38 new peers have been appointed to the upper house of the UK Parliament – 30 appointed by the Labour Party, six by the Conservative party, and two by the Liberal Democrats. Labour’s appointees include a number of former MPs who stood down in July’s election or lost their seat historically, including Steve McCabe and Lyn Brown (who stood down last summer), and Luciana Berger and Phil Wilson, who both lost their seats in 2019. In a move that many will attribute to Labour’s attempts to tackle historical and ongoing allegations of anti-semitism, Mike Katz, the chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement, has also been appointed to the Lords.
Perhaps the most interesting of the new members of the upper house, however, is Sue Gray, who left her position as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff only a couple of months ago as part of a row over her level of influence in both the party and government. Part of the row also concerned the extent of her salary, which, it was revealed, is actually higher than that of the Prime Minister himself. Gray wrote the famous ‘Partygate’ report into illegal gatherings taking place at Downing Street during the height of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, and Gray’s entrance into the House of Lords may well reignite allegations of partiality among the upper echelons of the Labour Party.
The Conservative appointments are not without their fair share of controversy. Kemi Badenoch’s selections include Toby Young, founder of the Free Speech Union, who has received criticism for his support of what he labels ‘progressive eugenics’, which involves screening the intelligence of embryos. Young stood down from a government position on the higher education watchdog after just eight days in 2018 amid a row over a number of historical comments that many found ableist, homophobic and misogynistic. In 2017, Young also attracted media attention for his attendance at the invite-only ‘London Conference of Intelligence’, which was later investigated by University College London (where it was hosted) after it emerged that attendees included a known white supremacist.
Badenoch has also awarded a life peerage to Nigel Biggar, who was the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford from 2007-2022. In 2017 he initiated the controversial ‘Ethics and Empire’ project at the university, which was criticised in an open letter by other Oxford academics for its perceived ‘caricature’ of post-colonialist thought. Biggar’s 2023 book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, was equally divisive, praised as ‘courageous’ in the Literary Review, while Kenan Malik argues in The Guardian that the book ‘strains credulity’ in its attempts to reappraise the morals of the British empire.