Labour’s ageing peers to respect ‘will of the Commons’ over Rwanda bill

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Labour will not try to delay endlessly Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda bill in the House of Lords, partly because of fears its peers are too few and too old to withstand a Tory revenge attack in the upper house at a later date should Sir Keir Starmer lead the party to a general election victory.

Starmer and Baroness Angela Smith, the Labour leader in the Lords, have agreed that while the controversial asylum legislation should be robustly challenged in the second chamber, the will of the elected House of Commons must be respected.

Apart from wanting to respect constitutional propriety, the party’s leadership does not want to give the ruling Conservatives an excuse to launch their own sabotage missions in the Lords against a future Labour government.

“If you shoot yourself in the foot before you’re about to run a marathon, that isn’t a very good thing,” said one Labour official. “We don’t block bills.”

The decision by Labour’s leadership not to deploy wrecking tactics is partly motivated by concerns that the party would run into trouble in government if it had to rely on its 175 peers — with a median age of 76 — to regularly turn out for late night votes to push through legislation faced by a larger, more youthful opposition Tory bloc.

The Conservatives have 270 members of the Lords with a median age of 68, their numbers swelled during the party’s 13 years in power by the appointment of swaths of new and younger peers by Tory premiers, including Boris Johnson.

“We have a lot of sprightly elderly people, but we also have people with ageing-related issues or illnesses or they might be primary carers for their partners,” said the Labour official.

“It affects us in terms of how…