The Lords Should Be Hereditary

Here it is. The damaging work done by the deconstitutionalising figure, Blair, is to be completed by another deconstitutionalising figure, Starmer. The Lords are, in effect, to be completely abolished. There will still be a thing called a House of Lords. But it will have no actual Lords in it. Let me quote from the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill. It will “remove the remaining connection between hereditary peerage and the House of Lords”.

Just to remind you, in 1999 the ‘Hereditaries’ were thrown out of the Lords. By a typical Cecil compromise (courtesy of the then Lord Cranborne), 92 of them were allowed to stay. In 2025 they, too, will be thrown out. (Charles Moore in the Spectator tells us that there was a cross-party attempt in the Lords to keep on the hereditary peers as life peers. “Labour sullenly faced it down.”)

Then the only hereditary position in the entire kingdom will be that of the King.

A higher, or second, house, such as the House of Lords or the US Senate, is supposed to lend authority to the counsels of the realm or republic. Polybius, a long time ago, noticed that the institutions of republican Rome came in three forms. The consuls were monarchical. The senate was aristocratic. The comitia and tribunes were democratic. The second of these, the senate, was the one with the least actual power = imperium or potestas. What it possessed, however, was auctoritas = authority. (It also controlled the purse strings.) A second, or higher, house is supposed to grant some sort of authority to the deliberations of the political order: and does so by not possessing the prerogative powers of King, Consul or President and not possessing the unwieldly and wild wisdom of the rabble.

There are three logics for how we can fill such a second house or senate.

The first is that it is filled by placemen and also, now, placewomen. You know, Johnson, Sunak, Truss etc. ‘raise’ their cronies. The Honours System = the Compliance System.

The second is that it is filled by those possessing merit. Well, occasionally, almost by accident, this happens. Consider, say, Michael Young (astonishingly, not indexed in a book on Edward Shils I just read: Shils considered Young one of the greatest English sociologists of the 1950s.) Consider, say, Toby Young. That is, the inventor of the word ‘meritocracy’ and his son. In the pages of the Daily Sceptic it is easy to say that the son rose by independent merit, not by inheritance.

The third is that it is filled by those who have taken some sort of responsibility, some sort of burden. These are the true Lords. They have something to live up to: a name, a status, lands, tenants. They have the ‘feudal spirit’: a phrase that only barely hands on in P.G. Wodehouse novels. They did not choose their fate. They have something to live up to. As a matter of birth.

Responsibility. Not rights, not credits, not bonuses. Instead, duties, debts. Yes, indeed, our feudal lords came over in 1066 and seized England and made the English their vassals. But, in fact, everyone was the vassal of someone else, and, ultimately, the vassal of the king. And the king was not, or not always, a fool. Kings were either born responsible, or had responsibility thrust upon them. If neither, they were dispatched in the manner of Edward II, Richard III or Henry VI. I was just looking again at a history of Parliament by Ronald Butt that I bought when I was an undergraduate. It has a plan of the old Palace of Westminster at the front. Well, William Rufus, not known for responsibility, built (in 1097) the still remarkable Westminster Hall: and it was soon the residence of the Law Courts. The king was, whether he wanted to be or not, responsible. His lawyers occupied the grandest chamber in Europe. The exchequer was nearby. Henry III built a great chamber for himself, the Painted Chamber: soon it, too, came to be used by the community of the realm. Lords eventually separated off to the White Chamber, while the Commons congregated first in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey and, later on, in St Stephen’s chapel. Kings had to keep building new palaces to get away from government: but they never succeeded. Henry VIII built Whitehall to get away from Westminster: but government kept creeping on, and eventually took over Whitehall as well. In a year or two, they’ll be housing HR types and Spads in Buckingham Palace…

The king was the feudal overlord. Yet he was not only a dominating figure: he was a responsible figure, a rex imposing rules (as well being a military dux leading armies over to France or Scotland or Wales or Ireland). And the other lords were also responsible. If Henry II was a great scholar, and Edward I chastised the barons with his Quo Warranto writs, John was chastised or coerced by the barons at Runymede in 1215, and Henry III was chastised or coerced by the barons at Oxford in 1245. Everyone took responsibility. And the mark of such responsibility is that it ended in death for those who went too far in overbalancing the constitution: including Simon de Montfort and Warwick the Kingmaker. Also Charles I, who was tried in Rufus’s Westminster Hall.

I know, I am going on a bit.

Nowadays we are all – courtesy of Bentham and Paine – born-again humanists. We believe in rights and utilities. We are, in fact, born yesterday: come out of revolutionary eggs. A bit cracked in the head. Living in Newfoundland. Remembering nothing. For us, a constitution is a political fix: a ‘fix’ in both senses: fixing a problem, for those who like it, and getting us in a ‘fix’, for those who don’t like it.

