Why are House of Lords clerics so anti-Tory?

The bishops can smell blood in the water. Sensing how badly the Conservatives are doing in the polls, the two archbishops and 24 bishops of the Church of England in the House of Lords appear to have thrown aside any pretence of political objectivity and impartiality and have pitched themselves all-out against the government. This has been building up since the advent of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition in 2010, but the way that the bishops have taken their gloves off in the present session of parliament is shocking.

Anglican bishops occasionally argue that they opposed the last Labour and coalition governments just as much as they do the present Conservative one, but consider these statistics. In 1999-2000 they opposed Tony Blair in 27.1 per cent of divisions on whipped business, which in 2000-01 dropped to 15.8 per cent. Gordon Brown had to face 50.4 per cent opposition in 2007-08, and 60 per cent in 2008-09, however. Sometimes, such as on the issue of the Iraq war or how long the police could hold terrorists without charge, the bishops would indeed oppose Labour, but it tended to be from the left.

The coalition government was heavily opposed by the bishops: by 74.6 per cent of their votes in 2010-12, 81.8 per cent in 2012-13, 83.5 per cent in 2013-14, and 78.6 per cent in 2014-15. Yet once the Lib Dems were no longer in government, they went into full-scale attack mode. In 2019-21 they opposed the Tory government 94.7 per cent of the time, and in 2021-22 it was 95.6 per cent. Even more ideologically aggressive in this present session, the bishops have cast no fewer than 274 votes opposing the government and only five in support, that is 98.2 per cent of the time. They are on the rampage.

Astonishingly, more Labour votes have been cast with the government in the Lords this session than bishops’. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who has criticised government immigration policy as ‘ungodly’, has even brought about a vote to amend the government’s Illegal Migration Act during its passage, which is almost unprecedented.

There are of course serious constitutional implications for such a large part of the upper chamber to range itself so heavily on one side of politics, while presenting itself as a sage and balanced honest broker. Tories are anti-disestablishmentarians by conviction, but for how much longer, considering that the bishops skew at the rate of more than 54 to one against them? In the 117 divisions in which I have voted, I have never once seen a bishop in the division lobby that I’ve walked through. (They wear splendid Reformation-period surplices, and so are hard to miss.)

Any bishop who stands up in the Lords chamber has the automatic right – by convention, though not by law – to be heard before any other peer. Indeed, any other peer hoping to speak has to sit down whenever a bishop rises, and thus often misses a chance to do so during ten-minute Oral Questions. Since there is now no real chance that the bishop will say anything supportive of one side of British politics, how much longer can this convention survive?

This precedence is presently given to the Bishop of Manchester, for example, who has voted against the government 39 times this session, and only once for it. Also the Bishop of Durham (30 times against, once for), the Bishop of Southwark (25 times against, not once for), the Bishop of Chelmsford (15 times against, once for) and the Bishop of St Albans (16 against, once for). The House presently listens to them respectfully as if they were oracles, but there is a strong and growing feeling that they should be given no greater precedence in debates than any other partisan political grouping, such as the Greens.

When bishops do take advantage of this right of precedence, they range far from Church or religious matters. The Bishop of Leeds has spoken on 158 occasions, on matters such as Boris Johnson’s meeting with Alexander Lebedev; the Sue Gray report; the size of the civil service; voter ID; economic crime and corporate transparency; lithium batteries; the UK Internal Market Bill; EU withdrawal; aid to Gaza; the BBC, and much more. He gives us a useful running commentary on socialist thought on every issue of the day, which of course is his perfect right, but why should he take precedence over every other peer from any other party?

For an organisation that rightly champions diversity so much, there is no diversity of political opinion on the bishops’ bench: the Bishop of Durham believes the government’s asylum policy is ‘immoral’ and ‘shames Britain’; the Bishop of Bristol voted for higher thresholds for serious disruption on the Public Order Bill; the Bishop of Gloucester thinks it unsafe to send female asylum seekers back to Albania; the Bishop of Leeds has equated Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue parliament to Vladimir Putin’s attitudes towards international law; the Bishop of Southwark believes stopping the boats would ‘impoverish the UK’ and accuses Israel of pursuing ‘the permanent inequality and disenfranchisement of Palestinians’, while the Bishop of Manchester claims that ‘everyone’ in his diocese opposed the Minimum Service Levels Bill over strikes.

When it comes to Brexit, Palestine, and illegal migration, there is a predictable uniformity of opinion on the bishops’ bench. It is often pointed out that the House of Lords, with 779 active members, is the largest parliamentary body in the world except for the National People’s Congress of China; what is less commented upon is that the bishops have the same level of ideological diversity as that found in Beijing.

The bishops’ left-liberal views are of course unrepresentative of Church of England congregations, where between 55 and 66 per cent of Anglican worshippers supported Brexit, whereas every prelate in the Lords supported Remain. In the Times’s recent survey of the Anglican priesthood, some 13.2 per cent said they were Conservative, which is also considerably higher than the 1.8 per cent of times that the bishops vote with the government.

If the leftist trending of the Church of England had led to an increase in worshippers it might have been justified, but exactly the opposite has happened. Since the left-liberal takeover of the upper echelons of the Church in the 1960s and 1970s, the number of Britons who attend Anglican services at least once a month has halved, from 1.37 million in 1980 to around 600,000 today. It is a kind of ecclesiastical version of the truism about corporations: ‘Go woke, go broke.’ Yet despite presiding over this collapse in their own backyard, the bishops believe that now is the time to go on the offensive against the elected government of the country.

The Anglican Church has 26 reserved seats in the legislature, while none are reserved for other faiths. When once there would have been Tory voices raised against redistributing Anglican seats in the Lords to other religions, the way that the bishops are behaving as a hardened anti-Tory cadre will ensure that some of those voices will be silent, or even supportive of redistribution.

Were seats to be based on attendance at religious ceremonies, the Anglicans would rate only three or possibly four seats in the House of Lords, and since there are plenty of conservative-minded Sikh, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and Pentecostalist religious leaders, the prospect of Tory legislation being blocked and delayed might be correspondingly lessened. While the Anglican bishops remain essentially the Labour party at prayer, there will understandably be fewer and fewer Tories prepared to defend the status quo.

The current behaviour of the bench of bishops might force Tories to consider reform, as balance, equity and fair-mindedness, which is what one used to expect from the Church of England, has been entirely lacking in its bishops’ apparent bid to derail the programme of the democratically elected government. Their very radicalism is thus undermining their own chances of surviving in their present form.