The House of Lords

There may be other constitutional monarchs around the world, but nowhere is there is anything quite like the upper Chamber of the British Parliament, the House of Lords. In fact, it is difficult to talk about it in the present tense, as it is in the process of being radically changed. In the 1997 election, part of Labour's manifesto was a promise to reform it – hardly surprising if you look at the extraordinary nature of the House of Lords before these reforms began.

The function of the upper Chamber is to act as a brake on the government of the day. Its members take a long, cool look at new legislation prepared by the Commons. They discuss it, revise it and sometimes send it back to be reconsidered. Their power has for a long time been very limited. Even before the 20^th century it was accepted that the Commons was the real seat of power; but from time to time the Lords tried to take control.

The problem was that the permanent Conservative majority in the Lords opposed the Commons when it was in the hands of its enemies, the Liberals. In 1909, the Liberals tried to introduce a radical People's Budget increasing taxes and benefits. The House of Lords did its best to stop the budget going through, and the Commons lost its patience. A law was passed to limit the powers of the upper Chamber: the Parliament Act of 1911. From then on, it could only delay new laws for a fixed period, and it could not alter budgets (normally the most important of government measures).

The problem of the Conservative majority did not, however, go away. It was still the main reason for Tony Blair's promise to reform the Lords in 1997. The origin of this built-in, permanent Conservative majority was the bizarre and medieval composition of the House of Lords. Most members were from the ancient aristocracy: dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts and barons. These are hereditary titles, like the monarchy, passed on from father to son through the generations.

In recent years, it has been the practice to create new lords, known as life peers, Senior politicians such as ex-Prime Ministers, and other important public figures were given titles (for example, Baroness Thatcher) and a seat in the House of Lords. But the relics of feudalism were joined by many more Conservatives among the life peers. In the 1990s, the Lords consisted of about 750 hereditary peers, 26 bishops of the Church of England, nine senior judges and about 500 life peers. You can see form the figures that another problem was the size of the membership; luckily, only a small proportion of them ever came in to work.