Political logic appears to be on the side of Conservative MP Sir Gavin Williamson in his bid to deprive 26 Church of England bishops of their seats in the House of Lords. But the Labour government is likely to resist his amendment because the "Lords Spiritual" have proved to be so reliably left-wing.
The former Education Secretary in the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson has tabled an amendment to Labour's House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill: "No-one shall be a member of the House of Lords by virtue of being a bishop or Archbishop of the Church of England."
In an article on October 29, the PoliticsHome website reported: "In the biggest Lords reform shake-up in almost 25 years, the Labour government has decided to abolish the remaining 92 hereditary peers, as promised in its manifesto. But 26 Lords Spiritual also possess an automatic right to sit and vote in the Lords and have done so since the 14th century. They constitute another block now thought by some to be outdated and undemocratic, no longer representing Britain today."
PoliticsHome explained the political background to Sir Gavin's amendment: "Tensions between the bishops and the Conservatives reached boiling point during the last parliament, with relations described as 'toxic' and 'unfixable'. The bishops were criticised for being too political by taking strong views on government legislation, in particular its flagship immigration policy. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was one of the major critics of the Rwanda Bill at the time, labelling it 'immoral and cruel'."
The article quoted Sir Gavin explaining the logic behind his amendment: "The Government has made the decision to remove one outlier that has become outdated, they should also recognise the fact that there is another great outlier. What can justify the Church of England having the right to such legislative power? This is completely out of sync with any modern democracy. It's frankly wrong, and it's actually quite insulting."
Significantly, Martin Sewell, a prominent lay member of the C of E's General Synod, agrees that the bishops should lose their seats in the Lords. He wrote to The Church Times on November 1: "The Bishops' privileged status has been founded upon a premiss of moral integrity, which was presumed to ensure that they 'spoke truth to power'. That justification has evaporated with their collective failures to urgently address the multiple disasters in safeguarding...
"The Church that they lead obstructs every attempt to hold episcopal delinquency to account. Under its processes, any complaint is refined and diluted at each stage until it is determined that it is does not 'quite' reach the requisite standard and is dismissed."
He concluded: "The sooner the Established Church is held to the same standards as every other institution the better; the withdrawal of its privileged position in Parliament is the price we have to pay. We only have ourselves to blame."
Fortunately for the Lords Spiritual Labour's new Second Church Estates Commissioner, Marsha de Cordova MP, appointed by the government to field questions in the House of Commons on behalf of the established Church, has revealed the Westminster elite's determination to reward the leftist loyalty of the bishops.
She defended the bishops without any apparent irony for being non-partisan. She told PoliticsHome: "They scrutinise government legislation, which is what the Upper Chamber is there to do, and one of the positive things is that they are not partisan...To me that is something we should be applauding.
"I always believe there will be a place in the Lords for our bishops. I can't see any space where that wouldn't be the case."
So, the bishops will almost certainly keep their red seats in the Upper House showing that loyalty to neo-Marxist dogma rather than political logic is the dominant factor in the government's purge of the hereditary peers from the Lords.
But under the Labour government's House of Lords shake-up would the C of E's bishops be keeping their hereditary places in the UK legislature if they had consistently stood up for traditional, orthodox Christianity in all its counter-cultural glory?
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
