Britain will be worse without hereditary peers

This article was first published in The Critic.

Though it was first broadcast twenty-seven years ago, there’s one scene in Molly Dineen’s documentary The Lords’ Tale that has always stuck in my head. As Dineen passes along a corridor of Parliament, where she is documenting the final months of the vast majority of hereditary peers, Lord Ahmed, a newly appointed Labour life peer, is telling a House of Lords servant what he thinks will happen to his hereditary colleagues. 

“Aaaw, yes, they must be deciding when they are going out of this place … that’s tomorrow,” he says, adding — with a touch on the servant’s shoulder and a hint of menace— “but I wouldn’t get you involved in politics”. Ahmed was to prove correct: on 11th November 1999, the day after his smug prophecy, the Lords passed the government’s House of Lords Bill, which saw the hereditary peers expelled at the end of the parliamentary session. Or rather, it saw all of them expelled except a rearguard of ninety-two, who were elected as representatives of the hereditary faction by peers of the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Crossbench groups, in proportion to those groups’ numbers amongst the herediaries as a whole.

Until the recess of Parliament last week, that rearguard — whose numbers the House kept topped up by means of unusually polite by-elections — still sat in the House. Now, though, Sir Keir Starmer’s government has finished what Tony Blair’s started and has expelled even these last remaining parliamentary aristocrats. As the Paymaster General put it when moving the Bill in the Commons, “[This] is a matter of principle for this Government, who are committed to fairness and equality.”

Progressives always talk like that, and without conscious irony, because they think that they alone care about fairness and equality. But as eight hundred years of parliamentary tradition now come to an end, it’s worth pausing for a moment to ask whether the final expulsion of the herediaries is really equitable or fair.

The first thing to consider is what the House will be like without them, when Parliament resumes and only life peers (including bishops) will be entitled to walk through the bronze gates into the chamber. Sadly, the quality of today’s lifers is not high. Of course, most of them are more honest than dear old hereditary-hating Lord Ahmed — a prominent “community leader” type convicted of historical sex offences. But they have little more to recommend them. Scanning the red benches, one can pick out various tribes: the ponderous, officious, plodding ladies; the former local-government big-wigs, comfortable in their lanyards; the vaguely spivvish ex-Tory MPs and businessmen who introduce themselves as “Lord This-or-That”; the utterly useless Lib Dems, appointed in the fat years of the coalition. The overall quality of life peers is now so low that half of them cannot even understand traditional Lords forms; they talk to the House of “the noble Lord Bloggs” instead of the “the noble Lord, Lord Bloggs”, as if “the noble Lord” were an evaluative statement rather than a courtesy.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When, in 1999, the ministers of Tony Blair’s first government put their House of Lords Bill before Parliament, they presented Lords reform as both obvious and indisputably rational. Those who held their seats by an accident of birth (a favourite phrase at the time) were to make way for knowledgeable, learned, experienced people appointed on merit alone, for life alone.

So much for undergraduate political theory. In practice, Labour and the Conservatives alike stuffed the red benches with lobby fodder, and unlikely nobles proliferated. There are, of course, a few really excellent life peers even now — writers such as Lord Moore, perceptive defence chiefs such as Lord Stirrup, and a few elderly former cabinet ministers with first-class minds, survivors from days when intelligence was a pre-requisite for ministerial office. But they are rarities: the average quality of lifers is embarrassingly, conspicuously lower than that of the herediaries just expelled.

What was the herediaries’ secret? A few points suggest themselves. First: whereas the managerialist class that displaced them propagated the myth that aristocrats were stupid, most of them are actually very capable people. Second: most hereditaries held titles that were created many years ago, and so were able to sit in Parliament without owing allegiance to any patron. Third, almost all herediaries had received an excellent education, and were raised to love Britain and its ancient traditions of government; they understood our ancient, Christian constitution, and had an instinct for the tried-and-tested British way of doing things. (That’s one reason why Tony Blair hated them: he wanted to turn our constitution into a generic euro-secular one, and he knew that the hereditaries would stand in his way). 

Fourth: hereditaries in Parliament knew that they did not get there on merit, and rather than this fact being a recipe for arrogance, the reverse was true: it functioned as a guard against flattery. They didn’t get a frisson from the clerks’ calling them “my Lord”, and they tended not to have inflated opinions of themselves. Fifth: they lived all around the country, and knew far more about the needs, sentiments and difficulties of ordinary British people, especially the under-represented rural section of them, than the North-London-based contemporary elite. Sixth, and perhaps most importantly: they were not politicians. They hadn’t been through the sausage-machine of party selection processes and held a broader range of views than those that had.

If those were the merits of the hereditaries, they lead us back to our original question: is the expulsion of the hereditaries really fair or equitable? Here I would pose two further questions. First: is it fair to the public to denude the House of people with a wide range of life experience and (often) long parliamentary experience too, whose skills helped ensure that legislation were well drafted? Will people who now fall foul of badly worded laws take comfort in the knowledge that they at least weren’t drafted by any aristos?

Second: does the expulsion of the hereditaries help the house become more representative of the British public? Or does it in fact make it more exclusionary: more metropolitan, more sanitised, more ignorant, more philosophically fashionable?

If ministers are too dogmatically egalitarian to care about the answers to these questions, then so much the worse for them, and so much the worse for the country. It might not be how they wish to expend political capital, and perhaps there will be bigger constitutional battles to face, but a future small-c conservative government that truly wants to repair the British Constitution could do worse than begin by welcoming the hereditary peers back into Parliament — and not just the ninety-two, but all of them. Then we would truly see some diversity in Westminster.