The Case As Yet Unheard:
a defence of the hereditary peerage
This appeared as an essay in Social Affairs Unit pamphlet Research
report 29 in 1999. With nearly 100 hereditaries currently (22 January
2001) in place, it remains timely.
Click to and fro footnotes
The hereditary peers are to have their right to vote in the House
of Lords removed, as part of New Labour's devotion to modernising
the country and making it somehow "young" and "forward-looking".
This is very odd, since the country has never had greater need of
the hereditary peers: they are the very thing a country which was
actually modern and young would hang on to. Less surprisingly, the
party most of the peers support, the Tories, seem to have agreed
that the demise of their special role should be polite and uncontested,
perhaps even in advance of its being very clear what a "reformed"
House will look like.
We will see. Their Lordships - hereditary or not, Tory or not -
are certainly notable for their politeness, but they are not particularly
predictable. Except perhaps in this: they do seem to understand
that their role is to be an independent voice. This may lead to
even more surprises than we saw during 1998 when this decorous backwater
of the British state saw the sacking of Lord Richard as the leader
of the Labour peers, covert deals, Commons drama, and the sudden
sacking as leader of the opposition of Lord Cranborne, a scion of
the incomparable Cecil family. The Cecils, by the way, could in
a few years' time claim a 400 year tradition of speaking and voting
in the House of Lords, and may yet achieve it as part of a rump
of "hereditaries" condoned during an interim period before
total abolition.
The ending of the hereditaries' rights seems so natural to most
people that it is important to see why it is not sensible or natural.
The hereditary peers in practice: independent and conservative
Abolition of hereditary voting isn't an extraordinarily popular
cause. Feelings and views on the whole business of Lords reform
are divided and largely uninformed. Pollsters' trawls of public
opinion demonstrate that about two-thirds of people favour some
change or other for the House of Lords. [1] About a quarter favour
outright abolition of the House, and presumably want a unicameral
system. According to various polls, between around a fifth and a
third of people favour leaving the House exactly as it is. Gallup
puts the matter very clearly. Its numbers suggested a bit under
a third of people in favour of unspecified reform; a slightly smaller
number in favour of outright abolition of the House; and very slightly
more than a third in favour of leaving the House as it is, replete
with hereditaries.
This last is especially the option favoured by those who are older,
who claim to take an interest in the subject, or who vote Conservative.
On two and possibly three counts, these are the very people one
would listen to when trying to preserve the country's valuable traditions.
Now of course, it is a serious failing of opinion polls that they
can seldom measure the seriousness, depth or value of people's feelings
and views. Indeed, the real difficulty is that calling any opinion
polls as evidence for anything to do with the Lords is flawed. The
Lords has traditionally operated as a check on the predominate power
in the land. This implies that it must now be a check on public
opinion, which currently rules us, just as it once was on the King,
who used to.
It is peculiar and paradoxical, but true too, that an effective
defence of the House of Lords could only have come from a political
class which had vision and self-denying concern for the well-being
of the country rather than the political class itself. Tony Blair
may not pack the Lords with cronies. He may enjoy enhancing his
reputation for a post-political approach to power even more than
he would have enjoyed exercising more obvious power. He is not,
in any case, the man to understand the merit of leaving a committed
awkward squad at the heart of the legislature.
Politicians of the modern sort fancy themselves to be members of
a profession which is moulded by, and moulds, public opinion. New
Labour and "new" Tories can contemplate the erosion of
power amongst politicians because they have figured for themselves
an interesting and lucrative career as people who are more like
pollsters than leaders. In this thinking, opinion polls and focus
groups are much more easy to deal with than peers whose most obvious
feature is that they carry over into the present prejudices garnered
from the past.
The present House of Lords performs quite well the role of sceptical
oversight of a political world dominated by the need and longing
to be popular. Of course, it must not go too far: it must never
seriously compete with the Commons. But within these limits, it
has been a useful piece of grit in the process, and the hereditaries
have played a proper part in that.
Good government has required that they not merely be mildly reactionary,
and sceptical of change, but a reliable source of these qualities.
But the hereditaries are usefully surprising, too. Most of them
are Tory, but what is more peculiar, granted the dislike by socialists
and others of the Tory majority in the Lords, is the way that Tory
hereditaries simply do not dominate the House of Lords. Lord Mottistone,
a busy and committed hereditary, has been watching the situation
since the mid-70s and concludes in an unpublished paper:
"From 1977 to 1997, at any one time only about one fifth of
the eligible hereditary peers attended the House sufficiently regularly
to have a serious influence on legislation and the conduct of the
country. By a mysterious process of self-selection, a constant number
of peers of both sorts [hereditary and life], then averaging 300,
attended regularly with about 250 on any one day. These came whether
the business was normal and dull to most of them or exciting and
politically interesting. In the latter case, the whips of organised
parties might seek to add to their own numbers; more, I suspect,
to impress their partly-informed colleagues in the Commons than
in the certain knowledge that the added numbers could both come
and be effective in party interest. The 300 regular attendees of
both sorts of peer then balanced out, over the years between 1977
and 1997, to approximately 120 Conservative, 120 Labour and Liberal
and 60 Crossbench."
It isn't even easy to find a worrying general drift of attitude
and approach amongst the hereditaries. What instead we find is what
one might expect of people who have no particular constituency to
satisfy. The hereditaries are not schooled in diplomacy. Usually
with infinite courtesy, but also plainly, they are freer than any
of us to speak their minds. They are, as a body of people, the least
fashionable people we could possibly invite to help us legislate.
Their circumstances of life insulate them from ostracism and worse
by those they offend.
These are not trivial matters. Political correctness is the name
we give an attitude of mind and a habit of speech which a pluralist
society must develop in order to defend the prickly sensitivities
of all the many self-appointed and genuine minorities of which it
is composed. Absurd as much of all this is, we could not do other
than go through a period in which it happened. The hereditaries
are amongst the few people who have not been inculcated in this
new discipline, and they are certainly the only people in the entire
political system who can say, when they want to and with complete
impunity, what a lot of nonsense they think it is.
