Drumming the last hereditary peers out of the House of Lords would be a mistake
Iam going to try something that might strike you as eccentric. Over the next 900 words, I shall seek to convince you that hereditary peers should, at least for now, continue to sit in the House of Lords. The Sunday Times has launched a loud and indignant campaign against them on the grounds that they are male and white, that they have cost taxpayers £47million and that the only other legislative chamber with a hereditary element is Lesotho’s Senate. Voters agree: according to a poll on Thursday, they want the hereditaries out, by 63 to 10 per cent.
To understand why around a tenth of Lords members owe their positions partly to patrimony, we need to go back to Tony Blair’s first term. Labour had come hungrily to office after 18 years, promising to overhaul a second chamber which, in 1997, was still largely hereditary and largely Tory.
The new Conservative leader, William Hague, was no great fan of the hereditary principle. But neither did he like the idea of half of Parliament being appointed by the Government: the job of the legislature, after all, is to hold the executive to account. He therefore indicated that he would back the removal of the hereditary peers, but only as part of an overall reform package that settled the longterm role and composition of the Upper House.
Blair had no intention of agreeing to any such thing. He wanted to remove the hereditaries first, and only then start talking about what might follow. The Tories feared (correctly, as it turned out) that he would never get around to the second stage, but would carry on filling the red benches with his friends.
That was the context in which the Conservative leader in the Lords, Viscount Cranborne (now the Marquess of Salisbury), struck a private deal with Labour. The Lords, he promised, would not delay or frustrate the removal of the hereditary peers, provided that 92 of them were left in place until the reform was complete. Those 92 would serve as the guarantee that Blair would not go back on his word, and that a final settlement would be reached.
That fact, it seems to me, makes the qualities of the remaining hereditaries almost irrelevant. So what if lots of them went to Eton? They are there precisely to be the pebble in the shoe – an uncomfortable reminder that we now have the one outcome that all parties had declared unacceptable, namely a chamber filled at the whim of the PM.
For what it’s worth, my impression as a new life peer is that the hereditaries are more disinterested, more industrious and more heterodox in their opinions than most of us. They certainly do more than their share of the unrewarding, workaday jobs – serving as whips, overseeing the maintenance of the buildings and so on. The £47 million that the Sunday Times put in a big red font on its front page last week sounds a lot less outrageous when you work it out as £27,000 per hereditary peer per year. Are there cheaper legislators anywhere in Europe?
All that, though, is beside the point. Defenders of the surviving hereditaries are not arguing that the system is ideal, or even that it is particularly justifiable. What they are
arguing is that the original bargain must be kept. It is a question of good faith.
When the legislation removing most hereditaries was proposed in 1999, it contained a clause providing for by-elections should vacancies arise among the 92. Derry Irvine, Blair’s Lord Chancellor, was not especially interested in the details, because he thought that no byelection would need to be held: full reform would happen first.
More than 20 years on, it still hasn’t. But, scandalously ignoring the original deal, reformers now demand that the by-elections be halted so that the hereditaries die out over time. Numerous bills to this end have been talked out, largely through the brave efforts of two hereditary peers, the Earl of Caithness and Lord Trefgarne.
Trefgarne is the second longestserving peer, having sat as a Conservative since 1960 when, aged 19, he inherited the title from his Labour father.
He personally favours an elected second chamber but – as he keeps patiently explaining – he will accept any final settlement, even one that keeps an appointed house, provided it ends No10’s unchecked patronage powers by shifting the right of appointment to an independent statutory body.
All sides agree that there should be no hereditary legislators. For reasons I have never fully understood, the hereditary principle is considered indispensable to the monarchy but outrageous anywhere else. So be it. The question is not whether we should hang on forever to the hereditaries, something no one is proposing, but whether we should complete the reform that was promised in 1999 – indeed promised in 1911.
That reform might be part of a broader constitutional recalibration, taking in the powers of the executive, the role of the supreme court, the case for different voting systems, the balance among the devolved assemblies and possibly even the plan – pushed in slightly different forms by Gordon Brown and by Salisbury – for some kind of federal upper house. Once the health crisis is over, and economic recovery is under way, there is an argument for looking at all these things.
In the meantime, though, it is wrong in principle for any legislative chamber – let alone an unelected one – to alter its own composition. It would be unthinkable in any other democracy. Try to imagine the German Bundesrat deciding to take away Bavaria’s six votes and give them to Saxony, or the US Senate declaring overnight that its representation would henceforth be proportionate to the population of each state.
Yet the House of Lords now wants unilaterally to remove its only elected members. Sure, their electorate is tiny; but for the other 90 per cent of peers, there is no process at all. Removing the last wholly independent element while making no other changes would, by any definition, leave us with a more objectionable settlement than we have now.
The hereditary principle is considered indispensable to the monarchy but outrageous anywhere else