House of Lords: Why the SNP will never take a seat

In fairness to Ian Blackford, he wasn’t saying he wants a seat in the House of Lords, nor was he saying the SNP should be asking the government for a couple of peerages.

Rather, speaking to a group of student journalists in Westminster, he was saying that if Scotland becomes independent the Scottish Parliament would maybe need a second chamber, "some kind of elected senate" to provide "checks and balances" and to "strengthen scrutiny".

Somewhere along the way, that became Baron Blackford of Humble Croft is looking for a spot in London’s most exclusive retirement home.

It would in fairness have been quite the u-turn. In his 2021 conference speech, Lord Lochaber, as he’ll never be known, decried the upper chamber as "a relic of an institution stuffed so full, that it's second now in size to the Chinese People's Congress".

To turn round three years later and ask for it to be stuffed a wee bit more would have taken some chutzpah.

But he didn’t! Rather people heard what they wanted to hear.

As one SNP MP told me when I said I was writing about this for Unspun, perhaps the more interesting story would be on "how some individuals leapt upon an obviously amped up piece of nonsense to undermine both Ian and party policy".

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Nevertheless, it’s a debate the SNP seems to have every five years or so, but one that’s been pretty comprehensively settled for the best part of a century.

There is an argument for the party to take up a place in the Lords, and it’s a good argument, compelling.

The Lords is a powerful institution, "a forum with real power" as Stephen Noon, who served as chief strategist of the Yes campaign in the run-up to the 2014 referendum, pointed out in the pro-independence National newspaper just before Christmas.

Every day the nearly 800 members scrutinise legislation which impacts the people of Scotland, and yet according to the SNP’s own research, there are just 78 members who could be regarded as Scottish peers.

Most of them are privately educated men over the age of 65.

The SNP took a far stronger position on Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda Bill when it went through the Commons. It’s now getting an absolute kicking in the Lords but there are no SNP boots in the scrap.

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Their absence was noted around Brexit and the slew of legislation that flowed through the Lords as a result, notably the Internal Market Bill.

And whenever independence comes up – and thanks to Labour’s George Foulkes, it comes up a fair bit – the only peer I've seen willing to share a pro-Yes view is Green peer Natalie Bennett.

The reasons for not taking a seat in the Lords are compelling too, and like all constitutional debates, the best arguments can be found in The Herald’s letters page.

"The upper house of the Westminster parliament is an unelected one, and consequently flies entirely in the face of any acceptable standards of democracy," wrote Jamie Hepburn in 2005.

The now Scottish Government Independence Minister but then just a 26-year-old kicking about Glasgow, said the Lords represented "the pinnacle of the establishment at the heart of the British state".

"Given that the raison d'etre of the SNP is independence from that British state and opposition to the establishment view of the constitutional order, I can see no logical reason for its participation in that particular forum."

It’s an argument Hepburn would probably still make now.

Independence minister Jamie Hepburn wrote back in 2005 that the House of Lords was 'the pinnacle of the establishment at the heart of the British state' (Image: Newsquest)
There is possibly change coming to the Lords. Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to replace the second chamber with a new elected senate, though he has rowed back on that happening within the first term of a Labour government.

Instead there’ll be a series of incremental reforms along the way.

Would that make any difference to the SNP’s thinking? Not so, said one source, mostly because they thought it was very unlikely Labour would do anything.

"Labour have been promising to reform the Lords since the beginning of time, what’s different this time round?" they asked.

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But with 90 more Tory peers than Labour in the Lords, there’s talk of Sir Keir ennobling a whole heap of folk to help get his legislation through.

It’s not unreasonable that he could turn to the SNP to help stop Tory peers thwarting his legislative programme. I mean, Humza Yousaf has already written to Sir Keir to say their differing political views should not "prevent us being able to work together".

Though this probably wasn’t what the First Minister meant.