I am going to attempt something that might strike you as eccentric. Over the next 750 words, I am going to seek to persuade you, a citizen of the world’s greatest republic, that the United Kingdom is wrong to phase out its last hereditary peers — that is, the last 92 members of the House of Lords who owe their places to being their fathers’ sons.
Many of my American friends have what I have always found a flattering view of Britain , seeing us as a country of dowager duchesses, curtseying maids, and steam trains that carry excited children to boarding schools. In reality, we tend to be rougher and ruder than our American cousins. But one of the few ways in which we conform to stereotype is in being only one of two places in the world (along with Lesotho) to have a hereditary element in our legislature.
The House of Lords dates ultimately from the Magna Carta, which laid down limits on royal power, and provided for a council of bishops and barons to enforce those limits. Fifty years later, in 1265, they were joined by an assembly of elected burghers and knights, and, in time, these two chambers developed into the Lords and Commons.
The House of Commons progressively became the more powerful of the two, with the Lords losing their power to block laws in 1911. From 1958, life peers could be created — that is, Lords who would sit in the Upper House alongside the hereditaries but whose titles would die with them. Tony Blair won the 1997 election on a promise of two-stage reform: first, abolition of the hereditaries; second, the replacement of the chamber with some kind of senate.
Why two stages, asked suspicious opponents. Why not move straight to an elected chamber? Could it be that, once Blair scrapped the hereditaries, he would never get around to stage two, instead enjoying the unparalleled power of stuffing the Lords with his friends?
Faced with their impending abolition, the hereditaries did a deal with Blair. They would not delay or frustrate his reform provided that, in return, he let some of them (after a bit of haggling, it ended up at 92) remain, with special elections to replace them when they died. It was a bizarre arrangement, but that was the whole point. Those 92 hereds were supposed to be the pebble in the shoe, an uncomfortable reminder that the promised democratic reform had not been delivered.
More than a quarter of a century on, we are still waiting. Blair filled the Upper House with his partisans, Tony’s cronies; and every prime minister who followed did the same, including Boris Johnson , one of whose appointments was me. Now, reneging on the original deal, Labour plans to tap the pebble from the shoe without delivering the promised democratic reform.
That, ultimately, is the case against scrapping the hereditary peers. Not that they add color, although, with names like the Earl of Cork and Orrery, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, and Lord Willoughby de Broke, they do. Nor that they take on unglamorous jobs that appointed peers, many of them retired ministers, think themselves too grand to do. Nor yet that they are more diverse in their opinions than the appointees, some having even voted for Brexit.
No, the fundamental objection is that Labour, which enjoys an unassailable majority in the Commons despite a low proportion of the popular vote, plans to cement its dominance, removing the last traces of opposition.
Never mind Lesotho. In how many countries does the executive get to fill one of the two legislative chambers with placemen? Imagine if Joe Biden got to hand-pick the Senate. The whole point of the legislature, after all, is to hold the government to account.
In removing the only elected element from the House of Lords — elected, it is true, by other hereditary peers, but that’s still better than nothing — Labour is removing one of the few checks on its power. All talk of democratic reform has been quietly dropped.
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I happen to favor an elected senate, but, frankly, almost anything is better than a government-appointed chamber. A regional congress like Germany’s Bundesrat, a House where people are elected for long nonrenewable terms, a chamber selected by lot or, yes, by heredity (which is close to selection by lot) — all would be preferable.
The House of Lords, as Gilbert and Sullivan put it, “does nothing in particular and does it very well.” Until they have a proposal for something better, Brits should stick to what works.
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