Coffee House Shots: should bishops be booted out of the Lords?
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The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 19 October 2024
⏱️ 18 minutes
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Summary
Labour have big plans for the Lords and have been pushing ahead with their crackdown on hereditary peers. But this week we learnt that Tory MP Gavin Williamson will table an amendment calling for them to reconsider the role of bishops as well. Gavin says that a clergy-free Lords would be more representative of modern Britain and is expecting to gain cross-party support, including from the likes of Jeremy Corbyn. The Spectator’s features editor William Moore thinks this is ‘institutional vandalism’ and opens the door to the removal of faith from parliament.
Gavin and William join The Spectator’s political editor Katy Balls to debate.
Produced by Cindy Yu and Oscar Edmondson.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Spectator magazine is home to wonderful writing, insightful analysis and unrivaled books and arts reviews. |
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| 0:11.8 | Go to spectator.com. UK forward slash voucher. |
| 0:18.4 | Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. |
| 0:22.1 | I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by Willmore and Gavin Williamson, the Tory MP. |
| 0:28.0 | Gavin, can we just start with what's going on in the House of Commons and the House of Lords this week? |
| 0:33.5 | Labour have been pushing ahead with their crackdown on hereditary peers |
| 0:37.1 | and you would like to add |
| 0:38.3 | an amendment and add some details to their plan. |
| 0:42.1 | So what Labour are wanting to do? They're wanting to banish their hereditary peers out of the House |
| 0:46.9 | of Lords. That's fair enough. They've had it in their manifesto. They made it clear that |
| 0:50.9 | that's what they were going to do. But actually, if they're going to get |
| 0:54.5 | rid of the hereditories, I think it's also right that we look at how we make the House of Lords |
| 1:00.0 | more fit for purpose in the longer term. And there's still this abnormally with 26 Church |
| 1:06.4 | of England bishops that continue to sit in the House of Lords. And what I'd like to see is the legislation amended so that they're also removed from the |
| 1:17.0 | legislative body. |
| 1:18.2 | Why is that really the case, though, Gavin? |
| 1:20.0 | Is it just because those bishops in the House of Lords tend to vote against the Tory party |
| 1:25.8 | nowadays and have gone rather from being Tory party at |
| 1:28.5 | prayer to the Labour Party at prayer. So is it just a total party political goal that you've got |
| 1:33.9 | in mind here? Not as all well. I mean, if you see their voting record, they've only |
| 1:38.5 | vote about on average 6% of the time on division. So it's not about that. It's actually making sure that we got |
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