The House of Lords should not be punished for opposing tax credits

There are many excellent reasons to wish to reform the House of Lords. It is an anachronism, medieval in origins and, sometimes, habit. It is grossly undemocratic. It institutionalises one particular religious grouping, the Anglican Church, in Parliament – absurdly so in a multicultural society.

Its members are sometimes prone to excess. Its procedures are self-perpetuating. It is a symbolic bastion of privilege. It honours the hereditary principle, albeit nowadays in attenuated form. And so on.

Strong feelings about any or all of these shortcomings would be a decent motive to alter the powers and composition of the upper chamber. Spite, however, is not.

And yet this is precisely what the Government – and particularly the Prime Minister, once again relapsing into “Flashman” mode – is about to attempt. It is a nasty move, plainly a result of the Lords’ insistence on its right to challenge the Commons on a matter of enormous public interest: when the Government failed to honour its side of the constitutional bargain by allowing proper debate on the reduction in tax credits announced by the Chancellor.

Now Mr Cameron seems set on his mission to emasculate the Lords for no better reason than that his party no longer boasts the natural majority it enjoyed for a century or more. The Lords can be a troublesome bunch, as previous prime ministers – Conservative, as well as Labour – have found to their cost.

And yet, usually, the Lords has been proven right. The poll tax is one such example. It was also right about tax credits, as George Osborne tacitly admitted when he executed his U-turn on them in the Autumn Statement. Maybe it is this that has made George and David want to send the Lords a-leaping.