If Labour rejects the hereditary peerage, it must abhor the monarchy
There are moments in parliamentary politics when the hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness of its practitioners are encapsulated in a single act of monumental contradiction. Such a moment occurred at the recent State Opening of Parliament, when the announcement that the remaining 92 hereditary peers would lose their seats in the House of Lords was read out by the occupant of the 93rd hereditary seat in that chamber: the throne.
The sole reason advanced for expelling the hereditary peers from the Upper House is objection to the hereditary principle. Yet logic invincibly dictates that it is impossible to reject the hereditary principle in respect of the House of Lords and credibly swear a public oath to “be faithful and bear true allegiance to King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to law”. The hereditary system is the keystone of the British constitution: to repudiate the principle of hereditary succession to a peerage is an implicit repudiation of the succession to the throne.
Bagehot divided the British constitution into effective and decorative parts, though the decorative parts also performed an effective function, but less powerful than the complementary elements. The monarchy was, historically, the chief effective part of the constitution, but it now is the chief decorative component. Although, similarly, the House of Lords was formerly the more powerful arm of parliament, it has progressively been transformed into another part of the decorative constitution. Yet both the monarchy and the House of Lords retain some vestigial, if heavily circumscribed, powers.
That is how revolutions work in Britain. In 1649, the insurgent Commons and, in 1688, the great Whig nobles successively stripped the monarchy of its power, while retaining it as a formal institution. Then, in 1832 and 1910, the Commons subjected the Upper House to the same fate. In recent times, the House of Commons, in turn, has begun to be subjected to the same process of emasculation, its powers increasingly relinquished to devolved assemblies, the courts, quangos, and supranational bodies and tribunals. If the Commons’ conduct in attempting to reverse a national referendum result is repeated, in a tin-eared refusal to acknowledge the popular will on issues such as immigration, it is possible the public itself might deliver the coup de grâce to that now totally unrepresentative chamber.
That the House of Commons has any moral right to “reform” the second chamber, when its own composition is a travesty of equity, is absurd. We have just experienced a general election in which Reform UK won 4.1 million votes and was rewarded with five Commons seats, while the Liberal Democrats, with just 3.5 million votes, gained 72 seats. Labour, with 9.7 million votes, only slightly more than twice Reform’s tally, won 411 seats. No wonder, of European countries, only Belarus and, in a modified form, France retain the discredited first-past-the-post electoral system.
If Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues were remotely serious about reforming parliament, the King’s Speech should have contained provisions for an electoral commission to be convened to draw up proposals for a system of proportional representation. Instead, the old canard of “House of Lords reform” was dished up as a distraction and as an appeasement of Labour’s more knuckle-trailing backwoodsmen.
By what criterion can a system of appointment of peers by party patronage be considered more democratic, or fair, or representative than the hereditary system? Why is it more acceptable to drape a donor of party funds in ermine than to summon to the Upper House the descendant of a military hero, brought up in a family in which a sense of public duty has been transmitted from generation to generation, along with its coronet?
As for meddlesome schemes to abolish the Lords and replace it with an elected senate, that would be nothing more than an overflow chamber of the House of Commons, packed with expensive career politicians and party hacks, providing yet another tranche of half-baked tribunes of the people, keen “to make a difference”, on top of devolved assemblies and elected mayors, all aggravating the Balkanisation of Britain and divisive politics sundering and weakening the United Kingdom. We need fewer politicians, not more, and fewer political forums.
The British constitution, within living memory the most stable in the world, has been vandalised, weakened and reduced to incoherence since the Great Charlatan Tony Blair treated it as his plaything. An American-style Supreme Court, tricked out in foreign-style robes reflecting the establishment’s Europhile sympathies, sits incongruously at the apex of our judicial system. The ancient office of Lord Chancellor, occupied by such diverse notables as St Thomas More and F E Smith, Earl of Birkenhead, has been reduced to a travesty, vandalised by Blair and his former flatmate Charlie Falconer, on the pretext that the ECHR (yes, that comic tribunal again) would not tolerate the dual Cabinet and judicial role of the lord chancellor, despite 1,400 years of precedent.
Today, Labour is being lobbied on further constitutional reform by the Ghost of Crisis Past, Gordon Brown, so we can look forward to further incoherence and vandalism. Labour is irredeemably a party of the past, not in the healthy sense of assessing modern problems and institutions in the light of tradition, but in the sense of nursing caricature grievances against institutions such as the Lords, as provocative reminders of an imaginary era in which the Household Cavalry trotted arrogantly down the Mall to sabre the common people.
The common denominator of all “progressive” activists is hatred of tradition and a love of drabness. The pageantry surrounding the monarchy and the peerage is anathema to egalitarians, who lust to destroy everything that is colourful and derived from our historical aesthetic. If hunts had sallied forth in dungarees and black navvies’ wellington boots, they could have nailed foxes to barn doors without provoking objection from leftists: it was the scarlet coats, white stocks and elegance that enraged them. Blair, as prime minister, “reformed” the state opening of parliament by reducing the number of heralds and pursuivants in attendance: too much colour, too much heritage, too much fun.
The founder of the radical tradition in Britain was Oliver Cromwell, arch-puritan and foe not only of kings, but of maypoles and mince pies. The House of Lords, in its physical aspect – Pugin’s amazing building – does not derive from that chamber’s glory days, but from Victorian times, when it was still a powerful element in the constitution, but already much reduced in status. That building is a celebration of the history and romance of the peerage; the notion of its housing some future assembly of gauche iconoclasts, on the Holyrood and Cardiff model, carries incongruity to an extravagant extreme.
