Brown’s report gives Starmer a chance to shift power from Whitehall

In 1912, Herbert Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister, declared that reform of the House of Lords would “brook no delay”. Well, 110 years later, it seems to have managed to “brook” quite a lot.

After endless rounds of tinkering but no comprehensive overhaul, the Upper House has 786 members, including 91 hereditary peers and 25 bishops. It is the institutional equivalent of a hoarder’s house.

Not surprisingly, therefore, much debate has already been generated by Sir Keir Starmer’s declared intention to abolish the existing chamber and replace it with an Assembly of the Nations and Regions in the first term of a Labour government — and rightly so. But it is important to see this ambition (the Opposition leader has left himself some wriggle room on timing) in the wider context of the 155-page report of Gordon Brown’s Commission on the UK, in which Lords reform is only one element in a 40-point plan.

The standard objection to proposals for constitutional change has long been that they are a side-show, a waste of political capital, a fixation of liberal intellectuals that distracts attention from the crunchier business of economic, social public service reform.

This is, and has always been, absolute nonsense. One only has to consider the huge impact of devolution — empowered by referendums, enacted by Tony Blair’s government— upon the structure of the United Kingdom to grasp how consequential institutional reform can be.

The rise of the metro mayors, notably in London, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, has strengthened the argument for a fully decentralised system of government. The independence, respectively, of the Bank of England and the Supreme Court has been of the highest importance.

Brown’s report makes no claim to be the last word on what Starmer should do if he becomes prime minister — but it is a fine starting point for consultation before the next election, which would enable a Labour government to hit the ground running.

As Peter Hennessy, the undisputed master of British institutional history, has argued in a book of the same name, the UK’s uncodified constitution is its “hidden wiring”: the software that enables the machine to run. Though Brown stops short of arguing for codification on the model of the US Constitution, he argues for much greater transparency, accountability and devolution.

Perhaps the most radical principle binding his proposals is fiscal decentralisation, whereby the Scottish government would be able to borrow more, and local authorities could be granted “greater fiscal flexibility” and might “retain some of the savings they generate in taking people off benefits and into work”. Though such plans may not quicken the pulse, they represent a radical challenge to the centuries-old dominance of HM Treasury and the near-total centralisation of significant decision-making in Whitehall.

Above all, the study takes proper account of what I have called the “ethical crash” — a collapse of standards in public life that is every bit as damaging to the state of our democracy as the financial version of 2008-09. As Brown writes: “The Johnson administration of 2019 to 2022 saw constitutional norms and established expectations of propriety wholly disregarded, and the mechanisms for enforcing them found seriously wanting.”