House of lords and contemporary politics 1911-1957

When the Parliament Act of 1911 was passed, both its advocates and its opponents expected that it would soon be replaced by a comprehensive reform both of the powers and of the composition of the House of Lords. The past forty years have in fact seen innumerable proposals, modest and ambitious, in Parliament and in Party Conferences, but all have been abortive. The powers of the House have been left unchanged until now, except by the new Parliament Act of 1949, which merely modi fied the provisions of the old by reducing from three sessions to two the Lords' power to delay bills passed by the Commons. At last, in November 1957, a Conservative Government brought forward a proposal to reform the composition of the House with a serious intention that it should go through; but the modest provisions of the Life Peerages Bill came as something of an anti-climax. Both socialists and conservatives would have liked a more far-reaching reform, but they are still far from agreeing on the objectives at which larger reforms should aim. The differences between the Parties have become narrower as time has gone by, but the restricted and essenti ally uncontroversial scope of the Life Peerages Bill recognizes the need for caution.