The Case for Tory Constitutional Reform, Or An Aristocracy For The Modern Age
Blackstonian Lords Reform and Aligning Elite Interests With The National Good
“Here then is lodged the sovereignty of the British constitution; and lodged as beneficially as is possible for society. For in no other shape could we be so certain of finding the three great qualities of government so well and so happily united. If the supreme power were lodged in any one of the three branches separately, we must be exposed to the inconveniences of either absolute monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy; and so want two of the three principal ingredients of good polity, either virtue, wisdom, or power.” — Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England(1765–1770)
“Anachronistic” is often the word applied to the House of Lords, the hereditary system frowned upon as out of kilter with the democratic spirit of the age. But, in an age of constant change, is some constancy in the legislature not desirable? A constancy with its roots in the deep soil of tradition from which our constitution has grown? And in this age of democratic and technological upheaval, can we honestly say that our elected officials have provided us with the best government possible? Can we even be sure that our elected officials, and the party machines that select and manage them, have the national good at heart? Is it not good that we have some in the legislative process unsullied by those loyalties? And would it not also be preferable to have some element of our parliament whose self-interest is constitutionally aligned with the national good? Which doesn’t have to play the game of offering bread and circuses to satiate a fickle electorate? Whose interests are parochial, national, bound to this island and not to international markets? Would it not be wise to have a cohort of people who aren’t likely to be absorbed into the global corporate hive — into Facebook, or Greensill Capital — incorruptible by the hope of a cosy office in a tall building or well-paid speeches when the sun has set on their political career?
All of these things are what the hereditary peerage should — and to some extent has — provide to the British parliamentary system. And although many hereditary peers have provided a great service, loyalty, dedication and fastidiousness to the legislative process, it could, and should, be made better by some constitutional modernisation.
This doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater in a fit of what that great Scottish reactionary, Thomas Carlyle, would have called Swarmery (the arbitrary attachment of moral value to an idea and the rush by the masses to busily implement it and shut down critics of it, despite it not necessarily being a good idea and potentially having disastrous outcomes). But it does mean understanding the ethos the greatest constitutional thinkers and critics, William Blackstone and Walter Bagehot, recognised in the British constitution and re-embedding it, having lost it through pernicious and perfunctory reforms to the constitution and economic and technological changes to the country, in a way that contributes to better government in the future.
In Defence of Hereditary Principle
The hereditary principle is somewhat out of fashion now. “Why”, the argument goes, “should someone have any say over the laws of this country just because their ancestor cleaned the monarch’s sword 300 years ago?”
It offends the modern democrat who imbues the vote with a quasi-religious moral value, ostensibly regardless of its outcome; although when votes don’t go their way hypocrisy is frequently not beyond them, their faux democratic-righteousness is exposed for the performance it is, the resentment and envy which it disguises are made clear, and their value for the vote seems to become contingent on its outcome — although sophistry, self-deception and semantic self-justification will prevent them admitting it.
But, when you dig into it, that’s usually what the objection to the hereditary system comes down to, a sense of envy and resentment that someone has something they don’t have through an accident of birth — the unfairness of it.
But even if it is unfair, the purpose of government isn’t fairness. It’s good governance of a country, and any mechanism which contributes to good governance shouldn’t be removed because of the childish envy of ideologues. And the hereditary element of the Lords does add something valuable.
In a previous essay, In Defence of Hereditary Peers, I've written about this in more depth, but I’ll touch on some of the highlights here.
Hereditary peers, unlike elected politicians, are tied to a seat and an area as their family have been for generations and their descendants will be for generations to come. They’re not parachuted in to serve a party machine, they won’t move on the moment they no longer attend parliament or a better job offer comes along. They have a long-term commitment and bond to an area, and indeed the country, that’s frequently unmatched by career politicians. There are few better incentives to exercise one’s power for the betterment of an area or a country than the fact one’s children and grandchildren will still be there long after you cease to be!
The hereditary principle also inserts what I call ‘controlled randomness’ into the parliamentary process. We can never be quite sure what the child of a peer will be like; what their interests or temperament will be beyond broad brush stroke assumptions based on their upbringing and parentage, and having been embedded in a culture and tradition shaped by familial and social expectations of service and duty with the weight of history on their shoulders; they’ll be from an “organ of society”, to borrow T.S. Eliot’s phrase, with a “peculiar and essential function, as peculiar and essential as the function of any other part of society”. But we can be reasonably sure they’ll be reasonably intelligent, and well educated, and there’s at least a chance we’ll get some people participating in the legislative process that have some characteristics usually absent from the type of person who would put themself forward for election. Better yet, some characteristics which are common in people who put themselves forward for election may be absent from someone in parliament through an accident of birth! They’ll also be from different parts of the country, as opposed to the types of people who enter into professional politics or make up the workforce of Britain’s sprawling bureaucracies, who tend to be from, or live within, a select group of geographical clusters.