Thus we see and can delight in a quality rare, especially in public,
in the general public, but quite common, even in public, in the
best of the hereditaries. Naturally, this sometimes takes trivial
forms. It is mildly offensive to some people when Lord Cranborne
says that the hereditaries are now like "fuzzy-wuzzies"
facing the Maxim gun in the time of the Boer War. But we know that
is what even quite nice people then called the blacks, and so the
expression is perfectly appropriate for use in an example drawing
on history. Besides, we know that a few very nice people of the
older generation still do use such language, partly as a deliberate
snub to modern fashions. No harm is done, and the thing adds to
the gaiety of nations. It happens that Cranborne is arrogant as
well as incautious, and it would be a pity if his style predominated
in the House. But it doesn't.
We know that sometimes the hereditaries speak for large sections
of the country, perhaps even a majority, and for people who keep
tactfully silent on some matters. On other occasions, they speak
equally boldly for under-represented minorities. The widowed, disabled
and the poor find their most reliable allies in the House of Lords.
As do the young. Their Lordships' House - acting in this case as
the grandfathers' union - was not in favour of lowering the age
of consent for homosexuals, and though that might seem undemocratic
and much else, there were hurrahs for the decision all over the
country. Of course, in the end, the Commons must prevail. But on
just such issues, the Lords can usefully go against the grain, just
as they did when - thirty years ago - they agreed that homosexual
acts in private should not be illegal. On a limited reform of the
laws on cannabis, on Mrs Thatcher's proposed Poll Tax, on the expense
of tertiary education for poor families, on the open list system
for proportionally representative elections and on dozens of other
matters, the reliable unpredictability of the Lords is not the least
of the reasons for maintaining the hereditaries' part in it.
Then there is the occasional matter on which the Lords are indeed
predictable. Where country matters are concerned, and especially
where country pursuits are concerned, the hereditary peers can be
relied on to be uncomfortably, indeed traditionally, bloody-minded,
and blood-minded. But again, a sensible nation - even one which
disapproved of rural barbarities - would think very hard before
dismembering an element in its constitutional settlement which perversely,
consistently, and from deep knowledge and commitment, argued against
the urban and rootless majority. It would, for instance, perhaps
be handy for Labour to be shot of the hereditaries before an anti-fox-hunting
bill comes before Parliament, and this because their Lordships may
prove remarkably popular when they defend the freedoms of a rural
minority, and do so even in the face of a general unease about the
right of men and hounds to chase foxes. Actually, Labour may come
to rue the absence of the hereditaries, whose opposition to the
measure could have made a plausible reason for pursuing it, and
whose absence may lay bare Labour's lack of real argument, interest
or advantage in the matter.
Anyway, we can see a particular merit of the reactionary nature
of many of the hereditaries. Our society is becoming more and more
the victim of televised moral panic, brought to us by sophisticated
pseudo-dissidents amongst the journalists and fostered by a powerful
Anxiety Industry of campaigners. On guns, dogs, paedophiles and
many other subjects, sudden flurries of anger and moral certainty
break out. The hereditaries are not a perfect guarantee against
such fits of nervous energy and opinion in a largely apathetic and
self-absorbed society, but they are likely to help and already often
have.
It is true that in the last five years of the 70s Labour saw a
far larger proportion of their bills suffer defeats in the Lords
than did the Tories for the next 18 years, and the rate has increased
again under the new Labour government. [2] The Lords inflicted 156
defeats on the Thatcher administration between 1979 and 1990, in
spite of her habit of marshalling the hereditary backwoodsmen in
a way which did nothing for their dignity and is now regarded as
contributing to Labour's dislike of them. It is not necessarily
important that many of the defeats of Governments of either stamp
were popular with the public. What matters is that any Government
trying to change anything very much will meet more or less proportional
Lords opposition.
Well way from the high drama of large events, there are plenty
of humdrum reasons for keeping the hereditaries, especially now.
Walter Bagehot wrote in his magisterial The English Constitution:
"A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions
said that 'the cure [[[[cure in itlaics]]] for admiring the House
of Lords was to go and look at it'". [3] That observation has
become very untrue, indeed it is the reverse of the truth. A hundred,
or five hundred, years ago we could have managed without a House
of Lords well enough, and perhaps been better off if we had attempted
to. Then, it might have been argued, the Lords constituted brute
self-interest to an unacceptable degree. Now, a visit to the place,
or an hour two watching its proceedings on cable, or a look at any
of the reports of its select committees, show that it is a hive
of humdrum, serious scrutiny of the activities of the EU and UK
executives, and occasionally the scene of real drama and often the
location of real wisdom.
If it were their usefulness which mattered, one might expect the
public to rally to the idea of hereditaries like David, Lord Mottistone.
His style could not be more different to that of Lord Onslow. Of
relatively new creation, the Mottistone title carries no great tradition
of landowning or affluence. The present baron, now 78, was a naval
officer with a gallant record until he retired because he thought
that Denis Healey, the then Secretary of Defence, was doing such
harm to the service that silence would have been cowardice. It was
only months later, and surprisingly, that Captain David Seely found
himself translated to their Lordships' House in 1966. He was soon
to become the head of what we would now call a Quango, concerned
with industrial training, and was shortly to become involved with
various trades association, amongst them the Biscuit, Cake, Chocolate
and Confectionary Alliance, surely the least martial-sounding organisation
in the country.
In his new role, he increasingly found himself operating as a professional
peer. He was perhaps the first of a species which was soon to become
extinct. Unpaid for their attendance in the House, some peers were
paid for furthering the interests of industry [4] . These interests
were usually of course declared, and flagged up when peers spoke
to them in the House (Lord Mottistone was very scrupulous in this
regard). The Lords is famously a House which prefers to listen to
people who know what they're talking about and Mottistone, for instance,
did.
