Labour is turning the Lords into a chamber of horrors

The once amicable Upper House is now more about wrecking than revising

The appointment of a junior Opposition whip in the House of Lords should not usually warrant attention. Ed Miliband has enough trouble getting himself noticed, let alone an obscure Scottish peer at the tail end of the new leader’s first reshuffle. But in the Lords and in Downing Street, the fact that he chose to give a job in the engine room to Lord McAvoy has caused a minor ripple of disquiet. As a Labour whip in the Commons for nearly 20 years, Thomas McAvoy built a reputation for quiet ruthlessness in his party’s interest. Gordon Brown thanked him for his loyal service by sending him to the Upper House last year. Since then he has emerged as a leading light in a gang of recently ennobled Labour toughs who have disrupted the rarefied atmosphere of the Lords with the bully boy tactics of the Commons.

That, at least, is the view from the Government benches, where Lord McAvoy’s nomination to the Whips, just as the Upper Chamber prepares for six months of attrition over the remaining elements of the Coalition’s first legislative programme, is taken as a terrible portent of things to come. To the ministers preparing their Bills for Lords passage, it’s the political version of the butterfly who creates a typhoon with a flap of his wings. The Government is looking nervously down the corridor at the other place and wondering what horrors Labour has in store for them between now and the end of the current parliamentary session next April.

Their nervousness is understandable. In the past 18 months, the House of Lords has undergone a profound change that has overturned all the assumptions about its future. The amicable club where all sides play by a set of understood but unrecorded rules has gone. Labour is playing hardball. In the Lords, there is no time limit on debate, but tradition holds that this freedom is not abused by filibuster. With Mr Miliband’s approval, Labour is now using time as a weapon to prevent Bills from making progress in a way that defies convention. Or take today’s debate on the Health Bill: government legislation is usually never put to a vote on second reading. Yet that is precisely what a combination of Labour, Crossbench and Lib Dem peers have done by tabling poison pill amendments to the Health Bill, which, if passed, will kill off one of the Coalition’s most tortured but emblematic measures. The Government is confident of seeing off the danger, but the threat has caused alarm.

The trouble the Government is having with the Lords is attributable to two distinct political reactions to the formation of the Coalition. The first is Labour’s, the biggest single party in the Lords. It sees its job as not to revise, but to oppose and if possible block. This is its calculated response to the Coalition. Last January, the Government had to threaten to introduce a guillotine – in Lords terms, the destruction of its freedoms – to end an all-night filibuster by Labour peers. That most of those causing the trouble are ex-MPs has provoked sniffs of distaste from long-serving peers, who resent the coarse yah-boo tactics of the other place being introduced into their more deliberative counsels.

Between them, the Conservatives and Lib Dems have a notional majority. But not if you take into account the crossbenchers. Peers who sit as independents and do not take a party whip make up a significant number of the House’s more than 800 members. They used to serve as a reservoir of spare votes for the main parties, their support varying depending on the issue in dispute. Their strength was usually dissipated by the range of their opinions, often with just as many voting for something as against it. That has changed. For some time now, they have been formally organised, with a convener acting as shop steward. A study of the division lists shows how crossbenchers are increasingly voting as a block with Labour against the Coalition. The Government has been defeated on a fifth of divisions in the Lords since last May – 23 out of 111. On 10 of those occasions in the past year, on major Bills on issues such as AV and the EU, crossbenchers have swung decisively against the Coalition.

The other response is that of Lib Dem peers, many of whom are at best reluctant members of the Coalition. Some are ageing members of the SDP whose sympathies are, if not with Labour, then with a social democrat view of the world that does not match Nick Clegg’s. One of Downing Street’s growing frustrations is the role Lib Dem peers are playing in efforts to do in the Coalition’s programme. Baroness Williams of Crosby – Shirley Williams – has headed the campaign against the Health Bill. Last summer, after the Government announced its concessions on NHS reform, Mr Clegg obtained the backing of his MPs and peers for the compromise. Now that the measure is before the Lords, Mr Cameron wants him to deliver on his bargain by ensuring his peers vote the right way. But he cannot be certain they will, nor can he have any confidence that the Lords will allow the rest of his programme to get through in the time remaining. Around the Prime Minister there are mutterings that if Mr Clegg cannot get his peers on side, then Mr Cameron might feel less obliged to press ahead with Lords reform.

In fact, this newly confrontational House of Lords presents Mr Cameron with a wider political difficulty. Until now it was assumed that Mr Clegg’s plans for a fully or partially elected second chamber or senate were destined to remain in the pending tray, discussed but never done, a victim of political inertia. But the transformation of the Lords over the past year from an apolitical and unelected house to one that is both unelected and now highly politicised means it might no longer be possible to put off reform. Viewed from No 10, the House of Lords poses one of the biggest threats to the success of the Coalition, and needs to be fixed.

In most ministerial meetings these days, you will hear the phrase “we might have problems with this in the Lords”. As a result, ministers are clamouring for corrective action to restrain Labour excesses. On the Tory side, work is being done to draw up procedural changes that will mean an end to the House’s most cherished freedoms of debate. If Labour peers, with the help of sympathisers among their crossbench and Lib Dem colleagues, carry on behaving as if there are no rules, then, as one Cabinet minister describes it, “they will be digging their own graves”.

But what if Labour’s oppositionist tactics have another effect? An Upper House that no longer respects the supremacy of the elected Commons by trying to scupper its programme cannot be allowed to continue in its unelected state. If it wants to play politics, then it should first have legitimacy. In the coming months, the Lords will test the patience of the Coalition. And Mr Cameron in turn may begin to wonder if Lords reform might not be worth ramming through sooner rather than not at all.