Hereditary peers are also free in a way other peers, indeed all other politicians, are not. They owe no allegiance to any party or politician. In the words of the 3rd Earl Attlee, “No one can say to me, ‘Well, we didn’t put you in the House of Lords to vote this way or say that.’ I can say and vote exactly how I like.” These are independent voices free to be thoughtful, analytical, and even heterodox, relatively emancipated from the pressures of party politics and public Swarmery and capriciousness. It was the 3rd Earl Attlee’s grandfather, Clement Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, who, following Lord Milford’s maiden speech, pointed out the irony that, “One curious [anomaly of the hereditary system] is that the voice of the Communist Party can be heard only in [the House of Lords]. That is the advantage of hereditary representation.” But even those who do wear a party label, “wear their party labels lightly”, to quote the life peer, Charles Moore, Baron Moore of Etchingham.
I suspect these are the conditions most likely, for the most part, to lead to Burke’s ideal, “A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.” Indeed, this is, generally, what patricians tried to be and how they saw themselves. David Cannadine, the greatest historian of the aristocracy, writes, “They saw themselves as men of affairs, disinterestedly and heroically doing their best for the country.” Of course, one would also hope for a sprinkling of eccentrics and reactionaries — which rarely fail to appear.
I also think that the presence of hereditary peers in British governance solved a problem. Not deliberately; it wasn’t planned, engineered or thought out, our constitution is a collection of political traditions, it has evolved, but it’s evolutionary adaptations which provide value that survive and last, and the constitutional adaptation which led to the peerage has lasted a very long time. To quote Donald Kingsbury, “Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.”
The final advantage of the hereditary system is that it means there’s a contingent of parliamentarians who have to acknowledge they’re there by luck, nothing more. In the age of the ostensible meritocracy, it becomes easy for elites to believe they’re there due to their own deservingness, their own brilliance, and consequently, those at the very bottom must necessarily be there due to their deservingness, or lack thereof, and their own inadequacies — a theme explored brilliantly in Michael Young’s satirical The Rise of the Meritocracy. But often Tyche plays her hand, and, to have a set of politicians who have to acknowledge her role in their fortunes, and equally the fortunes of those born without their blessings, should, one would hope, and there are examples of it having done so, inspire some moments of reflectiveness and compassion. Noblesse oblige.
Aligning Interests with the National Good
In 1869, William Gladstone recommended raising Nathan Rothschild to the peerage arguing that “in a few carefully selected cases” it would be wise to “connect the House of Lords . . . with the great representatives of the commerce of the country.”
This sat uneasily with Queen Victoria, who explained that “she cannot think that one who owes his great wealth to contracts with foreign governments, or to successful speculations on the stock exchange, can fairly claim a British peerage . . . This seems to her not the less a species of gambling because it is on a gigantic scale.”
Until that point, the peerage’s financial interests had largely been contained within the United Kingdom and held in the form of land. The prestige of the Lords was tied to the greatness of the country, their interests were tied to the interests of the country; not international markets or foreign governments. In the words of David Cannadine, “As the Queen had observed of Rothschild, international capitalists and speculators lacked that literal stake in the country that only the extensive ownership of land brought with it.”
By the end of Gladstone’s life, and Victoria’s reign, that would be beginning to change. David Cannadine explains, “during the last two decades of her reign, the power of such new, thrusting, plutocratic wealth proved to be irresistible. The Lords may have held out longer than the Commons as a bastion of territorial exclusiveness, but only by a little more than a generation.” Over the next century, broad-acred nobles would cease to be the dominant force in the Lords. As the country gentleman declined, the plutocrat and the industrialist — the merchant middle class — came to dominate parliament. This is how best to understand the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949, as well as Blair’s House of Lords Act 1999, and now Starmer’s latest proposals; as a middle-class class war and seizure of power both practically and symbolically, all under the guise of putting right an injustice.
Nowadays, little has changed. Parliament is still dominated by the merchant middle class. Indeed, following the aforementioned Acts of Parliament, it’s become all the more thorough. Only now they’ve been supplemented to a greater extent than ever before by something perhaps even worse — the ideologue.