But this sort of activity did not suit their Lordships, and a select
committee of the House outlawed it in late 1995. Now, a peer can
speak for interests if they are part of his business, or no part
of it, but must not be a freelance lobbyist. The changes make little
difference to Lord Mottistone, who has in any case determined to
retire from his fulltime involvement in the House. What is interesting
is that while lobbyist peers may have been useful in bringing specialist
knowledge to bear on legislation, the House of Lords preferred its
members to be free of the modern trade of interest-mongering, and
thus preserved a further difference between itself and the Commons.
Of course, the House's understanding of how it should behave makes
it yet more valuable that peers be people of leisure, and the hereditaries
are not by any means the less valuable for having amongst their
number plenty who can afford to put their time at the disposal of
parliament.
This defence of the hereditary peerage in the Lords naturally has
begun by seeing them as a valuable part of a modern House, never
more valuable than now, and gaining in justification as the modern
world unfolds.
Of course, this is counter-intuitive. There is an assumption, badly
wrong, that the Lords and especially the hereditaries represent
a nation trapped in its traditions, and in thrall to deference and
flummery. The House in its present form is seen as exemplifying
the "dignified" as opposed to the "efficient"
part of the constitution, as Walter Bagehot defined them. We are
supposed, perhaps rightly, to be less interested now in the cod-Medieval
showiness by which the old rich dress up to amuse us whilst fleecing
and bossing us too.
When not being absurd, their hereditary Lordships are often supposed,
quite wrongly, still to be pursuing some more or less sinister class
warfare. It is true that the families from which the hereditary
Lords have sprung have by definition surived many vicissitudes,
as all families must. They have done so partly out of rugged self-interest.
But they do not on the whole pursue crude self-interest in their
House, and are not keen to cling to their role in the House if to
do so would damage too greatly their private interest.
We should never have looked to the peers to defend themselves.
It is perhaps typical of a group of men schooled in particularly
British (not to say, English) forms of politeness that they should
be the last to raise their voices in their own defence. [5] But
there is more to it than that. Almost any peer of Britain - and
any successful one - knows a great deal about survival. Many have
kept wealth, land or influence, or all of them, as well as title,
and have done so in spite of waves of anxiety and real threat produced
by revolutions abroad and punitive taxation at home. As a class,
and as individuals, these are people who above all believe in preserving
the advantage which has accrued to themselves and - very particularly
- to their families. If parliamentary reform is inevitable, better
to bow to it gracefully than to incur the potentially disadvantageous
wrath of "the people".
Besides, and this is one reason why it is so perverse to be rid
of them, most of the peers are only in Parliament out of a desire
to be usefully as well as agreeably employed. Leave aside a tradition
of service which is considerable, over recent centuries, but increasingly
in recent decades, many peers have sensed that strategic self-effacement
was the best survival mechanism. If the people once accepted and
even demanded grandeur of the well-born, they have now come to expect
a curious mixture of spectacle and the threadbare cardigan. In some
peers, modesty was a strictly surface affair. Eton, where so many
aristocrats were and are educated, is uniquely efficient in producing
disguises for the arrogance of those scions of the aristocracy not
prepared to become genuinely modest but willing at least to moderate
their behaviour in public.
However, for many peers, as for many of the landed gentry, survival,
respectability and morality have combined in different measure to
make a really active and considered civic virtue genuinely attractive.
The emphasis has perhaps shifted over the years, but that only strengthens
the theme. The medieval barony may not have felt much need for self-deprecation
as they pressed their rights, and their regional authority, against
those of the Crown and the emerging nation state. But even so there
has been, from the earliest times, a real nobility, and noblesse
oblige, as well as self-interest, in aristocratic involvement in
the state.
By the late eighteenth century, we find some of the most thoughtful
of the landed aristocracy responding to the French Revolution as
though it were the nemesis the hubris of monarchic absolutism and
aristocratic vanity deserved. In the 1790s, Uvedale Price, a writer
from Herefordshire's landed gentry, deliberately fashioned what
we would now call an image for his class which had it fitted snugly
and usefully into the wider rural scene, and representing not so
much its own interest as that of its poorer and disenfranchised
neighbours. [6]
Price argued that a landed aristocrat living in a time of revolution
should merge himself as best he could into the rural scene. Price
was interested in estate management and in landscape aesthetics,
and argued that a landowner should plant trees in the proximity
of his house, and encourage the natural woodland near it, partly
because that would make his estate look more like a Claude Lorrain
painting, and partly because it would symbolise an identity of interest
between the landowner and the natural order, including the wider
local social scene which he should no longer rudely dominate, but
rather subtley influence and serve.
This picture of the aristocrat usefully merged with his society
has taken some quite big dents. In the Swinging Sixties Lord Lucan
and the "Claremont Set" (named after a West End gambling
club) stood in the public imagination as the unacceptable face of
the hereditary peerage: arrogant and spendthrift, their dash could
not quite make up for their delinquency. More recently, we have
had the death of the troubled Marquess of Bristol, and the lives
of several others, to remind us - what most of us enjoy remembering
- that few people can survive great wealth and advantage with equanimity
intact. The influence of the more politically active sort of aristocrat
has seemed at times no less "anti-social". The House of
Lords fought against factory act reform in the 19th century and
against the introduction of "socialist" income taxes in
this. Actually, their arguments were not solely self-interested,
and have - many of them - gained in credence since. But the hereditary
House lost every time, and has learned the lessons, perhaps too
well. The idea of the welfare state was unstoppable, and the enduring
issue for the Lords was, at the beginning of this century and since:
how to be the voice of legitimately awkward resistance to the Commons
without so alienating the "people" as to bring on the
extinction of the power or influence of the aristocracy? The result
was to clothe their debates in courtesy, but above all to hope that
the influence of their House could be maintained whilst, and because,
its power was diplomatically handed away.
Now they believe that to preserve the remnant of their House's
diminished influence and aetiolated power, they must leave the stage.
The hereditaries themselves have sold the pass. Lord Onslow, Michael
to his wide acquaintance, including many journalists and artists,
has had the starring role in the current drama about the House of
Lords. He is everything the large soap opera of modern society demands
in its bit-players: outspoken, stereotypical, and above all loquacious
in the way that simultaneously fills the airwaves and produces the
sound-bite which is so valuable to compressed news bulletins. He
is the personification of intelligent, informed, well-connected
classiness.
