Every so often in British politics, we stumble into a moment where the nation collectively looks around and mutters, “Good grief, how did we get here?”
Well, welcome to 2025, where a Labour government with a Commons majority inflated by vote splitting now believes it has been handed the divine right of kings.
Let’s be honest. Labour’s win wasn’t a sweeping ideological revolution. It wasn’t a thundering endorsement of left wing policymaking. It was simple arithmetic.
Tory voters went one way, Reform voters another, and Labour slid through the middle like someone shuffling sideways through a closing lift door. Add up the centre right vote and you end up with a country that did NOT vote for wholesale Labour dominance. Yet here we are, saddled with a Commons where the government behaves as though every idea it floats is a mandate delivered on stone tablets from the mountaintop.
Which is precisely why the House of Lords has never been more essential.
While the Commons races ahead like a government EV stuck on ludicrous mode, the Lords remains the one chamber still willing, and constitutionally empowered, to apply the brakes. And thank heavens for that. The frantic legislative conveyor belt emerging from this government has already produced various standout examples of why we need those brakes in working order.
Examples include the Assisted Dying Bill, an enormously serious issue, one that demands slow, careful, sober deliberation. Instead, the government has allowed it to be bundled along like an Amazon parcel in the wrong warehouse. It wasn’t in their manifesto, it wasn’t put to the public, and it wasn’t drafted with the precision such a profound change requires. If ever there were a moment for the Lords to step forward and say, “Hold on a minute,” this is it.
Also, the Chagos deal, a proposal so breathtaking in its scale and financial implications that one could reasonably ask whether anyone in the Treasury still owns a calculator (or whether they’re actually working for China). A potential multi BILLION pound commitment, not in the manifesto, not debated properly, and not acknowledged to the public until it was already halfway down the legislative slipway. Yet another reason we rely on the Lords to demand scrutiny when the Commons shrugs it off.
And here’s the delicious irony, many of the loudest voices now complaining about the Lords daring to intervene are the same people who once cheered every time peers tripped up Brexit legislation. Back then, the Lords were noble protectors of constitutional integrity. Today, the same people treat them as medieval villains for daring to insist on oversight. We see you Labour MPs, certain Labour Peers and left-wing journalists. It seems the principle was never really about constitutional purity, just political convenience.
But institutions don’t exist to rubber stamp the passions of the moment. They exist to withstand them.
Right now the Commons is a monolithic voting machine, capable of passing complex and consequential laws at a speed that should make anyone with democratic instincts uneasy. That is precisely why the House of Lords exists, to scrutinise, to resist, to insist on standards when the political mood of the day sweeps them aside.
For all its quirks, the Lords provides the balancing counterweight our system desperately needs at this moment in history. It is the last great bulwark preventing a government, elected on a minority share of the popular vote, from bulldozing through laws that were never submitted to the electorate.
So yes, thank goodness for the Lords. Thank goodness for a chamber that reads the small print. Thank goodness for a body that asks the questions the Commons doesn’t have time, or inclination, to ask.
In an era when parliamentary checks and balances are being tested like never before, the House of Lords may be the only thing standing between Britain and its own legislative autopilot.
And right now, that’s a very good thing indeed. So Thank you, M’Lords, for reminding this government that democracy comes with brakes, not just an accelerator.
By Claire Bullivant