How do we balance out this assortment of self-interested or ideological parliamentarians with those whose self-interest is the national interest? How do we take self-interest, ambition and ideology away as a driving motivation for at least a selection of people in parliament?
Well, in the same way we dealt with the problem of how you pay a neutral monarch.
Constitutionally limit the ways in which the hereditary aristocracy can make money, whilst providing a constitutional means for them to do so that best aligns with the interests of the country. An aristocratic equivalent of something like the Duchy of Lancaster or the Duchy of Cornwall. This could solve not only the self-interest vs the national interest problem, but also the tragedy of the commons. There are some things — industries, parts of our society — that we do want to be kept economically viable and well looked after in perpetuity, and because these things haven’t been well maintained, or well represented in Parliament, some of them are beginning to struggle to the detriment of us all.
So what are the national assets and industries we want to be kept commercially viable, for the national good, indefinitely?
The first and most obvious example is our high streets which, unloved, un-championed, have fallen into a tragic state of decline. Once the centre of our communities, they now serve as a pitiful reminder of the growing dilapidation of the country that once boasted the largest empire on the planet — the tragedy of the commons in full view. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
If the income of the aristocracy had depended on healthy high streets, would they have become so dilapidated? Would their decline have passed so unnoticed by Parliament? I suspect not.
Indeed, we have an example of aristocratic ownership that ensured the long-term flourishing of an area.
In a piece titled Long Term Thinking, Steve Gilchrist, who works for the Development Team for the Grosvenor Estate with the 7th Duke of Westminster, describes how the long-term thinking of the Grosvenor family over the generations has turned what was once a collection of open fields into one of the most desirable parts of London. A whole history of the London estate can be read here, but if only all of our high streets had had such diligent stewardship! (An example of this long-term thinking is the Grosvenor Estate Strategy of 1971, a document which planned ahead for the next 100 years — an exercise I doubt any government or council has engaged in for any part of the country.)
If the country’s high streets were owned by a single company, The Noble Company of the Lords, perhaps, and the hereditary peers were made the shareholders with their income made constitutionally dependent on dividends from it, would they look as they do now? I suspect they’d be far better cared for — and the challenges to them much more thoroughly explored in Parliament — to the benefit of us all.
The second activity we want kept economically viable is agriculture. This is a battle the landed gentry have been fighting since 1846, often beaten by the overwhelming zeitgeist for free trade — even the aristocracy can’t always stand against overwhelming public opinion, although they have more chance of introducing heterodoxy into a parliamentary debate than anyone else — and finally by the weakening of the Lords.
Agriculture has long been an industry championed by the aristocracy, and indeed, still is to some extent today. David Cannadine writes about the agricultural advances made by patricians in the 1700s and 1800s, saying, “Sir Watkyn Williams Wynn [4th Baronet], Sir Stephen Glynn [9th Baronet] and Lord Penrhyn invested heavily in improved drainage, better breeding and new crops. They sponsored agricultural societies [and] gave prizes at shows […] great magnates like Lord Donegall, Hertford and Downshire were pioneers in improved breeding, cultivation and drainage.” Today, Matt Ridley (5th Viscount Ridley) writes about the incredible conservation work done by the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Leicester, the Duke of Northumberland, Viscount Cranborne, Lord Bolton and the Earl of Swinton on their land.
Unfortunately, “when the government or its quangos draw up new rules”, the aristocracy is now largely ignored, despite the wealth of knowledge they could bring to the conversation — likely a result of the diminished power of the House of Lords. Ridley writes, “The Duke of Norfolk tells a funny, if exasperated, story about how much easier he found it to get the monarch, and even the pope, to return his calls than the official within Natural England in charge of permitting him to release curlews.”
One only needs to tune into Clarkson’s Farm to discover that the Duke of Norfolk isn’t the only one unhappy with how farming and agriculture are regulated in this country. It’s an industry that’s really struggling. If there was a constitutional expectation of hereditary peers to each own a certain amount of working land which represented a meaningful proportion of their wealth, and there were a more substantial contingent of hereditary peers in the Lords (and perhaps a slightly strengthened House of Lords), then I’d imagine not only would they be harder to ignore, but the British agricultural industry would be doing relatively better than it is now.