Onslow is a notable if amusing and occasionally mildly embarrassing
contributor to debates in the House of Lords. He is never happier
than when quoting Gibbon and spouting Latin tags at their Lordships.
He exclaimed for all to hear that he was "prepared to behave
like a football hooligan" as New Labour pressed reforms upon
the House which he loves.
But Michael Onslow is only one of many hereditary peers who are
meekly volunteering a long neck for the block of reform. In the
two day debate on abolition of the hereditaries in October 1998,
he said: "Of course I would be sad no longer to be here, and
hope I have had some positive influence, but I do not know a single
hereditary peer who does not know our time has come".
Onslow is not alone in insisting that his last gestures of defiance
about the nature of reform are the least duty he owes the House
before he leaves it. It is as though people who love the House of
Lords sense that it is worth scrapping its most ostentatiously undemocratic
feature in order that the second chamber be saved from wholesale
democratisation.
It would be easy enough to defend the principle of a reformed House
of Lords on sensible, Conservative grounds. It would be comparatively
easy to do so on sensible, socialist grounds. For generations, many
powerful Britons have thought it worthwhile to preserve, not least
because it is possible to reform, the House of Lords. Even J S Mill,
who declared himself sceptical of the need for a second chamber
in an intelligent democracy, nonetheless thought that a less aristocratic
House than the one he knew might be a useful bulwark against a "despotic
and overweening" political party in the Commons. [7]
No modern party is likely to be moved by that argument. Indeed,
New Labour is likely to want to settle for a House as little capable
of seriously inconveniencing the majority in the Commons as is consistent
with its looking thoroughly democratic. They start with the small
problem of democratising the place, not with the greater problem
of preserving its useful awkwardness. They are not the first political
party to wrestle with such issues. Historically, many of the most
plausible reforms have been suggested by Tories. The House of Lords
has itself often suggested reforms which the rest of Parliament
might consider. [8]
Of course different players in the political and constitutional
games have come to the issue from very different positions. Some
on the broad Right have sought to reform the House of Lords because
they believed strongly in its fundamental importance, and believed
they could best secure its survival by making the thing more conformable
to modern ideas. On the Left, there is less acceptance of the idea
of a second, senatorial chamber, and still less of a seignorial
one. Still, even Left-minded people can accept that there ought
to be some checks on the Commons, and even on the power of the People,
and have in any case been unsure what the wider response might be
to hacking away too thoroughly at hallowed institutions. So the
Left proposes reforms with less enthusiasm for the institution itself,
but with an understanding that reform is the better course in so
evolutionary a society as Britain.
The "extreme" left and right are sometimes in agreement
on the matter. [9] Michael Foot and Enoch Powell were an unholy
alliance of extremes of their parties when they combined to stop
Harold Wilson's minor Lords reform package thirty years ago. Foot
thought the reforms too readily enshrined some role for the hereditaries;
Powell saw them as damaging the traditions of the House too much.
Reform is more likely now because there are probably less strong
feelings around than previously: less principle, fewer principled
people. Some fudge may emerge where previously people had felt strongly
on all sides of this many-faceted argument.
It might well be argued - and will be - that the powers of the
House of Lords ought to be strengthened. Or weakened. It might very
possibly be that the House of Lords ought to have a membership which
was more able to represent the people of Britain. [10] Or less.
To achieve this, the membership of the House of Lords might need
to be more "like" the people of Britain. Or less. These
desirables might be best achieved by election. Or by selection.
All these issues are difficult to resolve, and there will be a good
deal of debate about them. In the meantime, it has seemed obvious
to all parties that we can at least all agree that we should get
rid of the hereditaries. Abolition of their parliamentary role is
the essential radical move which can be made so as to satisfy Labour's
ranks, whilst very little offending the Tories or even the hereditaries
themselves.
The hereditary peers in principle: class, family and interest
It is very easy to argue that whatever one does with the House of
Lords, and however the rest of it is composed, the hereditaries
are the most natural, not to say the most necessary, part of it.
Indeed, the main though infinitesimally small hope now is that though
Labour will introduce and see succeed a bill which will abolish
the hereditaries, good sense will prevail and see the re-introduction
of many of them. This might be the best of all possible worlds.
The English monarchy was much strengthened by being first abolished,
then missed and finally re-instated by popular acclaim. Great strength
was gained by the constitutional acceptance of a monarch who, while
not elected, was nonetheless clearly chosen by the elite of the
day on the understanding that a monarchy was in the public good.
In our own time, we could yet return to the hereditary principle
for a part of our legislature, and give it a refreshed authenticity
and authority because we had volunteered for it.
Even though we have a constitutional monarchy, no logic on earth
can save the monarchy once the hereditary principle is despised,
as it is by New Labour. Baroness Flather (a one-time Conservative
life peer, and now an independent) pointed out in October's debate:
"The hereditary principle is being decried so why is this country
to remain a monarchy? That is the foundation of all hereditary principles,
so why are we not moving towards becoming a republic? If the monarchy
is hereditary, then the principle is enshrined in the constitution
of this country."
It was perhaps typical that it required an Asian immigrant to stand
for the values and traditions of her adopted country. She alone
had the temerity to point out what the hereditaries really meant
to the House:
"The legitimacy of the hereditary Peers has been questioned.
[But] it is their House. We should be questioned as to whether or
not we are here legitimately. It is very strange to say to people
whose title dates back for a thousand years that their legitimacy
must be questioned while those who are appointed by the party machine
become more legitimate. It is quality and not quantity in the end
which will give this House authority. It will not be a question
of hereditary or non-hereditary. We need the best people possible
to do the job most needed." [11]
This is itself not a clear argument. If the hereditaries were accorded
power or influence as of right, it wouldn't matter whether they
exercised it well. Moreover, the hereditary principle's strength
ought to derive from people's sense of its normality in the whole
of society, not merely in the monarchy. We do sense that there is
a naturalnes to hereditary authority, and that efficacy and usefulness
flow from its naturalness.
