ABSTRACT
Reforming the House of Lords was presented as one of the central elements of Labour’s programme of constitutional reform when it came to power in 1997. Yet the fact that at the time of writing the process of reforming this august and ancient institution of Parliament has only reached a rather unconvincing Stage Two and senior Ministers seem determined to resist radical changes in its role and composition suggests a rather half-hearted commitment on the part of Tony Blair, Lord Irvine and their senior colleagues to the idea of producing a transformed Second Chamber within a transformed system of Parliamentary government. As Lord Reay, one of the hereditary peers elected by his colleagues to membership of the interim House in 1999 but now facing extinction in Stage Two of Lords reform, observed in the Lords debate on the Wakeham Report: ‘from my reading of British history, we have only rarely proceeded by adopting blueprints or proceeded to constitutional reform at all, except in conditions of great, or even dire, necessity’.1