The third industry we want protected which is also suffering and under-discussed in Parliament is the pub industry. Once communal hubs that brought people and neighbours together, pubs, the length and breadth of Britain, are now being forced to make their last calls. Indeed, with Starmer’s potential future smoking ban on the horizon and the dearth of opposition in the Commons, it’s an industry that could be about to take a further legislative kicking. Letting it further decline will be yet another act of cultural vandalism.
If there was a collection of historic pubs up and down the country (many of which now sit empty, like the gorgeous art deco Iron Duke in Great Yarmouth — in fact, there are now so many in London alone, there’s an Instagram page tracking them), perhaps owned by the same Noble Company of the Lords, which made up a meaningful proportion of its income, then perhaps the struggling pub industry and the challenges it faces would have been addressed more seriously and more urgently. Instead, the country is now dotted with hollowed-out buildings serving as poignant reminders of our hollowing-out communities.
There may be other industries into which we want aristocratic buy-in; perhaps the arms industry which we’ve recently discovered the importance of in the post-Russian invasion of Ukraine world but which we’ve allowed to become atrophied; maybe the shipyards and the ship-building industry which once was dominated by Britain and we’ve lost — to our detriment — in part due to apathy and negligence. Which particular industries doesn’t matter right now though, the point is only to illustrate that a modernised landed, or propertied, aristocracy could serve a functional and important purpose in a modern democracy, imbued with the incentive and the ability to think on much longer timeframes than our elected politicians whose attention seems to reach at best to the end of their career, on average to the next election, and at worst until the beginning of the next news cycle.
It may also be desirable for there to be, if not a constitutional mandate, then a social expectation for heirs to do certain things professionally prior to their taking their seat in the Lords. There are numerous suggestions one could make — involvement in local charity, work in local government etc. — but the most obvious one is military service.
One of the sentiments that was most obviously expressed in the early days of the Ukraine war, and especially around the time of Rishi Sunak’s national service proposal, was that if something were to happen, Britain was forced to go to war, it would be the children of the working class sent out to fight as cannon fodder. That today’s elites would find some way of protecting themselves and their young ones. We wouldn’t all be in it together.
This wasn’t the case in the past; it shouldn’t be today. The upper classes should have a stake in the serious business of the defence of this country, and a military nobility makes that so. To turn back to David Cannadine once again, who writes of the Great War:
“The patricians were either professional soldiers or among the first men to volunteer. Most of them were junior officers below the rank of Lt. Colonel, who were rapidly posted to the front, where they shared the risks and dangers of trench life, and led their men over the top and into battle. During the first year of the war, one in seven of such officers were killed, compared with only one in seventeen of the rank and file. And at the Somme, Bernard Montgomery noted that ‘we have been unlucky in losing rather a lot of officers in proportion to the men.’ In terms of the relative [his emphasis] numbers of lives lost, there is no doubt that the titled and territorial classes made the greatest sacrifices.”
He goes on to point out, “In so far as any group benefited from the war, it was the profiteers and the businessmen, the cronies and followers of Lloyd George. As Lord Willoughby de Broke remarked in 1915, with understandable bitterness: ‘His own friends are not being killed, while yours and mine are being picked off every day.’”
The Second World War also saw the rush of patricians to the front, and country estates again converted into hospitals for the wounded, as was so wonderfully dramatised in Downton Abbey, and so movingly written about in Brideshead Revisited, “‘Wonderful old place in its way,’ said the Quartering Commandant; ‘pity to knock it about too much.’” And, as portrayed in Downton Abbey, in both wars aristocratic women also did their patriotic duty:
“The Duchess of Westminster established a Red Cross hospital at Le Touquet, Lady Dudley set up an Australian Hospital nearby, and the dowager Duchess of Sutherland organized her own ambulance unit to serve in Belgium. She was obliged to retreat in the face of the German advance. […] In London, Lady Lowther organized the production of food and clothing parcels for Belgian prisoners in Germany, Mrs Alfred Lyttelton supervised the reception of Belgian refugees and made arrangements for their accommodation and employment, the future Lady Curzon helped run a night canteen at Waterloo Station, and Jennie Churchill prompted butlers to join up by publicly expressing her preference for housemaids. Among the younger generation, Lady Diana Manners became a VAD probationer at Guy’s, Monica Grenfell trained at Whitechapel Hospital, and Helen Manners qualified as an anaesthetist. North of the border. Lady Tullibardine staged a series of concerts in support of her husband’s recruiting efforts in Perthshire, and later organized the knitting of 15,000 pairs of ‘hose tops’ to keep the legs of kilted Highland soldiers warm.”
