The House of Lords has been strongly criticised in certain quarters for amending the EU Withdrawal Bill in a number of significant respects. Some people are suggesting that the aim is to derail Brexit. Writing in The Times on May 16, the prominent Brexiteer, Matt Ridley (who sits in the Lords as Viscount Ridley), said: “if the Lords are really determined to frustrate Brexit, there may be only one option left: to get the monarch to threaten to create a 100 new peers… [a tactic which] Herbert Asquith used in 1911 to overcome peers’ opposition to Lloyd George’s radical budget.” In a letter published in the paper on May 19, Alistair Lexden corrected the errors in this statement:
Sir, Further to Matt Ridley’s comment article (May 16), the House of Lords was threatened with 400, not 100, new Liberal peers in 1911, Asquith having drawn up the list of names. The threat was not to “overcome peers’ opposition to Lloyd George’s radical budget”; the Lords had passed it in April 1910 after a year’s delay.
The issue in 1911 was the abolition of the Lords veto on legislation so that Asquith’s Irish Nationalist allies, on whom he depended for a majority, could get the Home Rule government in Dublin to which the Tory majority in the Lords remained opposed. That was achieved by the 1911 Parliament Act with Tory peers abstaining in large numbers to prevent Asquith’s mass creations.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords