate to that of the Commons, is absurd.

It is entirely feasible to have a bicameral system with two elected houses: many seemingly functional countries do. But the reason one chamber remains politically inferior to the other is because of its powers (and therefore its purpose inside the constitutional order) — the very nature of which Labour won’t address.

We would finally have what Victorian and Edwardian jurists like A.V. Dicey cried out

Vague rhetoric about an “Assembly of the Nations and Regions” for an upper house is an eyeroll emoji potentially expanded to a satiric novel-length document, which Labour might in due course claim as a constitution.

The final telling lie in Labour’s rationale for attacking the House of Lords is that its new chamber, whenever it may one day come, will “[ensure] that power cannot be clawed back to the centre by future governments”. This is fascinating verbiage. Its authors must believe that an altered House of Lords will, in some mysterious way, effect subsidiarity with British characteristics.

Some of this relates to Brown’s belief that devolution has been a sustaining triumph for the British state. Thus the “Sewell convention”, for example, would stop being such, and it would become a matter of British constitutional law that the national parliament could no longer legislate for Scotland without the (therefore superior) permission of its Westminster-established devolved parliament in Edinburgh.

In other words, we would finally have what Victorian and Edwardian jurists like A.V. Dicey cried out for during the assorted crises which accompanied the Union-wrecking effort to achieve Home Rule: constitutional protection.

There would be laws that guarded the constitution, which would be a particular role of the newly-constituted upper house to protect within this new constitutional order. Mere legislation could not sweep them away.

Except, as per Labour’s stated aims, these entrenched powers of the post-Lords upper chamber would only be exercised with the permission of the Supreme Court. Which, in the lapidary words of A New Britain, “is already well able to make such judgments”.

That is an inherently political view. The confidence its Labour authors have in it reflects terribly upon the current political habits of the Supreme Court — the result of another “reform” justified by a mimsy dislike of the way we had been doing things.

The modesty of the Law Lords was despised by faux-sophisticated progressives who wanted us to be “modern” and “like everywhere else”. This was how they made their shallow case publicly. But their real achievement was to build a constitution that reflected their constitutional assumptions without having to do anything tedious like openly debate and legislate for them.

This appalling tendency culminated in the Supreme Court arrogating the prerogative for itself during the liberal and learned frenzy over Brexit. But prorogation was not a symbolic matter. It was not window-dressing on power. It was the thing itself.

A delusional Supreme Court had been constitutionally fattened to the point where it thought this was its decision to make. However, the point is not that the Blair settlement prevailed, but that so few Tories cared. Even the few who did were insufficiently bothered to be effectual.

The overturning of the prerogative in Britain’s constitution ought to have been a psychic shock for people whose explicit political purpose had historically been to believe in it and defend it. For what is Toryism if it’s not intrinsically pro-system? What has it done if it has not achieved a system it wishes to defend and conserve, and is unashamed to seek to do so?

No one can plausibly claim that this was the reaction of the Tory party in the five years in office it had left after the Supreme Court’s Miller 2 decision was made in September 2019. No practical defensive measures were undertaken, as they so easily could have been as regards the House of Lords.

It would have been an afternoon’s work to ensure that new peers could only be introduced with the permission of the House, thus preventing any plausible threat of a swamping creation.

And that’s just tactics: as Labour shows daily, power is there to be used if you want to use it. The Tories failed to use it even for the most basic of Tory ends. And that’s because they did not really want to.

Modernised Conservatism, the ongoing project David Cameron and his friends began, was not Tory in instinct and did not achieve Tory outcomes. It remains the biggest single obstacle to Toryism defending itself.

The future belongs to those who want it. Cameron’s Conservatives did not even want their own past. Whether the Conservative Party will remain the vehicle for conservative ambitions in this country is now the question. Its leaders have too long supplied their own dismal answer.