Perhaps, if we had an upper class so willing to serve and sacrifice now, as well as high-status and wealthy individuals visible in the military, the cynicism about service would be somewhat diminished, and the recruitment crisis at least somewhat ameliorated.
Sure, the aristocracy might live in country houses and John Nash terraces, and no doubt there will be some envious resentment about that from some quarters as there is towards the Royal Family now; but would it not be worth it to have an elite who are actually in the businesses of service, for whom noblesse oblige means something? And is a certain amount of wealth and luxury not compensatory for the social expectations, the constitutional commercial limits, and the consequential loss of liberty those would entail?
It’s also that constitutionally enshrined wealth — or at least the potential for wealth — which would free aristocrats from the temptations of plutocracy they’ve been subject to in the past, and elected politicians are subject to today. To quote Gladstone, we should be “jealous of plutocracy, and of its tendency to infect aristocracy, its older and nobler sister” — which is what constitutional limitations are for.
There may also be some advantages to having a segment of the ruling class with enough money to transcend money. To quote the late Peregrine Worsthorne:
“Britain’s political class had inherited enough in-built authority — honed over three centuries — and enough ancestral wisdom — acquired over the same period — to dare to defy both the arrogance of intellectuals from above and the emotions of the masses from below; to dare to resist the entrepreneurial imperative; to dare to try to raise the level of public conversation; to dare to put the public interest before private interests; and to dare to try to shape the nation’s will and curb its appetites. To such a political class conserving the patrimony came naturally, as did the habit of using money to transcend money. Then, most precious asset of all, because its future did not depend wholly on winning votes, Britain’s political class could do for demos what courtiers could never do for princes: be a true friend rather than a false flatterer.”
Perhaps this is a romanticised view, but there is likely more than a grain of truth to it. Indeed, the history books are full of stories of aristocratic service to the nation, on the battlefield and in our institutions. In Worsthorne’s words, “the only way in which aristocrats are separate today — separate, that is, from all the other very rich people — is that higher standards are expected of them. While today it comes as no surprise to find a business tycoon with his snout in the trough, it is still shocking to find a duke so engaged.”
The recent public outcry over the alleged inappropriate behaviour of the Duke of York, and how shocking it was to discover that a duke had, allegedly, been so engaged, along with his subsequent need to disappear from the public eye without any hope for any sort of public rehabilitation, which other celebrities have managed, demonstrates that those standards do remain. And long may those standards remain!
Aristocrats, for a long time, but particularly as their direct political power in local politics diminished, also performed a ceremonial role in the centre of communal life. Again, David Cannadine explains, “During the long span of his Olympian chairmanship, even a grand seigneur like Lord Bath became less a chief executive, and more a constitutional monarch: no longer the driving force in administration and policy making, but a figure-head who leant a tone, and looked good in his Lord-Lieutenant’s uniform on ceremonial occasions. As such, the aristocracy’s part in the government of the countryside was increasingly moving towards that non-contentious and essentially ornamental role that, during the same period, they were perfecting and practising in the towns and in the empire.” And, as their wealth diminished, they tried to turn themselves, perhaps somewhat cynically, or desperately, into protectors of what they portrayed as Britain’s national inheritance, namely, their houses— which certainly isn’t how they’d always seen their homes in the past — and, to a lesser extent, their art collections (although, many had made their art collections available in galleries long before they fell on hard times).
Of course, the houses did prove to be national assets during the World Wars that the aristocracy dutifully put at the country’s disposal, and they were deeply tied to their ancestorial homes. Resenting them for doing whatever was necessary to maintain them is rather pointless.
But suppose aristocrats are to live in their ancestorial homes, grand country mansions with magnificent gardens, made possible by constitutionally provided means of generating wealth. In that case, there should be an expectation that their lands will be used for civic purposes, perhaps bonfire nights on the 5th of November, St George’s, Andrew’s and David’s Day celebrations, May Day and Jubilee celebrations, outdoor screens set up for important sporting events, and whatever other events you can think of, with all money that potentially raises going to meaningful causes, perhaps local charities. The theatrical majesty of the aristocratic estate, which once inspired and could again, comes to serve the practical purpose of reanimating the civic events and representing the familiar State and ‘old’ ceremonial that binds communities together. The ‘dignified’ part of the Constitution made tangible in towns across the country, because, in the words of Lord Curzon, the great inventor of traditions and animator of ceremony:
“We English are a people who combine a love for progress and a faculty for ordered change with a most passionate attachment to our ancient institutions, and a scrupulous reverence for those forms and customs whose roots are embedded in our history, and whose evolution has been typical of our national growth. We are always living half in the present and half in the past. In the conditions, and still more in the ceremonies, of our public life, the two are blended together with peculiar harmony, so that we cannot quite say where the one ends and the other begins, and the spirit of the past seems to be a part of the atmosphere we breathe.”