So why are we to believe that the hereditary principle helps create
people who should be accorded influence? It is tempting to argue
that the hereditary principle is efficient because of the qualities
of the families involved. It might be, for instance, that talented
families produce talented children and that the hereditaries are
thus a repository of uncommon good sense. It might be argued that
aristocracy tends to arise from bloodlines which are rich in heroism,
entrepreneurship, or leadership and that this dynamism is uniquely
distilled in the descendants of the people of exceptional skill,
courage or forcefulness and should be kept at the elbow of politicians
of commoner stamp so as to advise, inform and stiffen them.
However, it might just as well be argued that none of these traits
is to be seen in the current generation of aristocrats, at least
to an uncommon degree. Besides, we see that madness is more easily
inherited than genius, energy or courage and those who love the
hereditary principle need a defence of it which is not dependent
on breeding maintaining only good qualities.
We don't nowadays accept the idea that there is really anything
very real behind the idea of "good breeding", or that
aristocrats have a particularly good hold on it anyway. There is
heroism, entrepreneurship and all the rest of it, everywhere in
society.
Lord Williams of Mostyn, speaking for the Government as the Home
Office Minister, attacked the hereditary principle in October's
debate. "We suggest", he said, "that the hereditary
principle - which means sheltered employment for the undeserving
classes - must cease and cease now." Somewhere in the House,
a peer called: "Cheap!". Lord Williams continued:
"My Lords, it is not cheap. I will explain why and I shall
do so in a little detail by referring to one or two words from the
noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, to which I listened with great care...
There have been a number of ingenuous and ingenious attempts to
defend what I suggest is indefensible.... Personally, I shall be
sorry to see many of the hereditary Peers go. I hope I can say this
with their approval: I enjoy their company; I enjoy their courtesy,
their grace, their charm and also their contributions to this House.
Those concerned know of whom I speak, but the Indian summer is past
now. I am sorry that people will feel disappointed, that they feel
that their service over the years will be spurned. It will not be.
I hope it is fully recognised. But the fact is that all these things
must pass.
"I promised, when I responded to a complaint that I had said
something unworthy, to return to what the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood
[a hereditary peer] said. He described his pride in his family,
in history and in public service. I respect that. I honour it. I
know him well and I think he would identify himself as one of those
I described earlier. He said of his ancestors and relatives, quoting
Yeats, 'they are no petty people'. Perhaps I may explain why some
of us have a slightly different view of society, history and tradition.
"My own father was a village schoolteacher. His father was
gassed in the First World War and could not, therefore, work properly
thereafter. His father, my father's grandfather, remembered the
evictions in West
Wales of tenant farmers because they voted according to their consciences
in parliamentary elections before the secret ballot Act of 1870
was passed. They were evicted from their homes and their farms and
many of them had to emigrate. They were back-country people. They
lived unremarked, though not unremarkable, lives, and I take up
the noble Lord's words, of duty and service. There are millions
like them in our country today. All I would say is this: 'they are
no petty people'.
"That is a small illustration, just a tiny cameo - and forgive
me my indulgence this late at night - but I am entitled to say,
as long as I can breathe, that I am proud of their service and duty,
but equally I do not look to them for any advantage in this world,
except their memory. I do not look to them to have provided me with
any personal or political advantage. I believe it would demean them
and demean me similarly." [12]
So there we are. An aristocrat reminding us of the value of his
people is presumed to have traduced the family of a non-aristocrat.
In People's Britain, there are no Petty People and so there can
be no grand people either.
There are indeed plenty of remarkable and unremarked families, and
it doesn't in any obvious way help the hereditary peers' case that
plenty more achieve generations of distinction without the background
of nobility. The Plowdens, the Huxleys, and so on, have all seemed
able to produce talent without tiaras. And there are myriad aristocratic
families which do not produce people of special distinction at all.
[13] Few aristocrats are without a certain elan, and one is glad
of that, but mild eccentricity and a sense of oneself hardly add
up to genius.
We simply do not now believe that blood alone will produce exceptional
people. Or rather: we believe that good blood is all over the place.
The change in attitude goes deeper. Our European cultures have
variously thrived and suffered by nurturing and then dismissing
the idea of a divine nobility, or at least a nobility which was
ordained and ordered by monarchs who were themselves annointed in
some special and holy way for their work. A loss of faith has scuppered
any widespread acceptance of the idea of the Divine Right of Kings,
however attractive it remains to some high churchmen and Catholics.
It is of some interest, indeed, that Tony Blair will go to Catholic
churches and presumably acknowledge the authority of the Pope, as
successor of St Peter, and a traditionalist if ever there was one.
But he will not concede the principle nearer home. It is true that
the Pope is in some sense elected, though by a "college"
which his predecessors have appointed. But the authority people
sense in the Pope flows from his succession from St Peter, and on
the mere fact of continuity, which it is of course right and natural
to value. Anyway, outside religious circles, the idea of annointed
power was wearing pretty thin four hundred years ago, and the Stuarts
in their very different ways presided over its final demise.
So it isn't their inherent and inherited virtues which make the
case for the parliamentary role of the hereditary peerage.
One does better, but it isn't the whole of the matter, if one stresses
the evolved and evolving role of peers as people with inherited
interests to defend.
The history of aristocratic parliamentary power mirrors the history
of the exertion of power by every other interest group, and indeed
of the role of "interest" in politics in general. Politics
used to be almost exclusively the business of interest groups coming
together to negotiate their respective needs and strengths. Property
was represented in Parliament, not people. We have seen crown in
negotiation with barony; land in negotiation with trade. Only when
the issue became one of capital in negotiation with labour did the
rightness of individuals' representation become an unavoidable issue.
Even then, one might come to politics with enlightened self-interest,
but one didn't need to dissemble: politics was avowedly the business
of making sure one's own interest - social, financial, territorial
- did not suffer. Some people - the 19th century Earl of Shaftesbury,
for instance, with his factory acts - might argue against their
familial or class interest, but they were exceptional figures, and
their motivation was incomprehensible to many.
