Our resident scribe bemoans another act of constitutional destruction by the present administration

There is something of an obsessive tendency that unites socialists and civil servants. A passion for reforms that establish neatness, order, and apparent logic – regardless of whether those reforms will result in any improvement to the condition of the nation.

This is the light in which Swift views the expulsion of the last of the hereditary peerage from the House of Lords. It is a step which wounds him to the core, in its airy dismissal of centuries of history and tradition. But one does not have to be an historian to deprecate this step. It will also result in a less effective second chamber, just as the original removal of the vast majority of the hereditaries under that constitutional vandal Tony Blair – cursed be his name! – was a backward step, not an improvement.

Dear readers, permit Swift to explain. The ‘old’ House of Lords (Swift is speaking here of the Lords post the reforms of 1911 and 1949 – not that he likes those much either, but he understands them) – included the hereditary peerage with a seasoning of distinguished life peers. It was an ideal second chamber for the twentieth century. It could delay, but ultimately not frustrate, government legislation. It posed no threat to the primacy of the Commons. Like a constitutional pooper-scooper, it tidied up the messes that MPs had made. It worked.

None of this practical stuff mattered to that political poseur Blair and his cronies. Out went all but 92 of the hereditary peers, and in flowed a river of sludgy patronage – MPs ennobled (sic) to pass on their seats to former special advisers and assorted political chancers, people who bought their seats via party donations, ex-mandarins who could be relied on to favour state intervention in every aspect of life, gesture peerages for media favourites and so forth. We can all name some names here.

(By the way, it is to the shame of the subsequent Conservative governments that they followed this bad precedent. What Labour began, the Tories doubled and redoubled. We have quietly returned to the patronage system of the eighteenth century, and no-one seems to give a damn).

We see the results today. The House of Lords is a vast polluted lake in which swim a few good and hard-working peers (and the hereditary peers are very much overrepresented in that number), while the useless mass take advantage of the bars, restaurants and prestige, and do very little. The degree of politicisation of the Lords has increased, so that it has come to resemble the lower house. Dispassionate revision has been replaced by partisan knockabout. Legislation is hence greater in quantity but far worse in quality.

The bitterest irony here is that we will end up with a patronage-based second chamber which is exactly what the opponents of the old Lords used to criticise. The idea that it will ever be replaced by any ‘assembly of the nations and regions’ – God forbid! – is strictly for the birds, because that would rival the Commons in legitimacy, and that MPs will never permit.

Swift doubts that there will be many voters who care very much as Keir Starmer’s  sledgehammer knocks off another piece of our once-impressive constitutional edifice. After all, no-one seemed to worry too much about the vandalism inflicted on the Lords, the law lords and the office of Lord Chancellor by Blair.

But he urges you, dear readers, to care about these things. They are living links to our very origins as a nation, and as those links are cut, we lose something of great emotional value and – literally – nobility. When the hereditaries leave we will have lost something very precious.