Bagehot vs. Lord Lyndhurst, or an Efficient Upper Chamber
If we’ve now established that it is indeed desirable, advantageous, or even potentially advantageous to have a segment of Parliament made up of hereditary peers, then the next question must be, who else do we want in the Upper Chamber? And, how do we select them?
In 1867, Walter Bagehot published his book, The English Constitution, which was to become, arguably, the pre-eminent book on the Constitution, read by students, scholars, presidents and monarchs alike.
In it, Bagehot observes that, “The House of Lords, being an hereditary chamber, cannot be of more than common ability. It may contain — it almost always has contained, it almost always will contain — extraordinary men. But its average born lawmakers cannot be extraordinary.”
There is a way of enhancing the likelihood the most extraordinary hereditary peers do inhabit the Lords whilst also maintaining the controlled randomness I advocated earlier, and that is to limit the number who can sit at any one time. Every hereditary peer above the rank of marquess should be allowed (and expected) to take their seat in the Lords (34 marquesses and 24 non-Royal Dukes), and a further 100 hereditary peers below those ranks should be elected amongst themselves (as has been done since Blair’s reforms, which I’ll come to) to fill the red benches; just enough to be a meaningful counterweight to the life peers. Hereditary peers have the advantage of mostly knowing one another personally reasonably well, and therefore knowing one another’s character, strengths and weaknesses. Armed with that knowledge — which, in general, we don’t have of our elected representatives in the Commons — and wanting the best representation of their shared interests in Parliament, they’re more likely to vote for the most capable amongst their number.
My argument, however, doesn’t rely on brilliance being the only thing that matters for hereditary peers; incentives matter too, and ordinary intelligence coupled with the right incentives can produce results more desirable than brilliance paired with the wrong incentives. Where you get brilliance twinned with the right incentives — as you are sure to in a hereditary aristocracy just by the law of averages, and more likely to if they’re required, in part, to choose the best amongst them to represent them — you get fantastic results. But, because not every hereditary peer can be extraordinary in every complex field, the House of Lords needs brilliant people who understand things which the aristocracy, being limited in number, may not. Bagehot’s concern was primarily business, which, in 1867, with the advent of new technologies and the Industrial Revolution upsetting the agricultural Old World of the aristocracy, was becoming vastly more complex and changing drastically.
Today, we also face an age of rapid change, and I must agree with Bagehot, “In a country so rich in mind as England, far more intellectual power can be, and ought to be, applied to the revision of our laws.”
In 1856, Bagehot believed the solution to this problem had presented itself. On Lord Palmerston’s recommendation, Sir James Parke was raised to the House of Lords by Queen Victoria and made 1st Baron Wensleydale. But, unlike the other peers who sat in the upper house, Lord Wensleydale was given a peerage "for the term of his natural life". A life peerage which wasn’t to be hereditary.
Wanting to jealously guard their power from dilution, the House of Lords, led by Lord Lyndhurst, rejected it. The historian explains, “[Sir James Parke’s] name was placed on the roll of members, and if he had taken his seat at once he might well have retained it, opening the way for others. But gout kept him away. In his absence the house overruled Queen Victoria, a strong supporter of life peerages, declaring that the new life peer’s letters patent and writ of summons did not entitle him to sit in parliament.”
Bagehot found this outrageous, complaining, “The House of Lords rejected the inestimable, unprecedented opportunity of being tacitly reformed. Such a chance does not come twice.”
Bagehot expected that “The life-peers who would have then been introduced would have been among the first men in the country. Lord Macaulay was to have been among the first; Lord Wensleydale — the most learned and not the least logical of our lawyers — to be the very first. Thirty or forty such men, added judiciously and sparingly as years went on, would have given the House of Lords the very element which, as a criticising chamber, it needs so much.”
Walter Bagehot was both right and wrong.
By the 1950s, it was becoming clear that the Upper House needed reform, and in December 1957, the Macmillan government’s Life Peerages Bill was given a second reading in the Lords where it began its passage.
