The Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords have launched a new eNewsletter.

Every month you can be updated on what’s happening in the House of Lords, what the members of our group in the House of Lords have been up to and read a short Op-Ed from one of the Lib Dems in the Lords.

This month Tom McNally has written about the group’s role holding the Government to account (see below).

You can read the full newsletter at http://blogs.libdems.org.uk/lords.

Holding the Government to account

The partial reform of the House of Lords in 1998 was one of those acts of unforeseen consequences which happen from time to time in politics. Instead of a House dominated by a massive bloc of Conservative hereditary peers who feared to use their power, we had a second chamber created in which no party had an overall majority. What is more it was a chamber which owes its legitimacy not to powers granted by some medieval monarch; but by the democratically elected House of Commons via the 1998 Act.

When some frustrated Government Minister berates me about the unelected House defying the wishes of the elected Commons I smile sweetly and point out that if the Commons did not want us to have certain powers it should have said so in 1998.

The power to say “no” is essential to any leverage the Lords has over the executive. It is, in fact, used very sparingly. But because it is there, the Lords are able to wring concessions from the Government to improve legislation. Nowhere is that more important than in the field of civil liberties and human rights.

It is one of the paradoxes of our age that the unelected anachronism which is the House of Lords is seen as the main bulwark against an increasingly authoritarian Government and a whipped and supine House of Commons.

I take pride in that role, as well as the findings of the Constitutional Unit of University College London that the best disciplined and most effective grouping in the Lords in holding the Government to account are the Liberal Democrats.

* Tom McNally is Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords.