Stripping the Lords of the hereditaries would be an act of harm against our historical DNA

Members of the House of Lords await the start of the State Opening of Parliament
Members of the House of Lords await the start of the State Opening of Parliament

When a new government comes in, the main parties in the House of Lords, as in the House of Commons, swap sides. Being a non-affiliated peer, I remain in the same place – near, but not on, the government benches. This means I can now hear the Labour peers more readily than I can see them.

Because peers are, on average, older than MPs and therefore date from a time when class distinctions were stronger, there is still a difference in accents between Conservative and Labour peers. Most Tories sound posh or semi-posh; most Labour ones do not.

So as I sat in the Chamber on Thursday, listening to a question about the Emergency Alert service, I was slightly surprised to hear a definitely old-fashioned, rather grand and fruity voice coming from the Labour benches behind me. “My Lords,” it said, “I do not know whether the House is aware that there is increasing scientific interest in the effect of heat on human beings…”

I turned round and saw that the speaker was the third Viscount Stansgate, Stephen Michael Wedgwood Benn. He is the son of the legendary Labour Leftist, the man who chucked out the viscountcy, the title and even the Wedgwood to become plain Tony Benn and got the law changed to allow him to spurn the Lords and pursue his career as an MP.

Tony’s heir Stephen takes a different view. He was elected as a Labour hereditary peer in a House of Lords by-election in 2021 (by an irony of history, the remaining hereditaries are the only elected members of the Lords, though admittedly on a rather small franchise – four or five people in Labour’s case).

The third Viscount’s contribution to public life is wholly benign. He is a lot more fun than his younger brother, Hilary, now the Northern Ireland Secretary. He knows a lot about biology and champions people who suffer from allergies. In recognition both of his generous personality and considerable bulk, he is known in the House of Lords as Big Benn.

Yet this pillar of the constitution, and 91 others like him, are suffering, to purloin the phrase from his own question, “the effect of heat on human beings”. Sir Keir Starmer wants all of them out fast. This week, the Government began to build the pyre on which they will be burned by giving the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill its first reading in the Commons.

It is not true, as the Government and BBC claim, that this change is “unfinished business”. The reason that the 92 hereditaries are in the Lords is that Tony Blair half-failed in his original attempt to reform it at the end of the last century.

He got rid of most hereditaries but conceded that 92 should stay until his full reform – an elected second chamber of some sort – would be achieved. That is the unfinished business.

Labour is still not proposing to bring forward such a reform in the foreseeable future. It follows that Sir Keir’s Bill breaks the promise made in 1999.

So why are the 92 going? One Labour answer is that this is “an important part of putting politics in the service of working people”. It is not explained why the lords who would remain – almost all of us appointed for life by a creaky system of prime ministerial patronage – would get any nearer to the workers.

It would certainly help Labour alter the numeric balance in its favour, but that is by no means the same thing.

Another assertion – also from Nick Thomas-Symonds, the constitution minister – is that laws should not be made in Parliament by people present “by accident of birth”. He forgets that we are governed by “the Crown in Parliament”.

No law passed by Parliament (except for a brief period in the 17th century) has ever completed its passage without the formal approval of the monarch – a man or woman always on the throne by accident of birth.

Although the ejection of the hereditaries will not, in law, compromise the constitutional position of the King (and that is why Buckingham Palace sensibly keeps out of this argument), it does leave the monarchy exposed as the last hereditary institution standing. You can be sure that the hard Left and modernising liberal “rationalists” will make this point forcefully later.

In general, accident of birth is not obsolete. Our rights derive almost wholly from our citizenship and our citizenship derives, for the great majority, from where and to whom we were born. So do many rights of inheritance, and many tax laws and exemptions. Each nation state, you could say, is an accident of birth.

It might be true that, if we were inventing a second chamber today, we would not make any part of its membership hereditary. But then nor would we put 24 Anglican bishops in the Lords, a tradition that Sir Keir, knowing who his friends are, is leaving untouched.

We are not starting from scratch, though. We are taking an institution that was mostly hereditary for more than 700 years and cutting out roughly a fifth of its active participants on those grounds, even though the Government itself agrees that the 92 do good work. Why, exactly, must they go, then? Class feeling? Ancient hatred? Revenge? Not a solid basis for a good constitution.

In modern times, we have learnt much more than in the past about genetics, understanding scientifically what we had always intuited – that we human beings are, to a significant degree, what we inherit.

To speak metaphorically, that is true of Britain. Because, apart from Cromwell, we have not had a serious break in our political order for hundreds of years, we have an historical DNA in our institutions.

On balance, that is a blessing. When you ignore it, you may do damage.

In the next 18 months, it will not be easy for the hereditaries to defend themselves. They are mostly well brought-up people who do not like to blow their own trumpets. As a life peer, I feel protective towards them. Seeing them close up, I notice that very few exhibit the aristocratic arrogance that once caused revolutions across Europe.

They are not doing this for the power or the money, of which there is little; or for the fame, because there isn’t much (though I am doing my little bit to sound the bongs for Big Benn). And since they would still be lords by title even if they never entered the building, they are not doing it for any remnant of titular swank.

What I observe is 92 men (I realise the uniformity of their sex is now considered by some to be a lethal objection in itself) who work quite hard to make laws better, stand up for the rights of those who get pushed around and are motivated by low-key patriotism. The second largest proportion of them – the crossbenchers – have no political allegiance, and most of the others wear their party labels lightly, which makes them courteous in debate.

The hereditaries also come, unlike the famed Blob, from most parts of the kingdom and often have special knowledge of rural life. Most notable in an age when public-sector people so dominate the public space, they come overwhelmingly from the private, and therefore directly experience the reality of growing bureaucratic interference in citizens’ lives.

The presence of the 92 in politics is the political application of the famous Hippocratic oath for doctors, “First, do no harm.”