But a true constitution is an ancient thing. It is made, as Cicero said, by many men at many times. It is what Burke said it was: a tree under which we live and graze. It was, by definition, or more accurately, by antiquity, an ‘ancient constitution’. Its antiquity was one of its chief merits: this lent it authority; and it lent it authority because it was 1. obscure, hence authoritative, and 2. when historians like David Hume dragged it out of its obscurity, seen to be even more remarkable: a consequence of almost continual battle between warring parties, none of whom had the national interest at heart: and yet each one of whom contributed their bit – whether we mean Thomas Becket or Thomas Cromwell or Oliver Cromwell or Bonnie Prince Charlie – to the eventual order. It was burnt out of negativity as much as out of positivity: it was burnt out of battle. Kings defended liberties; Antikings defended order: paradoxes abounded. The paradoxes have not yet ceased.

Now, I think that the arguments against hereditary lords are either hypocritical or subversive. Some say, on principle, that we should have no hereditary positions at all. It is ‘out of date’. About this, it is only necessary to say that ‘out of date’ is not an argument. It is an attempt to say ‘Adieu!’ without any justification at all. It is the sort of argument that could be used by anyone against anyone. The others agree, but out of envy. They resent hereditary power, or authority, because they do not themselves possess it. Perhaps they secretly want it for themselves.

Both are irresponsible about our history. I think we need hierarchies, and I think we need hierarchies to be hierarchies of value. There needs to be aspiration, and aspiration cannot exist outside of a hierarchy. At the moment the only hierarchies appear to be ‘fame’ and ‘wealth’. Except insofar as we are stupefied by those who are famous or wealthy there is absolutely nothing in a society based on fame or wealth that gives us anything to believe in. We can only believe in something if it is a matter of truth, or reverence, or loyalty. All of our histories are stories of the means by which we compounded originally usurping, violent power with rituals that assured it the possibility of being revered: the discovery being that reverence went with responsibility.

The hereditary principle is a real principle. It is not an abstract principle, or lack of principle, like Rawls’s original position. The hereditary principle appeals to our common sense. Our sense that society will have hierarchies and that these hierarchies should be dignified, and that dignity requires solemnity, gravity, continuity, responsibility. The hereditary principle appeals to our sense of history. In fact, it gives us a sense of history. History is only found in institutions: Monarchy, Papacy, Lordship, College, even Newspaper, certainly literary Canon. The hereditary principle also sanctifies birth. We need reasons to value birth. We need to believe in heredity: in the sort of continuities that make marriage and children worthwhile. Heredity supports the old marital system: of investment in each other and in children.

I wrote before about a threefold: mediocracy, meritocracy and mystationanditsdutiesocracy. We live in a mediocracy. We partly believe in meritocracy. But better than both is a mystationanditsdutiesocracy: a world in which those with merit can be assimilated into an older order, so that those without merit can accept them and not feel demoralised. At the moment, our elites are mediocre and, in this situation, even those with merit feel demoralised.

The hereditary principle also tied us to land. In an increasingly urban world this may not make sense. It makes almost no practical sense to me: I own no property, and likely never will. But it was feudalism and lordship that made provinces matter, enabled marches to be defended, made peasants matter, even made the lords matter. Consider Edward II’s coronation oath: the suggest that the king would observe the laws of the land. The laws of the land: signifying importance of land. If we are tied to land, somehow, we will take responsibility for that land. Scruton said that this was the basis of the argument that demonstrated that conservation, properly understood, was conservative.

The House of Commons may, or may not, serve a useful purpose. But since the early 19th century what we have seen is a process by which the House of Commons has assimilated into itself the old balanced constitution of King, Lords and Commons. Those who admired the structure established in 1688-89 admired such balance. But the balance was exploded after the French Revolutionary Wars, and despite Bagehot’s English Constitution, and his emphasis on the cabinet, and Dicey’s emphasis on Parliament and the rule of law (though he never explained how they could ever be reconciled and legal theorists still pore over this exact problem), everything was tumbled into the clash of parties, Lib-Con-Lab: and such balance as our system has had in the last few hundred years has depended on decaying institutions, educated memory and the improvisations of the sudden born-again kings and queens we call Prime Minister: as aided and abetted by the vast magisterium of the Civil Service – as we know, recently corrupted by born-yesterday entitlements and bastardised post-Christian religions.

It is too late. But we should have hereditary lords.

As the 3rd Lord Attlee said, “Once the legislation comes into full effect, all the peers on the political benches will owe their position in Parliament to knowing someone in the Westminster bubble.”

As the Earl of Devon said, the Lords will only be those who “have got there for whatever nefarious reasons”.

Yes, these hereditary peers say that the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill should not be passed. The argument was put in the Spectator some time ago, and, I presume, in other places, like the Telegraph. Perhaps their position means that they cannot go further: noblesse oblige and all that. But I’d say – ignoblesse oblige – that Blair’s old House of Lords Act of 1999 should be repealed. The Lords should be restored. The debate should be which 92 of the placemen, placewomen and men and women or merit should be allowed to retain their seats – as hereditaries.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.

Stop Press: Toby has written a defence of the hereditary peers in this week’s Spectator.