If Lib Dems had our way, the House of Lords would be reformed into an elected House. Nick Clegg had plans to do this but they didn’t survive the vested interests in the Tory and Labour parties.
There’s no immediate chance of it becoming elected, but a small but significant reform could be enacted.
Today Christine Jardine presented a Bill to change the name of the House of Lords to the House of Peers to better reflect the contribution of women in the chamber.
The current gender-specific House of Lords title is no longer appropriate. It feeds into an outdated and unacceptable narrative that political decision-making is a man’s job.
In this centenary year of female voting and election rights, it is surely time to recognise that our upper chamber is not a male preserve.
This is something the Government should back straight away. I mean, what are the possible grounds for objecting to it?
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2 Comments
Anne Boleyn was a Lord – the Marquess of Pembroke no less. So the alternative, I guess would be to own the term lord as a functional rather than gendered title, like we do with Actor these days.
Generically Peers address everyone in the Chamber by the quaint term “Your Lordships” and even more oddly “Your Lordships’ House”. It’s even odder than that because if you address an individual Peer you have to do so in the third person eg “I would say to the noble Earl that he is a throwback” or “Does the Minister understand that she is talking baloney?”
Just saying…