King’s Speech

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, like others, I note that the King’s Speech did not mention constitutional or political reform. The Representation of the People Bill addresses many of the external threats to our constitutional democracy but does nothing to address the domestic threats, both from the depth of public disillusion and from the frailty of our constitutional safeguards against abuse of the executive power.

Public mistrust in Westminster politics, even in democracy as such, continues to rise. Polls show the leader of my party as the least unpopular political leader at the moment, but I have to say that all leaders based in Westminster are currently in negative territory. Yet Labour’s promise in its 2024 manifesto to “deepen our democracy” through parliamentary reform has almost been forgotten. It did set up the Modernisation Committee in the Commons, but that has so far achieved mainly improved accessibility for disabled Members; it has done nothing to address the order of Commons business.

Lords reform shuffles another couple of paces forward. The manifesto promised to move towards a second Chamber that is

“more representative of our nations and regions”—

that has disappeared. When I raised with the Minister, during the debate on the then devolution Bill, the question of how the new Mayoral Council for England would relate to the current, much weaker Council of the Nations and Regions, she seemed unaware that there might be a problem with relations between the different Governments within our union.

The local elections have shown that two-party politics has disappeared, leaving our electoral system and the conventions of Parliament unfit for purpose. In several local authorities, Reform won a majority of seats on a third or less of the vote. In Richmond upon Thames, the Liberal Democrats won every seat on little more than half the vote, which is not itself an advertisement for proper democracy. Labour’s massive majority in the Commons was won on barely a third of votes cast, on a turnout of less than six in 10. It is possible that, at the next election, a party could win a majority of seats on under 30% of votes cast, on an even lower turnout. That would be a real democratic crisis.

The Conservatives promised in the 2015 election campaign that they would provide “strong and stable single-party government” instead of what they described as a “coalition of chaos”. Since then, we have suffered years of chaotic single-party government under the Conservatives, and sadly now also under Labour.

Three weeks ago, a consortium of NGOs published a manifesto entitled Defensive Constitutional Reform: Preventing the UK from Going the Way of the US. They noted the growth of populist and authoritarian movements in European democracies, and the ease with which President Trump has swept aside the stronger constitutional safeguards, legal constraints and democratic scrutiny in the American system. Our constitutional safeguards are weak. We have already seen one Prime Minister attempt to bypass Parliament and govern by executive power. As the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, and others have said, we are no longer governed by “good chaps” alone.

All of us, in government and in democratic parties now in opposition, need to consider together what changes are needed in the way Parliament operates, in the balance between central, national and local government, and in the centre of government itself, to defend effective constitutional democracy from the threats we now face. All the King’s Speech offered us instead was a Bill to remove hereditary titles from the roll of Peers.