It is interesting to note the House of Lords, even when its members
were all hereditaries and most of them infinitely more powerful
than their descendants are now, was not nearly as powerful as its
present enemies might suppose. Robert Perceval, a Clerk Assistant
of the Parliaments in the mid 70s, in a remarkable, unpublished
history of the place, writes:
"...It is most noticeable that, right from the beginning [certainly
from the 16th century], it is the Commons who take the lead. It
is their debates which arouse interest in the country; it is their
members whom the Government strive to influence or placate, and
it is obvious from the reports that the Commons were the active,
the decisive, House; that the Lords were expected to - and generally
did - merely follow suit, and that the political proceedings of
the House of Lords never attracted much attention in the country.
"....We should expect that the House of Lords would suffer,
as an institution, the same atrophy that has in more recent times
overtaken the Privy Council... but... in fact it is not too much
to say that, during the eighteenth century, the Lords' political
power was equal to that of the King and the rest of the country
put together. I say 'the Lords' political power', not the 'political
power of the House of Lords'; and this is the paradox. For while,
during the three-and-a-half centuries after 1500, individual peers
wielded, at most times, more political power and influence than
anyone, yet that power and influence was never exercised by the
House of Lords. It was never all gathered up and bent in one direction:
it was never used institutionally and corporately, but by individuals,
either privately or in some official capacity."
The House of Lords was never as powerful as people now suppose it
was; the Lords wielded power as powerful people, not as members
of a powerful body. Anyway, now we see something quite different.
Our House of Lords is much noticed, and especially when it is controversial.
Equally of interest, in our own lifetimes we have seen the collapse
of "interest" politics. The Tories have become corporatist
and Labour have become entrepreneurial, and each has done so to
the point of inter-changeability. The death of "interest"
has not been replaced by disinterestedness, however. The political
parties have now become very like firms professionally engaged in
the pursuit of power, and staffed by professional politicians who
must join one or other of the outfits in order to be in the business
at all. They may have a taste for one ideology over another, but
it will usually be justified by the ideology's usefulness to the
whole of society, not its special usefulness to one bit of society.
Politicians now offer competing brands of policy, but they cannot
afford to offer them to niche markets.
We now have a generation of politicians of whom it is less likely
than ever, and very observable, that they have not inherited their
political attitude and affinities from their fathers, or even derive
them from their own financial interests. The reason is easy to see.
Class is many things, but it has one necessary feature. That is
the inevitability of the child inheriting a social position from
his family. In a class society a father passes on advantage and
disadvantage to his children. No amount of merit or absence of it,
in either the father or the child, can much alter the fact.
The ordering of the Commons into the entrenched warfare of the classes
is dead because the class system, always weaker than advertised,
has finally all but died. It survives only in the underclass and
what was once called the ruling class. Only the poor of the urban
and rural heartlands, and the aristocrats, inherit and pass on important
social characteristics. Class is a minority sport. Oddly, one might
make an interesting case that the hereditary peerage should stay
in the parliamentary system because they are the only class of person
who now really understands the very poor class.
As Simon Winchester pointed out [14] , many young aristocrats served
for a time in the regiments of infantry or cavalry. The arrangement
suited them. The regiments were often based in London, and the uniforms
were glamorous. Guns, horses (and later, vehicles) were involved.
Courage rather than brainpower were what were needed, and a certain
streetwise savviness was either drawn upon or inculcated.
But one might remark that the social value of the arrangement was
that these grand young men were put in command of men who were as
uniquely disadvantaged before they joined the army as their commanding
officers were advantaged. Some of the young aristocrats and the
young unemployed - both often representing the less educable of
their respective classes - faced discomfort and worse together.
We do not need to claim that officers and men grew to like or love
each other, or even to share interests: but we can certainly say
that some of the privileged young men went on to inherit titles
and seats in the House of Lords and thus took into the heart of
the legislature a much closer understanding of the disadvantaged
than it is likely that many of the middling sort of people in the
Commons have ever had.
The point might be made more generally. One of the merits of an
aristocracy is that it suffers many of the disadvantages of the
poorest of society. Both extremes of society spawn excesses: indebtedness
and inebriation are the curse of both, whilst the middle classes
are bastions of orderly good sense.
Such factors to one side, it was always truer in Britain than in
any other European society that class was rather weak: social mobility
has always been one of the most commonly noticed features of our
society. This was notably true of our notables. Primogeniture and
the rules determined that only one descendent got the title and
the wealth: the rest fended for themselves and quickly lost all
vestiges of aristocracy if they could not refresh them by their
own merit. Moreover, ennoblement came quickly and surely to succeeding
waves of energetic "coming" men, and these refreshed an
aristocracy which was in other countries condemned by snobbery to
become anachronistic and unadventurous. [15]
So it is clearly true that the hereditaries are amongst the few
remaining people who could be said to have a class, and thus - arguably
- to have a class interest to defend. It is almost certainly some
curious remnant of class warfare which leads Labour, and perhaps
even some Tories, to want to do away with the hereditaries. The
move is one of the few that can be made which has a comfortingly
old-fashioned, recognisable element of the old party politics.
It is wrong to claim, however, that the hereditaries have much
of a class interest to defend, at least when the government is New
Labour. The only serious class interests remaining to them pertain
to their ability to have, to hold, and to inherit their wealth with
as little interference as possible. But the House of Lords long
ago gave up the right to discuss "money bills" of the
kind which might, theoretically, closely touch them and their financial
self-interest. [16] Besides, their Lordships are by no means the
only people who have such interests to defend, and they are not
even in the forefront of those who do.
It is true that their Lordships have a uniquely concentrated interest
in land ownership. [17] Land is to a remarkable degree in the hands
of peers, but that rather locks their Lordships out of entrepreneurship
than encourages it. The House of Lords is full of people whose wealth
could only be turned into capital by someone prepared to be extraordinarily
and exceptionally entrepreneurial: they would have to be confident
enough to put their own main asset - their land - on the line to
raise capital.