There were some voices of opposition. To quote Lord Lexden again:
“Strong words of opposition came from a few vociferous critics on the red benches. Lord Elton, casting himself in the role of Cassandra, invited the house to share his sadness in ‘looking almost our last on the oldest parliamentary assembly in the world’. Thirty peers voted to exclude women; Lord Hailsham, ever blunt, called them ‘idiotic’.
Most peers accepted the case for admitting life members (Harold Macmillan referred to them privately as ‘the day boys’), despite concern about the unwillingness of the government to make clear how many would be created. There was much muttering about swamping. ‘We certainly do not want to add to the number of aged people in the house,’ declared Lord Woolton, the respected war-time food minister, speaking ‘as one of them’ and destined to be disappointed.”
Of course, the bill passed and life peers, men and women alike, entered the House of Lords. Concern over the size of the House, as prevalent then as it is now, also continued, with the fifth Marquess of Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, proposing radical changes that would have seen a reduction in the number of life peers sitting in the Lords from 860 to 200 who a select committee would choose after each general election.
There was never enough agreement across both Houses and both parties for reforms to be made though; that is until Tony Blair’s House of Lords Act in 1999 which allowed only 92 hereditary peers to remain in the House, each to be elected in a by-election by the hereditary peers themselves.
The “muttering about swamping” proved to be prescient, especially because by the time of the 1999 Act, life peers had been filling the red benches since 1958 and greatly outnumbered the hereditaries when they were reduced to 92. The early entries were mostly respectable, with the first 14 comprising 10 men and 4 women. I say mostly, because included was Bob Boothby who had carried on a long affair with Lady Dorothy Macmillan, the wife of Harold Macmillan, and who had a taste for rent boys.
But this is where Bagehot’s assumption that life peers would be added “judiciously and sparingly” was to be proved wrong, as was his belief that the life peers introduced would remain the “first men [and women] in the country”.
Indeed, for the most part, William Hague’s suggestion that the Lords would become a House of Cronies seems to have come true. That’s not to say there have been no impressive appointments, but there are plenty which raise an eyebrow, people whose reason for having been elevated to the Upper House is opaque at best, and suspicious at worst.
Bagehot’s faith in the character of prime ministers, and the political incentives they’d face, was obviously misplaced, which means that, like hereditary peers, albeit in a different way, prime ministers need to be constitutionally limited.
First, the number of peers who can be raised each year should be limited. If it’s scarcity which gives something value, then ennoblement should be scarce! In the mid-1800s, peers were made at an average of about 5 a year, but as plutocratic wealth started gaining more of a hold on the body politic in the 1880s, those numbers began to soar. By 1944 it had doubled to more than 10 a year, and more recently, Conservative Prime Ministers have created on average 21 life peers per year, and Labour Prime Ministers an average of 27 per year. (David Cameron and Tony Blair were even more prolific, creating 40.5 and 35.7 peerages per year respectively. In his first few months, Keir Starmer has created 24.)
Given the proliferation of the peerage, from now on, prime ministers should be allowed to raise no more than 4 peers a year or 20 per parliamentary term. The only exception to this should be when there has been a change of government following a general election, in which case the new prime minister should be allowed to grant 5 additional peerages to the previous prime minister and members of the last cabinet so long as they’ve served in their post for a minimum of three years. This would encourage stability in the cabinet (as opposed to the constant musical chairs of cabinet ministers we have at the moment), and, for legislative reasons, it could be helpful to have people with that experience of government in the Lords.
For the rest of the Prime Minister’s appointments, the choice of whom should be, or can be raised to the House of Lords also needs to be limited. At least 5 of their picks should be constitutionally required to come from the country's vital institutions or those who have recently retired from them: high-ranking officials in the military, intelligence services, the police, and high-ranking diplomats. But the rest need to come from somewhere too.
One of the defining features of British society and one of the greatest shapers of our shared intellectual, artistic, and scientific life, was, from the late 17th century, our voluntary learned institutions and societies. Chief amongst these was the Royal Society, founded in November 1660, and between then and now 54 more have emerged (excluding those in Ireland and the Commonwealth) touching on almost every interesting field one can imagine, intellectually, scientifically, culturally and artistically, from the Royal Astronomical Society to the Royal Medical Society, from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to the Royal Philatelic Society, from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents to the Royal Society of Sculptors, from the Royal Society for Asian Affairs to the Royal Institution of Naval Architects — the depth and breadth of knowledge contained within these institutions is exceptional.
These institutions have a knowledge of and access to the best minds in Britain in each of their respective fields; exactly the sorts of people we want populating the red benches in the House of Lords. The type of people, no doubt, Walter Bagehot would approve of if he were alive today.
