Starmer Puts Allies, Union Bosses in Lords Despite Abolition Vow
(Bloomberg) -- Prime Minister Keir Starmer named 30 new Labour peers as he seeks to address the political imbalance in the House of Lords, despite pledging at the election to slim down and eventually replace the upper chamber.
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Sue Gray, Starmer’s former chief of staff who was ousted from Downing Street just three months after his July election win amid infighting with other government aides, is on the list of nominations for peerages published on Friday.
Political allies including David Evans, Labour’s former general secretary, and Deborah Mattinson, who was Starmer’s director of strategy until the election, will also enter the Lords, alongside a number of former Labour members of parliament including Luciana Berger and Thangam Debbonaire.
Starmer’s nominations for peerages will begin to close the gap between Labour — which currently has 185 peers in the upper chamber, and the Conservatives, who have 271 after spending 14 years in power.
At the same time as nominating new Labour members, however, Starmer’s government is working to whittle down the numbers in a bloated upper house that — with more than 800 peers — is often described as the second biggest legislative chamber in the world, after China’s National People’s Congress. A bill to take away the right to sit and vote in the chamber from 92 remaining hereditary peers is currently working its way through Parliament.
In Friday’s list, Starmer also nominated three former top trade union figures to the upper chamber: Brendan Barber, the former head of the Trades Union Congress, Mary Bousted, former leader of the National Education Union, and Kay Carberry, a former assistant general secretary of the TUC.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch nominated the journalist and free speech advocate Toby Young and former Deputy Prime Minister Therese Coffey among six people in her own list of peerages announced Friday. There were also two new peerages for the Liberal Democrats, the UK’s third party.
Labour’s election manifesto pledged to ultimately replace the House of Lords with “an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the nations and regions,” although it is unclear when Starmer will follow through with that proposal.
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