An amnesia epidemic appears to have struck Westminster. Or perhaps those afflicted are simply “moving with the times”, guilty of nothing more than a little “reinvention” or “reframing”, or possessors of that wonderful get out of jail free card: “hindsight”. Of course, for most of us, in plain English, it may best be described as a bit of good old-fashioned hypocrisy. In any event, the speed with which some politicians and commentators junked their previous views on the constitutional role of the House of Lords to attempt to ram through assisted suicide was astounding. They ultimately seem to believe that the Lords must be deferential to the Commons only when it accords with their views on the policy in question, and mutinous when it does not.
The assisted suicide Bill has now fallen, after it ran out of time in the House of Lords.
As of November last year, Liberal Democrat MP Christine Jardine believed that “the will of the democratic majority must prevail” and warned that if peers resisted the assisted suicide Bill, “it is their own future which is in question.” Yet in 2015, she criticised peers’ failure to back a fatal motion to block a government financial measure on tax credits that had cleared the Commons: not a backbencher’s bill, but government policy. Then, she saw unelected peers as a noble force capable of standing up to the democratically elected government. Today, she now views those same peers as anti-democratic troublemakers for pursuing exactly what she once desired. It may not matter to Jardine that the constitutional principle remains unchanged; only that the cause has shifted.
Associate Editor of The Observer, Andrew Rawnsley, insisted it would have been “disgraceful” if the assisted suicide bill, endorsed by fewer than half of MPs in the Commons, were “‘talked out’ by “a clique of unelected peers.” In 2016, he helpfully explained that the Lords is not bound by the Salisbury Convention when a measure is not in a governing party’s manifesto, citing the expansion of grammar schools as fair game for peers to block. Did he ever believe the words he wrote, or does the Salisbury Convention only apply when it is politically expedient? Ditto for Simon Jenkins, who declared that second chambers must not overturn “clear decisions” of the democratic chamber or “impose their own moral views”, having in 2023 urged the Lords to vote a “wretched” bill down and send it back to the Commons when the legislation wasn’t to his taste.
Yet no one illustrated shapeshifting better than the assisted suicide Bill’s House of Lords sponsor, Charlie Falconer. In 2015, he was confident that peers could reject whatever they liked in certain circumstances; in 2017, he was sure that the Lords had the right to refuse a bill with a Government mandate (which this one does not); in 2018, he understood that the Salisbury Convention does not apply to such bills. Throughout 2021 and 2022, he referred to votes in the House of Commons as representing an “elected dictatorship”, and as recently as 2024, he urged the Lords not to “compromise” where human rights are concerned. He has also lamented that it is “very unattractive” for politicians to change their constitutional principles depending on whether they like the bill before them. On this, he is, of course, correct, and he skewers himself with more precision than any other could.
Supporters of the Bill are reportedly considering reviving it in the next parliamentary session by using the Parliament Acts to push it through, even though this would be unprecedented for a Private Members’ Bill. Additionally, new polling suggests the Bill would likely fail if reintroduced to the House of Commons, with 41 per cent of MPs surveyed able to be definitely relied upon to vote “Aye” again and 45 per cent saying they would continue to vote “No”.
Either the Lords have the right and duty to scrutinise, amend and, in extremis, block legislation regardless of topic, or they do not
This is not an isolated case of hypocrisy. A group of peers who signed a letter insisting the Lords must not block the assisted suicide Bill, because the Commons had approved it, happily helped derail a Commons-backed private members’ bill only a decade ago. Then, they saw their obstruction as a matter of courage and conscience. Now, they condemn robust scrutiny by others, on a different issue, as outrageous. What emerges is a hierarchy of bills: those that advance their social cause are sacrosanct manifestations of “democracy”; the very same House can shred those that do not. That argument looks even weaker now that the Bill has fallen because it ran out of parliamentary time in the Lords, rather than being blocked by a handful of peers. Analysis says almost 150 peers expressed opposition while the Bill was in the Lords.
Either the Lords have the right and duty to scrutinise, amend and, in extremis, block legislation regardless of topic, or they do not. Those currently demanding that peers swallow their reservations on assisted suicide in the name of democracy did not act that way when the issue was welfare reform, grammar schools or any number of government bills they happened to loathe. The inconsistency is not just “unattractive”, as Lord Falconer once put it; it is precisely the kind of cynicism that cheapens both Houses at the very moment they most need to be trusted.