So far as capital and wealth creation is concerned, the hereditaries
are not so much either bystanders or major league players as a very
special case. Their Lordships would be upset if private land ownership
was under threat. For the rest, there is little these Lords could
do, or would be exceptional in wanting to do. There are rich people
amongst the Tories and New Labour, though more in both cases amongst
influential supporters of the party than amongst its much less important
elected members. Further socialism is unlikely to flow from the
Commons, or to need unique opposition from the Lords.
So it isn't that the hereditary Lords are brilliant, or that they
are bastions in defence of some interest or other, that matters.
Indeed, it is tempting to say that they are the most valuable,
because they are the most disinterested, element in the entire system.
These are not people the party whips or fund-raisers can easily
push around. The richer, and the less acceptable to some egalitarians
they are, the more they ought to appeal to people (often the same
egalitarians) who fear that a person in need of funds can be a very
biddable creature. As we have seen, there are hereditary Lords who
have the same sorts of PR and lobbying interests as members of the
Commons. That is all right, up to a point, and may even help them
- as it can help MPs - to understand the real world, or at least
some part of it, exceptionally well and usefully.
There is more to the hereditary peers, however, than their valuable
independence, and the way the working peers amongst them seem to
complement the working life peers politically. There are rich people
who could be co-opted to a second chamber for their brilliance as
well as their financial independence, and who might achieve the
same balance, and yet who would not, even so, be so valuable to
us.
Indeed, all sorts of people could be co-opted on all sorts of principles.
Demos, the left-leaning think-tank, has proposed a scheme by which
"ordinary" people could find themselves chosen by a sort
of Athenian lottery to sit in the House of Lords. [18] There is
something to be said for the idea. We have a long tradition of jury
service, and there might easily be a role for randomly selected
individuals to be forced or invited to concentrate on the nation's
affairs for a set period of time and give us the benefit of their
sound, amateur, common-sense.
They might even usefully do so in the House of Lords. We might
wonder why focus groups could not do much the same sort of thing,
or Citizens' Juries, or any number of other fashionable and possibly
useful forums. But even if we accepted the infusion of such people,
they would not be a replacement for the existing hereditary presence
in the House of Lords. The obvious drawbacks to the new Athenians
are only apparently contradictory: such members would and should
not be permanent, professional or hereditary. Above all, they would
not have the required background.
The very principle of the value of tradition and of the history
of the country is at stake. The vehicle of transmission of these
values is the family. That is why it makes sense to reward those
who make a very big contribution to the present by ensuring their
progeny a role in the future.
It happens that the familial element in this process enshrines
a principle almost too homely and visceral to be called a principle,
and it is all the more powerful for being so intuitively simple.
Bagehot believed that the hereditary - that is to say, the family
- monarchy had value precisely because of the ordinary way in which
it touched people: "It brings down the pride of sovereignty
to the level of petty life.... The women, one half of the human
race at least - care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry".
[19] He might have lived in the age of television rather than that
of the carrier pigeon, so well does he seem to foretell the advantages
(if he could not see the disadvantages) of regarding monarchs as
family people. His argument, by the way, gives the lie to the idea
that it is deference alone that gives us the key to understanding
the appeal of monarchy and aristocracy. We do indeed seem to love
to defer, and deference is clearly quite natural: the current generation
of stars of stage, screen and catwalk are venerated with a devotion
which would probably better be reserved for leaders or aristocrats,
or very nearly for anyone else.
But it is not exactly veneration or even deference which we should
accord the hereditary peers. Nor is it the converse: we are not
interested in the peers just because they have ancestors. We all
have ancestors.
Their value to us, especially their constitutional value to us,
is quite simply the aristocratic continuum they represent. They
could not be aristocratic except by having been part of special
families. But it is not as family men that they interest us. Luckily,
most of us know less of the family life of our aristocrats than
we now know of our monarch's. It is not mostly or even much as family
men that we do or should value them. We know some aristocrats buckle
under the pressure of privilege, and some blossom. That's not why
they are of interest to Hansard.
With the hereditaries of even mediocre quality, we get something
absolutely priceless in Parliament. We get something from almost
all of them which they have and which very few of the rest of us
have. This is quite simply their rootedness. Take first, the way
they are rooted in history. An aristocrat is almost certain to know,
and we are all able to know, and often do know almost as though
it were our own story, the history - the father to son story - of
his ancestors. In the case of the older titles, 20-odd successions
of eldest sons, or next of kin, will take us hop-scotching back
through the whole of our national history. Most of these men were
at the centre of the national life, for good or ill, and strongly
on the "right" or the "wrong" side of the nation's
arguments, throughout. It isn't remotely a disadvantage that this
or that ancestor of a hereditary was a fan of Hitler, or any other
nasty or unattractive cause. Their living descendants are not the
sum total of this sort of experience. They do not encapsulate it
or enshrine it. There is nothing holy or mystical, or even very
mysterious, about them or the process we see at work in them. Lots
of them do not live up to the reputation of their forebears, and
some exceed it. But these men are able to stand in the House of
Lords and remind us of this or that great-grandfather and his thoughts
and actions at this or that great juncture in the island story.
The peers need not pointedly remind us of the particulars of their
ancestors. Their very names remind us of the follies and grandeurs
of the governing class of the past many centuries. They are as good
advertisement for the perils we can note in our tradition as for
its merits. And then there is their rootedness in place. Some hereditary
peers do own a lot of land. But more than that, and even when they
are reduced (as Onslow and many others are) to the ownership and
management of a few farms, many of them can see from their farmhouses
the great houses and the estates and rolling acres which they no
longer own, but with which their names will forever be associated.
Whole counties (quite often not the one after which their title
is named) are closely associated with some hereditaries, by virtue
of ownership from previous (and sometime even present) times. Some
counties have been run from long before, and long after, the introduction
a hundred years ago of county councils, by noble families. Lord
Mottistone is typical in having been Lord Lieutenant, and Governor,
of the Isle of Wight, where his family have lived for generations.
