Keir Starmer is treating the House of Lords with contempt

We have different approaches to tidying up, my wife and I. It bothers her very much that the house we share with three chaotic children is so untidy. Over the years unsightly, useless, out-of-date items accumulate in every room: incomplete jigsaws, dried-out paints, barely-played boardgames, broken furniture, too-small and obscurely stained clothes, collections of shells and pebbles, or that vibration-sensitive fluffy penguin which flaps its stubby wings and blares out a tinny version of ‘Rock Around the Clock’ when a spider stamps its foot anywhere within a kilometre of it.  

My fantasy, when the clutter gets intolerable, is to have a clear-out in which everything that doesn’t spark joy goes into black bin bags and thence to the dump. She cannot quite bear to do that. She feels sentimental about that pirate outfit. She knows (for she is wise) that the children will never again play with Buzz Lightyear, but that there will be hell to pay if they spot his Astro-Boots peeking out of a skip. Rather, she purges with excellent thoroughness the living areas of the house and consigns all the junk to a series of giant plastic boxes in the spare room (which doubles – being the home of useless junk – as my study). This is the oubliette approach to cleaning house, the stuff-it-in-a-cupboard, out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach.  

Sir Keir Starmer, it seems, has been speaking to my wife. In his pre-election clear out of MPs he is treating the House of Lords as a sort of giant spare room into which to stuff all that he and his party colleagues consider unsightly, useless and out-of-date – but about which the party can’t help but be a little sentimental. Left-wing MPs in safe seats, among them the Labour veteran Diane Abbott, have reportedly been promised peerages in exchange for vacating their seats to make way for Starmerite loyalists. ‘They offered me a seat in the House of Lords because some little boy wanted my seat,’ was what one Labour MP told the Sunday Times. Another: ‘Peerages started being offered after the general election was called and suddenly there was a flurry of people standing down who had previously said they had every intention of standing.’ 

There are undoubted merits to this way of doing things when it comes to keeping the main living areas of a family house tidy. But I’m not at all sure that it’s quite the way to treat one half of our ancient legislature. The Lords, at least in theory, is supposed to be a collection of wise heads who will bring to bear on law-making the maturity of long experience in a wider range of fields than just party politics. It’s not supposed to be a dump-bin for harmless headbangers you want to get out of the way. Of course, stuffing the Lords has been a transactional, cynical, instrumental policy for both parties since long before Harold Wilson got out his lavender notepaper. You could say in his defence that at least Sir Keir looks to ennoble politicians with a proven interest in changing the world rather than party donors with a proven interest in improving their letterheads. But the principle holds. 

And there are some peculiar sort-of-paradoxes implied in treating it this way. For a start, it looks a bit like an elephant trap for the Corbynites. If you’ve spent your whole career inveighing against the Anti-Democratic, Antiquated, Unelected and Out of Touch second chamber, you’re going to look a bit of a plonker if you take a seat there as soon as you get a sniff of ermine. No doubt there are good Maoist arguments for including it in your march through the institutions, but it’s a hard case to make to a public less well versed in the theories of immanent critique and subversion from within.  

For Sir Keir, it’s a head-scratcher, too. Treating the Lords with contempt by filling it with people whose political instincts he doesn’t trust is, perhaps, of a piece with his stated intention to abolish it. But that reduces still further its attractiveness to the people with whom he’s offering it as a bribe to leave the Commons. And when Tony Blair and David Cameron stuffed the red benches with their cronies, they mostly hoped in so doing to produce a majority in the upper house that they could work with. Starmer is proposing to fill it with people who will vote against him most chances they get – except, I suppose, when it comes to the abolition of the chamber in which they sit.  

Using the Lords as an oubliette for the Diane Abbotts of this world sends two messages. The first is that it’s a part of the legislature that you have no great regard for, and that might as well be a spare room full of useless clutter. While it still exists, that shows what seems to me to be a high-handed and probably counterproductive contempt for something that, like it or not, remains a solemn part of our lawmaking process. And one, it should be said, that has proved itself handy over the last couple of years in putting a brake (if no more than that) on some of the wilder schemes hatched in the Commons.  

The second message it sends is that it’s a chamber so essentially toothless that you can stuff it with members of your own awkward squad without it being likely to cause you much bother – which may be true, though I hope it isn’t. But if it is true, it makes the case for spending political capital and parliamentary time on doing away with it rather a weak one. If the Lords is no more than a fancy daycare facility for Tory donors, cashiered Labour MPs and a handful of old toffs, it’s a minor drag on the public purse rather than an active stain on our democracy. 

The principled thing to do here, I think, is to gird the Starmer loins, face down the old lady, and reach under the sink for the bin bags. You may get a bit of a twinge early Wednesday morning, when as the refuse cart trundles off down the street you can hear a thin electronic voice, just very faintly, singing ‘Rock Around the Clock’, but in a couple of weeks you won’t even notice what’s missing.