Each of the Royal societies should, in the first month of each new parliamentary term, make two nominations from within their membership and their field as to who should be raised to the Lords. Their nominations should contain a written explanation of what each person they’ve nominated has done to achieve excellence in their field which makes them deserving of a spot in the Upper House.
It’s from this list of nominations that the Prime Minister should make his or her picks for ennoblement, although the Prime Minister should be able to meet, interview and vet his/her nominations first. The PM should also be allowed to write to a society and make a request that they nominate someone specific, although the person requested should have had to be a member of the society for at least 5 years to prevent cheating of the system, and the Prime Minister should have to offer the society a full explanation of what (s)he thinks that person has done that warrants them being a nominee. The society should also be within its rights to refuse.
These letters of nomination could then be published, maybe all of them in full by a publisher like Burke's Peerage, a new edition released each parliamentary term so the public can see who the Prime Minister had to choose from, and perhaps by newspapers for individuals when they’re raised to the Lords. This would provide a level of transparency hitherto unavailable to the electorate.
Each society should also be free to define what excellence means to them. I don’t know what excellence looks like in the field of philately, but I’d be curious to find out! I don’t know how the Royal Society of St George would define excellence in the field of English patriotism, but again, it would be fascinating to discover!
If the Upper Chamber had its members selected in the way I’ve described, it would likely command far more respect from the public. Accusations of cronyism, so salient now, would likely all but vanish, and thus, the Lords should be more powerful than it is now.
Not so powerful as the Commons with its democratic mandate, and the Lords should be a revising chamber, it shouldn’t be able to introduce legislation unless an MP is willing to introduce it in the Commons as a private member’s bill on a Lord’s behalf, but if it’s a trusted House with a mandate rooted in tradition, expertise and excellence, then it should be given more power with which to hold the Lower House to account.
Currently, the Lords only have the power to delay legislation for up to a year. An Upper Chamber constituted in the way I’ve described, with the added legitimacy it would have, should be empowered to block legislation with a simple majority on the first and second vote, a two-thirds majority on the third, and a three-quarters majority thereafter. If the government are still determined to push it through, it should either be put to the electorate in the form of a referendum or, if it’s introduced again in a second parliament, the Lords should be unable to block it.
There’s an argument to be made that money bills should be excluded from this, but one wonders, given the state of the deficit and governments’ profligate spending in recent decades, whether additional scrutiny from the Lords would be desirable — perhaps preferable to the oversight of a quango. After all, one of the societies making nominations from which Lords could, and likely would be drawn is the Royal Economic Society. Perhaps, in the case of money bills, the Lords should require a two-thirds majority on the first vote to block and three-quarters after that, or maybe there’s some other compromise to come to?
Vox Populi, Vox Dei
I write this polemic, sceptical that any of it would, or even could be implemented today. Too much of it grates against the democratic zeitgeist, even amongst those who are nominally considered conservative, so it would be difficult, some parts — probably the economic restrictions on peers and the creation of the Noble Company of the Lords — extremely difficult to nigh on impossible. Even our so-called ‘far right’ party (which it isn’t), Reform, headed by Nigel Farage, seems to want a more democratic Upper Chamber — democracy for democracy’s sake; not because it will actually improve our quality of governance; which it won’t.
The problem with having a democratic Upper House is two-fold, stemming from the problem of splitting the democratic mandate. As I’ve argued before, a democratic House of Lords, or alternative chamber, “will mean it will either resemble the lower house, in which case the change is utterly pointless, or it won’t, in which case it’ll lead to gridlock with both houses claiming equal ‘legitimacy’ thanks to their democratic mandate. Gridlock in government, as our friends across the pond continuously demonstrate (as did the kerfuffle over Brexit), is rather unedifying.”
By keeping the Lords unelected, but refining the way in which Lords are chosen, you solve the problem of which chamber should be and is supreme, and it could also help contribute to good governance in all the ways I’ve highlighted in this essay.
Walter Bagehot argued, “the addition of life-peers would have made [the House of Lords] a good House.” And it has been, for the most part, a reasonably good House. I think the changes I suggest would make it a great House. But even if all of them can’t be implemented, then I suspect even some of them being implemented would make it an improved House.
Despite the Swarmery as the country decides everything must be democratised because, for some reason, it’s a good in and of itself, I’ll finish with the words of advice Alcuin of York gave to Charlemagne in 798 AD.
Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.
Or,
“And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.”