The presence of the surviving hereditary peers lends the House of Lords continuity with its past, cloaking the benches filled with party donors, former MPs and modishly diverse appointees with a legitimacy they would otherwise lack; a kind of constitutional apostolic succession. It is, of course, precisely that seamless continuity that Labour wishes to fracture: for socialist zealots, every year is Year One of the Republic of Utopia.
The Lords is a revising chamber; that gives it less authority than the House of Commons, just as the King has less real power than the Prime Minister. There is no conceivable abuse of democracy in conscripting a small number of hereditary peers, nowadays monitored for suitability through election by their fellows, to assist in revising legislation in which the elected Commons always has the final say. In recent years, badly drafted legislation has become an increasing problem, so that solecisms waved through by MPs have been corrected in the Upper Chamber.
The hereditary peers, in many cases, have roots in rural communities, a constituency increasingly ignored by parliament: the recent King’s Speech contained 40 Bills, not one of them addressing rural problems. The hereditary peers are often grounded in their local communities, in a way that life peers are not. That offers some answers to the question now confronting hereditary peers: is there life after parliament?
The answer is a resounding yes, just as there was life in the peerage before parliament. Whether one considers parliament to descend from the Witan, after it became an England-wide institution in the 10th century, though it might equally be regarded as the ancestor of the Privy Council, or the meetings of the magnum concilium, or Great Council, first known as parliament in 1236, in either case there were lords in existence prior to those institutions: ealdormen (later earls) and thegns before the Witan, and earls and barons before parliament proper emerged in the 13th century.
The late Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, herald, genealogist, expert on the peerage and much else, wrote: “People link peerage with parliament too much.” On another occasion, when denouncing the peerage Act 1963, he elaborated on this theme: “The trouble was that the Joint Committee was composed of professional politicians who thought of peerage dignities only in selfish competitive terms as peerages of parliament. But peerage is not necessarily anything to do with parliament. Earls existed long before the first parliament.”
He pointed out that women were created peers in their own right centuries before they were allowed to sit in the House of Lords; that Irish peers could sit only in the Commons (and between 1801 and 1922 only 28 of their representatives sat in the Lords); all but 16 representative Scottish peers were excluded from the House of Lords until 1963. Moncreiffe thought that peers should be allowed to sit in the Commons without disclaiming their titles, a surprising view, considering how that would blur the character and distinction of a peerage.
In parliamentary terms, the peers have lost their noble privileges. In 1948, they voluntarily relinquished the right to be tried by their peers in cases of impeachment, felony or high treason, a colourful proceeding, last implemented against Lord de Clifford in the 1930s and which provided Dorothy L Sayers with a dramatic setting for one of her Lord Peter Wimsey novels. The other remaining privilege of peerage – to be hanged with a silken rope – though never formally abolished, became redundant when capital punishment was abolished in 1965.
The hereditary peers will be a loss to parliament. While their grander members may have received the Order of the Garter as a matter of course (“I like the Garter,” Lord Melbourne once remarked, “there is no damn nonsense of merit about it”), members of the higher peerage families won the Victoria Cross (very much a matter of merit) out of all proportion to the rest of the community. That reflected the principle that great privilege can only be justified by great service: Noblesse oblige.
If excluded from parliament, the hereditary peerage will still preserve its relationship with its fount of honour, the Crown. A glaring deficiency, at the recent coronation, was the marginalisation of the hereditary peers, to the considerable detriment of the ceremony. At the previous coronation of Elizabeth II, the most dramatic moment, also illustrative of our constitutional heritage, was the spectacle when the massed ranks of peers dressed in their coronation, rather than parliamentary, robes, placed their coronets on their heads as soon as the archbishop set the crown on the Queen’s head. That ritual, demonstrative of the relationship between Crown and peerage, should have been retained.
There is much concern that the Duke of Burgundy butterfly is an endangered species, but so are Britain’s remaining non-royal dukes. Dukedoms are at the apex of the peerage, living heritage comparable to the built heritage of our stately homes. With the extinction in the second half of the 20th century of the dukedoms of Leeds and Portland, only 24 non-royal dukedoms remain.
To reduce the risk of further extinctions, it should become regular practice, where there is no male heir within the limits of the remainder, the terms of succession set out in the original letters patent, but there is a male heir beyond those limits, for the King to expand the scope of the remainder. Only if there is no male heir general should the remainder be extended to heiresses. The object would not be to discriminate against women, but to keep the title within the original family.
The royal succession law was arbitrarily changed by David Cameron and only the birth of Prince George has prevented the early experience of a system that could see three changes of dynasty within a century. The House of Windsor is a fiction and Mountbatten is an invented name: Elizabeth II’s real surname was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Charles III’s is Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg. If heiresses repeatedly succeed to the throne, the dynasty will change correspondingly, removing it further from its historical roots, and with the present tendency to marry subjects, the House of Snodgrass may eventually rule Britain.
The same dilemma applies to peerages. The Dukes of Marlborough are not male-line Churchills, but Spencers. In conserving dukedoms, efforts should be made to preserve the bloodline of the original recipient. The second oldest English dukedom, Somerset, is a curiosity, in that the first holder conferred it on himself: Edward Seymour, Lord Protector of the Realm, created himself Duke of Somerset, in terms of powers conferred upon him by the terms of Henry VIII’s will.
There are many rewarding roles available to the hereditary peerage outside parliament, as community leaders, rural champions and conservationists. They are a living tableau of our history and, if socialist vandals, blinded by the politics of envy, deprive the country of their services, in favour of politically correct party hacks and municipal pondlife, that is our loss and a further contribution to the degradation of public life.
But the chief significance of this measure by Labour is how it betrays that party’s alienation from the constitution and hostility to the monarchy. For there is no escaping the irreducible logic of Labour’s position: if the hereditary principle is unacceptable in respect of the very minor influence of a hereditary baron in a revising chamber, how much more must it be resented in the considerably more powerful context of the Sovereign?
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