Right answer, spoken out of turn

RETURNED to power with a surprise majority in May and now facing a weak Labour opposition, Britain’s Conservative government has found everything almost too easy. Sure enough, on October 26th came the banana skin: a flailing defeat in the House of Lords, the drowsy but occasionally deadly upper chamber, which voted to delay a big welfare cut.The slip-up was richly deserved. The scotched plan, to take £4.4 billion ($6.7 billion) in tax credits, mostly from the lowest-paid, would have inflicted hardship on the country’s poorest children and reduced incentives for their parents to work. Britain is better off with the measures on ice. Yet the defeat by the Lords presents a bigger problem. Unelected and unaccountable, the peers tread on dangerous ground when they slap down the plans of an elected government. If the House of Lords is to serve as a check on power—which, as this week showed, is needed—it must undergo a few reforms of its own.