Parliament is the ancient seat of authority in this Realm, and the Crown in Parliament the source of all law. Yet the institution hath, by slow accretion and careless reform, grown unwieldy in its lower House, purposeless in its upper, and diminished in its sovereignty by the creation of a Supreme Court that oweth more to American constitutional theory than to any English tradition. These several defects require attention.
The House of Commons is too large, and spendeth too much of its time generating new legislation — much of it covering matters that do not require legislating, or duplicating what already existeth in statute. A smaller Commons, sitting less frequently but scrutinising more carefully, would serve the nation better than the present arrangement, in which Members are rewarded for the volume of law they produce rather than for the quality of their judgement.
The House of Lords hath become a bloated assembly of patronage appointments, hereditary relics, and bishops whose presence oweth more to historical accident than to any rational principle of governance. It must be reduced drastically in number, and its role as a revising chamber — which is its proper function, and the one at which it occasionally excels — must be codified and defended against those who would either abolish it or turn it into a second elected chamber indistinguishable from the first.
Most urgently, the constitutional vandalism of the Blair years — which stripped from Parliament its judicial function and erected in its place a Supreme Court modelled on foreign practice — must be reversed. The Law Lords should be restored to the upper House, and the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty reasserted against the encroachment of a judiciary that hath begun to behave as though it, and not the elected Parliament, holdeth the ultimate authority in this Kingdom.
I. The House of Commons
A smaller chamber, legislating less and scrutinising more.
The House of Commons should be reduced to 600 Members of Parliament, as was previously planned and legislated for before the proposal was abandoned. Six hundred is sufficient to provide for adequate constituency representation while producing a chamber of manageable size in which individual Members can make a meaningful contribution to debate.
More fundamentally, the Commons must reconsider how it spends its time. The present culture rewards legislative hyperactivity — the assumption that every problem requires a new Act of Parliament, and that a government's worth is measured by the quantity of legislation it places on the statute book. This is wrong. Much of what Parliament legislates for is already covered by existing law; much of the rest concerns aspects of life that do not need legislating at all. The result is a body of statute so vast and tangled that no citizen can reasonably be expected to know what the law requires of them.
Parliament should sit less frequently and dedicate a greater proportion of its time to the scrutiny and revision of existing legislation, to the proper examination of government expenditure, and to the holding of ministers to account. The committee system should be strengthened so that Select Committees function as genuine instruments of oversight rather than platforms for grandstanding. A Parliament that passes fewer laws but understands those it does pass would serve the country far better than the present arrangement.
II. The House of Lords
A drastically reduced revising chamber, purged of hereditary and ecclesiastical anomaly.
The remaining hereditary peers should be removed from the House of Lords entirely. Their presence is an anachronism that cannot be defended on any principle of modern governance. The ninety-two hereditary peers retained under the 1999 compromise were always intended as a temporary arrangement; it is past time to complete that work.
The Lords Spiritual — the bishops of the Church of England — should likewise be removed from the House as voting members. If it is judged essential to maintain the established Church's formal connection to Parliament, the bishops might be retained as non-voting members with speaking rights, but the principle that twenty-six clerics of a single denomination should hold legislative power in a pluralist society is no longer sustainable.
The total membership of the House must be reduced drastically. The present chamber of some 800 members is grotesquely oversized for a body whose function is revision rather than primary legislation. A straightforward set of criteria applied to the current membership illustrates what is achievable:
| Criterion Applied | Remaining Members |
|---|---|
| Remove all non-life peers | c. 690 |
| Further remove those over 80 or serving more than 20 years | 469 |
| Exclude those disqualified or on leave of absence | 447 |
| Further reduce to those under 75 | 352 |
A chamber of approximately 350 working peers — appointed on merit for fixed terms rather than for life — would be large enough to staff its committees and conduct thorough revision of legislation, without the present absurdity of a House larger than the Commons it is supposed to complement.
The Salisbury Convention, which holds that the Lords should not reject at second or third reading any legislation that fulfils a manifesto commitment of the governing party, should be codified in statute or standing orders. At present it rests on nothing more than convention and goodwill, which leaves it vulnerable to being tested or ignored by a Lords that feels emboldened to obstruct. Codification would remove ambiguity and reinforce the principle that the elected chamber has primacy on matters put before the electorate.
Regional mayors and the First Ministers of the devolved nations should be appointed automatically to the House of Lords for the duration of their terms of office. This would give the regions and nations a formal voice in the revising chamber, and would be consistent with the establishment of a Council of Regions and Nations at the governmental level. Their membership would be ex officio — tied to their elected position, not to personal patronage — and would lapse when they leave office.
III. The Law Lords & Parliamentary Sovereignty
Reversing the constitutional vandalism of the Supreme Court and restoring the judiciary to Parliament.
The Constitutional Reform Act 2005, which created the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom and removed the Law Lords from the House of Lords, should be repealed. The Appellate Committee of the House of Lords should be restored as the highest court of appeal in the land, and the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary — the Law Lords — should resume their seats in the upper House.
The creation of a Supreme Court was an act of constitutional vandalism. It imported into English law a concept drawn from the American separation of powers — a doctrine entirely foreign to the British constitution, which rests not on separated powers but on the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament. England does not have, has never had, and should not acquire a supreme judiciary that sits above the legislature and determines what Parliament may and may not do. Parliament is supreme. It is answerable to the electorate, and to no other body.
The consequences of this error have been considerable. The Supreme Court has, since its creation, progressively expanded its reach into matters that are properly political rather than legal. The prorogation judgment of 2019, whatever view one takes of the politics involved, saw the Court insert itself into the relationship between the executive and Parliament in a manner that would have been unthinkable under the old arrangements. Government by lawyers — in which political questions are reframed as legal ones and decided by unelected judges rather than elected representatives — has produced outcomes that weaken democratic accountability and embolden a judiciary that faces no electoral consequence for its decisions.
Restoring the Law Lords to the House of Lords would not diminish the quality of judicial reasoning. The Appellate Committee functioned well for over a century, producing jurisprudence of the highest calibre. What it would do is reassert a fundamental constitutional truth: that in this Kingdom, Parliament holds the sovereign power, and the courts exist to interpret the law that Parliament makes — not to sit in judgement upon Parliament itself.