LABOUR deserves no credit for the long-delayed abolition of remaining hereditary peers (the majority of these having lost their seats in the House of Lords back in 1999).

This was a compromise even then, since Labour had pledged to get rid of them all. Keir Starmer’s stultifying lack of ambition and originality is on show as he touts completion of a half-baked reform started 27 years ago as evidence of his modernising credentials.

The country has moved on. Whatever hopes some may have had of an appointed House have long since been dashed.

Few such appointments reflect a candidate’s genuine expertise or achievement: the House of Lords is a house of has-beens, cronies and crooks, seats on the red benches being awarded to politicians rejected by the electorate and rich people who buy their way in through donations to parties or favours of other kinds. It has no legitimacy.

Labour ignores the rational reforms proposed when it was in opposition by former prime minister Gordon Brown, which included replacing the Lords with an elected senate of the nations and regions. It ignores too the wider constitutional questions around the monarchy, prominent since the death of Elizabeth II and looming larger than ever given the horrific abuses her son Andrew is accused of.

Abolition of the Lords and the monarchy itself are no longer fringe demands. Labour’s reform doesn’t acknowledge their existence: as elsewhere, ministers are trapped in the conversations of 30 years ago.