This rootedness makes it often poignant, sometimes moving, and seldom
less than significant when a hereditary peer speaks of the place
- usually the county - he comes from. Their insights may be pedestrian
or dotty, but they are seldom plain ignorant.
These connections in time and place cannot now be replicated by
selection or election amongst any other sort of people. All of us
who are [1] not hereditary peers may be proud of our forebears,
and we may have more to be proud of in our forebears than many of
the hereditaries have in theirs. But the sheer intimacy of knowledge
they have - the length of the connections they can claim - is simply
unique in this country, and probably anywhere in the world. To have
organised a system whereby by such a human resource is put at the
service of the nation certainly is unique in the whole world. Only
the British, always dangerously careless with tradition and casually
confident about the future, would throw it away lightly. They have
picked a bad time to do so, because now - more than any other time
- societies which can easily hold on to the enduring, and which
have enduring qualities and institutions which do not hold them
back, ought to be proud of them. Everywhere, we see cultures which
are unable to nurture the civilised and the traditional, and are
suffering for it. Here in Britain, we are also infected by the modish,
and risk being deafened by the present and the transient. In the
hereditaries we have the harmless and useful embodiment of our traditions,
and we should value it.
By some miracle we still have the House of Lords, and more amazingly
still it still has the hereditaries. An extraordinary advantage
to our national life has been vouchsafed us, and it is a miserable
thing to be a part of the generation which chucks it away.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Voters ready to back plans for Lords reform (reporting MORI),
The Times, 24 July 1998; Most voters want elections for new House
of Lords (reporting Gallup), Daily Telegraph, June 8 1998
[2] The Economist, November 21, 1998
[3] Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, 1867.
[4] A member of the House of Lords, who is unpaid, costs about £37,000
a year, about a tenth of the cost of a member of the House of Commons
or about a thirtieth of the cost of a member of the European Parliament.
See, House of Lords briefing paper, HoL, London SW1A 0PW
[5] There are several modern portrayals of the British aristocracy.
Simon Winchester's Their Noble Lordships: The hereditary peerage
today, Faber and Faber, 1981, is lively and serious.
[6] The Picturesque Landscape, ed Stephen Daniels and Charles Watkins,
1994, Department of Geography, University of Nottingham.
[7] J S Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on
Representative Government, Dent, 1972
[8] One good summary of reform possibilities is the Constitution
Unit's Reforming the House of Lords, £3 plus £2 p and
p, (cheques payable to the University of London) from The School
of Public Policy, Brook House, 2-16 Torrington Place, London WC1E
7HN
[9] William Wyndham's Peers in Parliament Reformed, Quiller Press,
1998 is a timely account of the constitutional role of the Lords
and of past and present attempts to reform it
[10] In the sense we have especially from Edmund Burke, in which
to "represent" someone or an interest is to have their
interests at heart, and borne in mind, rather than to have delegated
authority only to advance their precise and previously-stated opinion
and policy.
[11] Hansard, House of Lords, 14 Oct 1998, Column 1021
[12] Hansard, House of Lords, 15 Oct 1998, Column 1163
[13] J Bernard Burke (founder of Burke's Peerage) reinforces the
sense of an aristocracy which is a) subject to the normal vicissitudes
of heredity and is b) both old but constantly refreshed. In his
Extinct Peerage (1883) he makes these points:
"It is a fact no less strange than remarkable that the more
conspicuous a man is for his great mental powers, the more rarely
does he leave a representative to perpetuate his name. Neither Shakespeare,
nor Milton, nor Marlborough, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, nor Walter
Scott, nor Chatham, nor Edmund Burke, nor William Pitt, nor Fox,
nor Canning, nor MacAulay, and, I may add, nor Palmerston, nor Beaconsfield,
has a descendant, in the male line, living. May not the same observation
be applied with equal truth to those families which stand out the
most prominent in the pages of history? May not the splendour of
race like the splendour of mind have too much brilliancy to last?
Beauchamp, De Vere, Beaufort, De Clare, De Lancy, Dunbar, Bohum,
De la Pole, Sydney, Holland, Tudor, Plantagenet, and Mortimer are
'entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality'. This ever-recurring
extinction of English titles of honour formed the subject of a chapter
in my work on 'The Vicissitudes of Families', and I venture to reproduce
from it the following passages which bear strikingly on the Dormant
and Extinct Peerage:
'After William of Normandy had won at Hastings the broad lands
of England, he partitioned them among the chief commanders of his
army, and conferred about twenty earldoms: not one of them now exists,
nor one of the honours conferred by William Rufus, Henry 1, Stephen,
Henry ll, Richard l, or John... All the English Dukedoms, created
from the institution of the order down to the commencement of the
reign of Charles ll, are gone, except only Norfolk and Somerset,
and Cornwall, enjoyed by the Prince of Wales...
The Present House of Lords cannot claim amongst its members a single
male descendant of any one of the Barons who were chosen to enforce
magna Carta, or any one of the Peers who are known to have fought
at Agincourt.'"
[14] see above
[15] Sir Bernard Burke, of Burke's Peerage, wrote an introduction
to his 1883 book on the extinct peerages of Britain which is fascinating
on the endurance, and lack of it, of titled families, and refers
also to a further volume of his, The Vicissitudes of Families. J
H Plumb in his England in the Eighteenth Century remarks how amazed
Voltaire and others were at the ease with which people could insinuate
themselves successfully into a new class.
[16] The House of Lords produces useful guides to its workings and
brief accounts of its history: House of Lords, London, SW1A 0PW,
telephone 0171 219 3107 and website: www.parliament.uk
[17] Winchester (see above) asserts that a third of Britain's land
is owned by 1,500 family, with the hereditary peers owning perhaps
four million acres. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that, the
ownership is certainly perceived by many peers and country-dwellers
to be as much an onerous duty as an undeserved privilege.
[18] The Athenian Option: Radical Reform for the House of Lords,
by Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty. £2.95 plus 60p p and p,
from demos, 9 Brideswell Place, London EC4 6AP
[19] Walter Bagehot, as above. |