The House of Lords and radical change are not words that often appear in the same sentence, least of all on May Day. Yet the Life Peerages Act 1958, which became law 60 years ago this week, was arguably the most radical change in the British parliamentary system of the postwar era. Until it came into force, the House of Lords was an overwhelmingly hereditary body. Sixty years later, the Lords has in one sense been utterly transformed. Today there are 784 members of the Lords, of whom nearly 670 are the beneficiaries of the 1958 act.
The 1958 bill was strongly opposed by Labour. Its then leader, Hugh Gaitskell, objected to the legislation on the grounds that life peerages might enhance the prestige of the then predominantly hereditary upper house. As things have turned out, Gaitskell was largely right. Life peerages have saved the House of Lords, though not in the way Gaitskell perhaps expected. Since 1999, the number of hereditaries has been frozen at 92, and there are 26 Anglican bishops. More significantly, 60 years on, Lords reform has ground to an absolute halt.
It is hardly surprising that the current House of Lords is seeking to accentuate the positive, stressing that this is also the 60th anniversary of women winning the right to sit in the House of Lords at all. Until 1958, no woman could do so. But the Life Peerages Act applied to women, and in that year the sociologist Barbara Wootton became the first appointee to break the ban. Today she has 204 successors. It was not until 1963 that female hereditary peers – who continued to be excluded after 1958 – were able to join the female life peers. As progressive reforms go, though, this is hardly a breakthrough on a par with women winning the right to vote or to stand as MPs.
It remains a ludicrous anachronism for any democracy that its upper house is wholly unelected. It is an open question whether it is any better that the Lords is now almost wholly appointed rather than wholly hereditary. In some ways it is worse and more corrupt. The appointment system is too often a way of rewarding political time servers and donors. It gives prime ministers a huge power of patronage. Peerages for former MPs who lose their seats in an election are particularly unsavoury.
Since 1999 there has been intermittent talk of more reform. In the event, nothing significant has changed in nearly 20 years, except that the number of peers has escalated. Britain now has 1,434 parliamentarians, the most in our modern history, and this at a time when significant powers have been devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Attempts to democratise the upper house in 2007 and 2012 were both frustrated. Since then, there has been silence. If she had more authority, Theresa May would doubtless like to pack the Lords with even more pro-Brexit Conservatives, in order to stem the defeats that her government has been suffering there. But the truth is that nothing but a wholesale democratic reform of the upper house on a federal basis will suffice now.