Spot the BME peer

Spot the BME member of the House of Lords. It's not easy. Out of 45 new Lords and Baronesses appointed to the Upper House yesterday there are  just two Asian peers, no Africans, Caribbeans, Chinese etc, etc. 

If these new 45 parliamentarians represent a new wind of change you can be forgiven for mistaking them for a waft of the old. They are overwhelmingly White and Middle Class. There's a higher proportion of women (17, or 36%), but apart from gender it is pretty much business as usual on the red benches.

Among them are the usual party sugar donors, ballot-box rejects, has-beens and never-beens. Ex-MPs who lost their seats with massive swings against them, a former MP who hit the headlines after claiming expenses to clean his moat, a lobbyist for the wine industry, and one new peer whose best real life experience is running the private office of a leading politician.

In recent years there has been significant progress on appointing more women peers, who remain under-represented in the Lords. Yet gender is being treated as a silo. There are two visibly disabled peers in the new list, but what 44 of the 45 peers all have in common is that they are White. There are some younger peers as well. So peerages have gone from being 'male, pale and stale' to just plain pale.

Following the latest appointments the proportion of BME peers in the Lords has actually fallen from 7.04% to 6.77% of the Upper Chamber because the list is so racially undiverse.

The only two  BME peers on the list, by the usual definition, are Conservative Ruby McGregor Smith and  Shas Sheehan, a Liberal Democrat activist from south-west London who makes up 2.2% of the new intake in her own right. This stands in stark contrast to the BME population making up over 14% of Britain

In addition, Stuart Polak, director of the Conservative Friends of Israel, was also given a peerage but Jewish parliamentarians are normally counted separately from black and Asians.

In a house of 826 members (only China has a bigger legislative chamber) it is appalling that BME people are so under-represented. It's not as if there's the excuse that not enough BME people put themselves forward in politics as the Lords is drawn from all walks of life.

When talented BME aspiring politicians fail to get elected to the Commons it is the gift of political leaders to appoint them to the Lords. Yesterday showed this is simply not happening. The blockage is right at the very top.

What the peers disillusion list tells us is that black, Asian and minority ethnic talent that is being overlooked, bypassed and sidelined. Not a single African or Caribbean peer, just one Asian and one Jewish peer. This really does show politics, and particularly political appointments, is a bad light.

And even when BME peers are appointed, very few of them have a record of speaking out about racial inequality. By my calculations, three quarters of all BME peers do not stand up, and perhaps have never done, on these issues. Of the few BME appointments to get through many are Asian businessmen who made political donations and live a colour-blind political life.

Of the 56 peers I would say only 17 have a track record of standing up on race equality or faith issues: Doreen Lawrence, Paul Boateng, Bill Morris, Lola Young, Victor Adebowle, Bhikhu Parekh, Ros Howells, Valerie Amos, Patricia Scotland, Oona King (all Labour), Meral Hussein-Ece (LibDem), Sayeeda Warsi (Con), and Michael Hastings, Herman Ouseley, Pola Uddin, Nazir Ahmed, Usha Prashar (all crossbenchers).

Even some of the 17 on my 'good' list are effectively no longer active on these issues, some for personal or health reasons and others because they've simply lost their mojo with advancing years. At best I would we could only rely on 12 to stand up in an absolute crisis. And during a typical year you can count on one hand the peers that will make a speech on the issue… and still have fingers left over.

And what of party political representation? No Green or UKIP peers despite getting over 16% at the 2015 election, while the Lib Dems got 11 new peerages after picking up 8% at the ballot box. After a post-election debate over the mismatch between votes for parties and MPs elected, you would have hoped the Lords appointments would redress the imbalance.

Politically-imbalanced, disproportionately White, the few BME peers disproportionately uninterested in race equality. This all strengthens the arguments for wholesale reform of the Lords. In the meantime one short-term measure could be to chuck out the inactive peers who claim hundreds of thousands in expenses but have not voted once in the past year, and replace them with BME peers who care about equality.

Lester Holloway