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WillowOne's Positions

Bishops in the House of Lords

My Positions

  1. The twenty-six Church of England bishops who sit in the House of Lords by right should be removed from it.
  2. No religion should hold seats in a legislature by virtue of being a religion. The United Kingdom and Iran are the only two states in the world that reserve places in the legislature for clerics, and that is not a list to be on.
  3. This is not hostility to Anglicans. On the Church's own figures it represents a small and shrinking minority, and every other religion, and the irreligious majority, are represented in the chamber by nobody at all.

Notes

  1. How it works. The Lords Spiritual are the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester, and twenty-one further diocesan bishops by seniority, capped at twenty-six since 1847. They are not appointed for merit, elected by anyone, or chosen for their views; they are there because they hold a particular job in a particular church. They vote on every bill, they have a reserved place in the order of speaking, and one of them reads prayers at the start of each sitting day. The Church of Scotland has no seats, and Scotland copes. The Church in Wales was disestablished in 1920 and the Church of Ireland in 1871, and neither country has noticed.
  2. Whom they represent. The 2021 census found that fewer than half the population of England and Wales now call themselves Christian and that over a third have no religion. Church of England Sunday attendance is below two per cent of the population and falling. Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, Catholics, Methodists and the forty per cent with no religion have no reserved seats. The usual defence, that the bishops "speak for faith", is false on its face: a bishop does not speak for a Muslim, and nobody speaks for me.
  3. How they vote. The bishops have used their seats to oppose same-sex marriage, to oppose assisted dying on every occasion it has come before the House, to preserve the collective-worship requirement in schools (Religious Education), and to defend the Church's exemptions from equality law (Religious Exemptions in Law). These are the positions of a lobby, and a lobby should lobby from outside the chamber like everyone else.
  4. The "moral voice" argument. If the Lords needs moral expertise it can appoint philosophers, and if moral expertise is to be found among bishops they can be appointed on that basis individually, as some have been. A seat by office is not a judgement that the office-holder is wise; it is a survival from a time when the bishops were great landowners who sat with the barons. The hereditary peers, who sat on the same principle, are being removed by the current reform; the bishops are being kept. A privilege of birth is abolished while a privilege of ordination is retained, and the inconsistency is not even argued for.
  5. Where this sits. This is the most visible single item in the programme of Hard Secularism, along with disestablishment and the removal of the monarch's role as Supreme Governor of the Church (UK Monarchy). The Royal Commission on Lords reform recommended cutting the bishops' number in 2000, and every reform proposal since has either reduced or abolished them before being shelved. The case has been made and conceded for a quarter of a century. All that remains is to do it.

Sources

  • Bishopric of Manchester Act 1847, section 2, fixing the number at twenty-six
  • Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015
  • Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords, A House for the Future, Cm 4534 (2000)
  • Office for National Statistics, "Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021"
  • Church of England, Statistics for Mission, annual attendance figures
  • Humanists UK, briefing on the Lords Spiritual — https://humanists.uk/campaigns/secularism/constitutional-reform/bishops-in-the-lords/

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