Stripping Peers of Their Titles Could be Used as a Mechanism to Suppress Dissent
In the House of Lords earlier today, the Lord Privy Seal confirmed that the Government would be bringing forward legislation to enable peers to be stripped of their titles, ostensibly so Lord Mandelson can be stripped of his.
At present, the House of Lords Conduct Committee can suspend or expel a peer from the House as per the House of Lords (Expulsion and Suspension) Act 2015, but not strip a peer of his or her title. That can be done under the Titles Deprivation Act 1917, which allowed removal of titles from peers who fought against the UK in World War I, but it has never happened.
In my view, we should be extremely wary of this bill, even supposing it contains the safeguard that stripping a peer of their title would require a majority vote of the whole House.
Three years ago, the Free Speech Union had to defend a member who was investigated by the Honours Forfeiture Committee for allegedly damaging the reputation of the honours system. (Does it have a reputation left to damage?) All he’d done, in reality, was challenge progressive orthodoxy about the British Empire’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, which, needless to say, this Committee, which is operated out of the Cabinet Office, regarded as holy writ.
We prevailed eventually and our member kept his honour, but it was a long and expensive process, and — for the honour holder — extremely stressful.
The Forfeiture Committee cannot strip peers of their titles, but any similar process in the House of Lords could be used in the same way, namely, to suppress dissent from prevailing orthodoxies. If not at first, then in due course. Worth bearing in mind that the Forfeiture Committee originally confined itself to investigating only the most serious wrongdoing such as fraud, but has since strayed into investigating wrongthink.
The bill will therefore need to be scrutinised very carefully to ensure it leaves little room for interpretation as to the meaning of phrases like “bringing the House into disrepute” or “damaging the reputation of the Lords”. Ideally, it will include a short list of what counts as “disrepute” and reputational damage, e.g. being convicted of a criminal offence, and not allow the Code of Conduct Committee to range beyond that list.
It may sound counterintuitive to point out that the scandal currently engulfing the Labour Party, and which may bring down Sir Keir Starmer, is a moment of great danger for conservatives. But we should not forget how good the Left is at exploiting crises – even those involving members of its own ranks – to punish political opponents.
According to the Lord Privy Seal, the reason the Government is bringing forward this bill is to restore the public’s confidence in the integrity of Westminster politics.
Good luck with that.
If the legislation ends up being used to suppress dissent in the same way that the Online Safety Act and the Digital Services Act suppress dissent under the guise of protecting the public from ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech’, it will further erode the reputation of British politics, not restore it.
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Yes, Toby. Yours might be next!
Well said Tobes, we have seen time and again how legislation rushed through in
Response to a real or invented crisis makes things worse not better.
A good rule of thumb would be that all legislation passed since 1997 needs to be repealed tout court.
Yes it could be the dangerous dogs act 2 (‘dangerous peers act’?)
How about starting with the 1965 Race Relations Act and all national/international social legislation subsequent to that.
@hardliner I intended to write tout court, as it has a slightly different meaning from tout suite, which has no meaning as the correct expression is tout de suite. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Apologies, changed back to ‘court’, assumed typo/predictive texting
Thanks!
They seem to be making it up as they go along, but it could easily strip out democracy as a whole. Legislating something as a reaction to some extreme event can easily be abused, or to have some (allegedly) unintended effect.
Very good point, Toby.
“Bringing _____ into disrepute” is a worryingly wide definition!
Difficult one given that the majority of those enobled are low grade political trash and are a disgrace to what is known as The Upper House. With the political nature of the appointments it is easy to see how a process to remove them will take on a political taint. Probably the best thing was never to have appointed them in the first place such as with Lord Sleaze of Mandelson and Lord Call Me Dave. This week yet another failed politician who was a minister in the Liberal government for a short while, the midget Sarah Tether is joining the Lords.
Wasn’t Blair going to abolish the House of Lords, but presumably found it too convenient as a way of giving out rewards to cronies?
Who????
If only the quality of those elevated to the peerage were higher, as it stands many of them are inadequate before they are chosen and it is blindingly obvious.
Titles should be removed from everyone. The purpose of a title is to elevate the person with the title away from the filthy masses. To give them special privileges, to raise the esteem in which they are held, to award them financial benefits, to lift them away from the dirty, stinking, proles. But we are all equal, not the same but equal, and a title is a lie.
Would a knighthood be included in the bill? If anyone has brought disrepute to the political class it is the prime minister himself.
Honour is something you have or you don’t. Nobody can give it to you or take it away from you. TY has it, Mandelson doesn’t.
As to who should be in the House of Lords, goodness knows.
I have long been of the view that no man or woman should ever be stripped of his or her title, whether conferred by the accident of birth (as in the case of the Windsors) or awarded through the ‘honours’ system. Collectively titled people are neither better nor worse than the rest of us, and anything that draws that simple truth to public attention is a positive.
According to the Lord Privy Seal, the reason the Government is bringing forward this bill is to restore the public’s confidence in the integrity of Westminster politics.
The public’s confidence in the integrity of Westminster politics has little to do with the HoL. I’d suggest a better way to restore confidence is to have a competent government that acts in the interests of the indigenous population not foreigners.
Government could also stop clopping the HoL with their cronies.
I would argue that it is safe to suspend his title as he is now under investigation for acts of treason. If he is found guilty he should be stripped of titles.
It would be quite simple to restrict it to a Peer who is found guilty of a criminal offence which can or does result in imprisonment.