In the debate on the King’s Speech, Rishi Sunak described the planned House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill – which will fulfil the promise in Labour’s 2024 manifesto to abolish the remaining 92 places reserved in the House of Lords for hereditary peers – as “constitutional wrangling”.
That complaint assumes that there is something to wrangle with – that there is any respectable or intellectually coherent argument against the Bill. But there is none.
The current position: reserved places in Parliament for hereditary peers
Until 1999, the large majority of members of the House of Lords were hereditary peers. For obvious reasons, hereditary peers were overwhelmingly Conservative with a big “C”: and even those who claimed to have no party affiliation were usually in practice conservative with a small “c”.
The Blair government originally proposed to remove all the hereditary peers. But, faced with a threat of disruption to its legislative programme if it did not compromise, it agreed to allow 92 to continue. Two of those places are reserved for the hereditary offices of Earl Marshal (held by the Dukes of Norfolk) and Lord Great Chamberlain (held in an arrangement of Ghormenghast-like complexity which boils down to a form of timeshare between three aristocratic families).
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The remaining 90 places are filled by election from the pool of hereditary peers. 42 of the places are elected by Conservative hereditary peers, 28 by “crossbench” (non-affiliated) hereditary peers, 3 by Liberal Democrat hereditary peers, 2(!) by Labour hereditary peers, and 15 are elected from the pool of hereditary peers by the whole House (so that overall there are currently 4 Labour hereditary peers, 4 Liberal Democrats, 33 crossbenchers and 46 Conservatives).
Because women are not eligible to succeed to most hereditary peerages (and even when they can, they take their place behind their brothers), very few of these places have ever gone to women, and at the moment all the 92 are men. There are no statistics for racial diversity but for reasons that are obvious when you remember that virtually no hereditary peerages have been created since 1964, almost all, if not all, are white. For equally obvious reasons, they are overwhelmingly from a privileged or highly privileged background.
When a place falls vacant there is a “bye-election” among the relevant constituency to replace the departed member: these “elections” are farcical, given the tiny numbers involved.
The idea that places in the legislature of a democratic country should be awarded on the basis of descent from people who bought their title from Lloyd George, slept with Charles II, or otherwise caught the favour of the monarch or Prime Minister of the day, is not easy to defend (though it is easy to see why Conservatives want to try). But that does not stop constitutional reactionaries – not all of whom are Conservatives – from having a go. Their attempts are a masterclass in hopeless arguments.
‘Hereditary peers add variety and diversity that you wouldn’t find in a purely appointed House’
The obvious and fatal problem with that argument is that, on any coherent approach to “diversity”, the pool of hereditary peers is about as undiverse as you can get. As already noted, they are almost all men and few, if any, are from a racial minority. Few if any have experience of life as a care-worker, teacher, nurse, or office worker.
The alleged “variety and diversity of experience” of hereditary peers is, for obvious reasons, weighted towards land ownership, with the City and business and other upper middle-class occupations in minor supporting roles.
There is indeed a case for giving a role in our law-making to citizens who are not elected or appointed, and there are numerous proposals around for achieving that, usually involving citizens’ juries appointed at random from voters as a whole.
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Less radically, the appointments system could require the Prime Minister and party leaders to pay attention to diversity of background when appointing life peers.
However, those who run the “diversity and variety” argument for hereditary peers are generally opposed to such initiatives (and, indeed, often sceptical of “diversity” generally) – a fact that gives the game away: they are not interested in diversity or variety in any real sense, and certainly not in the sense of giving voice to groups or interests that really find it hard to get a voice in our politics, but rather in securing a disproportionate voice in Parliament for the types of interest that the hereditary peers overwhelmingly represent: land-owners, the City, and business.
‘A House consisting entirely of appointed members gives too much power to the Prime Minister’
It is again hard not to note that those making the argument are often those who oppose any serious control of the power of the Prime Minister to appoint life peerages or any elected element in the composition of the House.
The complaint by Lord Keen (the former Conservative Advocate General for Scotland who led for the Conservatives in the Lords debate on constitutional aspects of the King’s Speech on Tuesday) that the “overmighty executive” was guilty of an “incursion” on the powers of Parliament would have been a bit less unconvincing had the concern about excessive executive power dated from before the arrival of a Labour government.
But, even ignoring their such opportunistic inconsistency, it is hard to see how removing 92 such hereditary peers really increases the power of the Prime Minister over the House.
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The Prime Minister’s “nuclear weapon” – his power to appoint so many members to the House that its composition changes, or so that House of Lords opposition to a particular measure is overwhelmed – is unaffected by the existence of hereditary peers: even if they all oppose the Prime Minister, all he has to do is appoint another 92 of his own life peers to counterbalance them.
The real limit on the Prime Minister’s powers over the House of Lords are first, that those appointed do not necessarily then follow his instructions, and second that he has to defend, politically, the number and quality of his appointments (and also, by convention, allow opposition leaders to nominate some peers). The Prime Minister can, at least, be held accountable for his bad appointments: Lloyd George and Charles II are beyond accountability for theirs.
Now, there is a powerful case – to which I would sign up – that those limits are too feeble to avoid abuse, and that the powers of the Prime Minister over appointments are too great. Indeed, there are lots of good ideas around as to how they should be reduced (including in my article last year for Labour List). But none of that is relevant to the abolition of the hereditary peers, where it is impossible to see how the Prime Minister’s powers over the House of Lords are meaningfully increased by removing the hereditary peers.
‘Now is not the time’
This is the oldest conservative trick in the book: to claim to agree that reform is needed but to argue that it should wait for something else that may never come.
The current variety of the argument, also deployed by Lord Keen, tries to get a foothold on Labour’s long run commitment, in its 2024 manifesto to “replace the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations”. Why, it is asked, doesn’t Labour just wait for that more fundamental reform rather than pursue “piecemeal reform”? It is also sometimes suggested that Labour should merely end the bye-elections to fill vacancies, allowing the hereditary peers to retain their places until they, literally, to die off.
Neither of those suggestions, however, grapples with the force of the objection to having places in Parliament reserved to (in practice almost entirely) white men who happen to have the right line of descent.
That wrong is worth ending now, rather than waiting for wider and more complex reform that may take years (and which many of those calling for delay would vigorously oppose).
What the complaint about “piecemeal reform” boils down to is the assertion that Labour should not do one good thing because it is not (at least yet) doing other good things, such as removing the places reserved in Parliament for Church of England bishops or, indeed, more fundamental reform: but that assertion is so feeble as to be embarrassing.
The Bill to abolish the hereditary peers’ place in Parliament is that rare thing: a political “no brainer”. It should be supported, and the Conservative Party would be foolish, as well as unprincipled, to wrangle with it.
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