Editorial: The liberal House of Lords places itself above concerns about immigration

The House of Lords illustrates the liberal consensus establishment world view.

​The party most represented among the 785 unelected peers is the Conservatives, on 270. The Tories indeed are not only the largest grouping in the Lords, they number more than the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats combined, on 255. Yet on issue after issue peers thwart the government from a liberal or a left-leaning angle.

For much of the last century the British establishment was seen as conservative with a small ‘c’ and almost reactionary in outlook. Now there has been a shift akin to that in elected politics too: in the latter half of the twentieth century the wealthiest tiers of the population were most likely to vote for the Conservatives in the UK and the conservative Republican Party in the US; now the wealthiest classes often vote for liberal or left-leaning politicians, and it is often the blue collar class that votes for the right.

Sociologists like Dr Matthew Goodwin have written on how a new comfortable, educated elite is, for example, most likely to trumpet extreme social liberalism on moral and family matters yet is one of the cohorts of the population most likely to bring up children in a traditional male-female marriage. And as Dr Goodwin writes, this tier of society tends to back mass migration, yet is least likely to live in poor areas that suffer its impact.

The Lords has shown its high mindedness over Brexit, where it tried to thwart a full departure from the EU, and over the legacy of the Troubles, where opposition is out of concern for ‘human rights’ and Irish concerns etc, rarely out of sympathy for those who think legacy has turned pro terror and anti state.

Now the Lords has tried to thwart Rwanda, not out of sympathy with widespread concerns across the country about immigration, but rather – again – over ‘rights’ objections to constraints on incomer numbers.