Labour’s 1945 Lords deal may no longer apply

THE 72-YEAR rule that should protect Theresa May’s plans for Brexit in the House of Lords may not apply because the Prime Minister failed to secure a Commons majority.

The Salisbury-addison Convention is a long-standing agreement which dictates that peers do not vote against a law proposed by a winning party in its manifesto. It is also commonly understood to mean that the Lords does not table amendments that alter the intention of a Bill.

However, Labour and Liberal Democrat peers may feel emboldened to oppose the passage of legislation because the Conservatives failed to win an overall majority.

Downing Street insisted on yesterday that the Salisbury Convention would apply if the Queen’s Speech was passed by MPS in next week’s vote.

Mark Elliott, professor of public law at the University of Cambridge, has suggested that “the governing criterion is ultimately what members of the relevant political community think”.

Lord Thomas of Gresford, the Liberal Democrats’ shadow attorney general, has said the convention does not apply to Bills put forward by a minority government or under a confidence and supply arrangement.

The convention is named after an understanding between Viscount Addison, the leader of the House of Lords, and Viscount Cranborne, leader of the opposition in the Lords, during the Labour government of 1945-51.

The arrangement was made after Labour secured a landslide victory in the Commons but had just 16 Labour peers. The party argued it had a clear electoral mandate which should not be curtailed by an in-built Conservative majority in the Lords.

Questions about the Salisbury Convention were raised following the 2010 general election, which also left Britain with a hung parliament.

Debates took place on whether the agreement applied after the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed a coalition government.

The two parties had opposed each other during the election and their final programme for government was not drawn up until afterwards.

The coalition initially insisted that the convention was still enforceable, but in 2011 the minister for political and constitutional reform acknowledged that “with the advent of a coalition government … the Salisbury-addison Convention does not operate in the same way, if at all”.

During the coalition government, there were three attempts by peers to block a government bill during the second reading, all of which failed.