Our constitutional settlement is too important for your silly games, Gavin Williamson

Gavin Williamson
Gavin Williamson

The Labour Government’s House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill, which reaches its final stage in the Commons this week, is misguided for many reasons.

Not the least of them is that expelling hereditary peers from the House of Lords is a break with the principle on which our monarchy also depends.

No less wrong-headed, however, is an amendment to remove bishops from the Upper House, which has been proposed by Sir Gavin Williamson, the former Conservative Chief Whip.

Sir Gavin is unashamedly out to make mischief. If his amendment is called, it will force Labour to whip its MPs, many of whom have no time for bishops or any other unelected peers, to vote against their own beliefs. Perhaps he hopes that a few will rebel and thereby embarrass the Government.

But this amendment would, in effect, abolish the very notion of “Lords Spiritual”, which goes back many centuries to the very origins of our parliamentary system.

The presence of bishops in the legislature serves to remind other members of both Houses that we should, in the words of Jesus, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”

Bishops bring a different, and often valuable, voice into the national conversation. They owe their role in Parliament to our constitutional settlement, as leaders of “the Church as by law established”. Our unwritten constitution is a seamless whole that has served us well. We unravel it at our peril.

Those who do not belong to the Anglican Church should nevertheless welcome their role. As a Roman Catholic, I certainly do – and so do virtually all the leaders of other faiths in this country.

The fact that most of the present bench of bishops happen to lean to the Left is not the point: no great Tory statesman, from Peel and Disraeli to Churchill and Thatcher, would have denied the necessity and importance of an episcopal presence in the Lords.

Sir Gavin Williamson evidently agrees with none of this. “What can justify the Church of England having the right to such legislative power? This is completely out of sync with any modern democracy,” he fulminates. “It’s frankly wrong and it’s actually quite insulting.”

Really, Sir Gavin? I have never met anyone who was insulted by the inclusion of bishops in the Lords – and I dare say neither has he. We may indeed be amused or annoyed from time to time by their utterances, but it is not only the right but the duty of Lords Spiritual to say things that might make us uncomfortable and them unpopular.

This is all the more true in an era when fewer of us ever set foot in a church. As the pews empty, the voice from the pulpit is increasingly unheard. Yet how can we transmit the Judaeo-Christian foundations of Western civilisation from one generation to the next without preserving the function in public life that the Established Church has exercised since time immemorial?

It is true that no other parliamentary democracy has followed the British example in this particular respect. But our Parliament is unique in countless ways, in its antiquity and in its ability to respond to the demands of the day.

Britain may no longer be a nation of churchgoers, but it is still in important respects a Christian country: in our respect for the individual, for example, and the idea that every one of us is made in the image of God.

The Coronation reminded us that this Christian cultural legacy is wholly compatible with a multiethnic, pluralistic society. James I, who commissioned the King James Bible to which the English language owes so much, liked to warn: “No bishop, no king.”

The final reason why the Tories should reject the Williamson amendment is a more practical one: it is the wrong approach to opposition. Such cynical, unprincipled tactics only serve to alienate the public.

People have a right to expect better from His Majesty’s Opposition. I am quite confident that with Kemi Badenoch, that is exactly what they will get.