The latest attempt to bring democracy to Britain’s legislature is missing in action.
The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill would if enacted remove the 92 hereditary legislators from parliament. Britain shares the distinction of allowing hereditary legislators to sit in its legislature with only one other country, Lesotho.
In September 2025 the bill entered one of the last stages for legislation, in which both houses of parliament consider amendments. Since then there has been no trace of it according to the Electoral Reform Society (ERS)’
The ERS says that what is delaying the bill not clear.
The House of Commons has approved the bill. And opinion polls indicate that most citizens believe it wrong for there to be legislators who certainly were not chosen by the people, and were not even appointed by a political party. As the ERS reminds us Thomas Paine noted two hundred years ago that hereditary legislators make as much sense as hereditary mathematicians.
The Labour Party promised in its last manifesto that hereditary seats in parliament would be abolished. And it did duel y introduce a bill to do that. But the unelected legislators responded with what their Conservative leader called a “very aggressive procedural action” to stop the House of Lords taking even a small step towards democracy.
They have delayed not just the Lords reform bill but other legislation in their campaign against democracy. At the “report stage” for the hereditary peers bill they had put down 46 pages of amendments to a two-page bill.
Now the bill has disappeared from sight.
Democracy must wait. Hereditary privilege takes precedence.