Sadiq Khan joins House of Lords as outgoing UK PM names 26 new peers
Sadiq Khan and 25 others will now be able to sit in the House of Lords, where they can scrutinise, revise and vote on United
Sadiq Khan and 25 others will now be able to sit in the House of Lords, where they can scrutinise, revise and vote on United Kingdom legislation as life peers. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has named the mayor of London as one of 26 people to be given seats in the House of Lords, in one of his final acts as prime minister. In a release published on Thursday, the UK government announced Khan’s appointment to the House of Lords alongside senior figures from politics, philanthropy, social action, the military and business. Sadiq Khan, a former Labour MP for Tooting, is halfway through his third term as London mayor, having first been elected in 2016.
Khan’s appointment to the House of Lords is among the final decisions taken by Starmer before Andy Burnham is expected to succeed him as Labour leader on Friday and as UK prime minister on Monday, July 20. Other nominations Outgoing prime ministers traditionally recommend political peerages, allowing nominees to sit for life in the House of Lords. Of the 26 nominees, just 16 were nominated by Labour, five by the Liberal Democrats, three by the Conservatives and two are crossbench peers, meaning they have no party affiliation. Among Labour’s nominees are Parvais Jabbar and Saul Lehrfreund, human rights campaigners who cofounded the Death Penalty Project, and Cathy Ashley, a families’ rights campaigner and former head of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
Chief of the General Staff of the British Army General Sir Patrick Sanders was among those nominated by the Conservatives. Economist Tim Leunig, chief economist at the British social innovation foundation Nesta, was nominated by the Liberal Democrats. One of the two crossbench peers nominated was former senior judge Sir Brian Leveson, who led the 2011 Leveson Inquiry into the conduct of the British press following the phone-hacking scandal. Starmer did not award any nominations to right-wing Reform UK, which now has seven MPs in the House of Commons following Nigel Farage’s resignation earlier this month.
Farage, who remains the party’s leader, said: “Once again, there is nothing for Reform and we get an even more unrepresentative upper house.” Before the latest appointments, the Conservatives held 246 seats in the House of Lords, compared with Labour’s 216, leaving the opposition with a numerical advantage in the upper chamber.
The BriefWire