Will UK Reforms Leave 800 Lords-a-Weeping?
It’s clear that Britain’s House of Lords is bloated and unrepresentative. But nobody has yet agreed what should replace it.
House of Lords.
Photographer: WPA Pool/Getty Images EuropeThere is little about the UK’s House of Lords — the largest legislative body outside China — that you’d keep if you were building a legislature from scratch today.
You probably wouldn’t fill it with dukes, earls or viscounts, which recall an ancient status system at odds with today’s meritocracy. You wouldn’t decide to have 800-plus members and give them jobs for life. And you wouldn’t choose its particular demographic mix — with more members over 90 years old than under 40 (the median age is 72) and so many coming from London and the southeast despite country trying to rebalance opportunity and “level up.”