Sir Keir Starmer

• IT is rumoured that Sir Keir Starmer has already watered down his ambition to reform the House of Lords, at least in the short term, by creating 100 life peers.

This added to the 800 existing members plus Boris Johnson’s discredited nominees, Liz Truss’s unmerited future contribution and Rishi Sunak’s potential list!

In recent years the non-elected second chamber seems to have been doing a reasonable job of reviewing government legislation but the Tories, with their overwhelming majority in the House of Commons often brushes their considerations and amendments aside.

However, very recently, the Lords successfully amended the Public Order Bill before it was signed into law, without the HoC rejecting an amendment.

Nonetheless devious Suella Braverman, our home secretary (who when she was attorney general – the government’s law officer – supported a parliamentary bill that would have broken a recently approved international agreement) did something that has never been done before.

She reintroduced the original unamended clause as a statutory instrument (SI) which can only be approved or rejected.

Green Party baroness Jenny Jones did submit a motion to the House of Lords to reject the SI but the Labour Party (under Sir Keir Starmer’s instruction) refused to back her motion; the principled reason was that Labour doesn’t want the Lords to do likewise to its legislation, should it become the government.

This may seem a mundane matter but it isn’t. This is the way that our rights are removed.

Sir Keir (being a lawyer as well as a politician) could have argued on the principle that the government was acting in an unprincipled manner, and therefore their SI should be rejected, as proposed by Jenny Jones.

Therefore when a future government (possibly with Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister) proposes House of Lords reform we, the electorate, need to be wary and not opt unthinkingly for the seemingly democratic option of electing all members of the second chamber.

PHILIP RICHARDS, N19