“But, happily for us of this island, the British constitution has long remained, and I trust will long continue, a standing exception to the truth of this observation. For, as with us the executive power of the laws is lodged in a single person, they have all the advantages of strength and despatch, that are to be found in the most absolute monarchy: and, as the legislature of the kingdom is intrusted [sic] to three distinct powers, entirely independent of each other; first, the king; secondly, the lords spiritual and temporal, which is an aristocratical assemblage of persons selected for their piety, their birth, their wisdom, their valour, or their property; and, thirdly, the House of Commons, freely chosen by the people from
among themselves, which makes it a kind of democracy: as this aggregate body, actuated by different springs, and attentive to different interests, composes the British parliament, and has the supreme disposal of every thing; there can no inconvenience be attempted by either of the three branches, but will be withstood by one of the other two; each branch being armed with a negative power, sufficient to repel any innovation which it shall think inexpedient or dangerous.
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.” — William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England(1765–1770)
If I were designing the government afresh, I very much doubt I’d design it as most people of my generation would design it.
Most people my age — I’m 33 — have absorbed into the very marrow of their bones the belief that democracy, in all cases, is desirable throughout government.
An elected upper house, and an elected lower house. Elections, elections, elections! Everyone, everywhere, must be periodically answerable to the people…
The problem is, to put it bluntly, the people are often stupid. Or to quote Winston Churchill, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
People love to throw out the quote “vox populi, vox Dei” — The voice of the people, is the voice of God — as a trump card. Somebody said it in Latin, so it must be true!
What they don’t seem to bother looking up is the entirety of the quote, which was penned in a letter by a learned clergyman named Alcuin of York to Charlemagne in 798AD:
Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.
Or, for those who don’t have the spare time to brush up on their Latin:
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.
None of this is to say democracy isn’t good — it is — it’s just to say democracy isn’t good everywhere, in every situation — and it certainly wouldn’t be good for the upper house of our parliament, the Lords, for reasons I’ve detailed here.
But this article isn’t to defend the principle and wisdom of having an unelected upper chamber. I’ve done that. It’s to make the case that hereditary peers in the Lords are not only morally justifiable but desirable.
Again, that doesn’t mean I want the entirety of the Lords to be made up of hereditary peers, I’d also like it to contain the greatest minds our society has to offer, and how I’d go about making that a reality I’ve also described in the afore-linked article.
There’s currently a clip doing the rounds on Twitter — taken from the BBC’s Politics Live — of Peter Hitchens debating with Labour MP Ben Bradshaw about whether the House of Lords is fit for purpose. Mr Hitchens quite rightly points out, to the sanctimonious sniggers of his fellow panellist, that it was working until the last Labour government decided it needed to be tampered with.
The genius of the Lords — as Mr Hitchens explains — was that most of the people there owed nothing to any elected government or party. They could, when they felt necessary, say no to the government.
Mr Bradshaw replied with something about it being a problem for foreign secretaries who wanted to lecture other countries about democracy and human rights, which is of course nonsense. The House of Commons is the legislative body which proposes and introduces laws, the Lords can at best amend and delay them — it’s a safety mechanism to protect us from the not uncommon messianic hubris of the types of people who would put themselves forwards for election. But the entirety of the lawmakers in the United Kingdom are elected.
Nancy Fielder, editor-in-chief of NationalWorld, made the more interesting point that one of the problems with the Lords is it’s too London-centric. Not only is she completely correct, but it’s a result of New Labour’s constitutional meddling. Of course, a London-based political class — now in charge of arbitrarily appointing peers — have appointed a bunch of their London-based cronies.
The great thing about hereditary peers is they are tied to a place by dint of their title being tied to a place — many of those places outside London: 4th Baron Roborough, 4th Baron Ampthill, 12th Earl of Dundee, 22nd Earl of Shrewsbury, 8th Earl of Effingham etc.
These titles (ideally) will be held by someone who was born and raised in the locale to which it’s tied, and who will pass it down to their child who will also have been born and raised in the locale to which it’s tied. In theory, the holders of these titles should be the ultimate aristocratic Somewheres. A balance to the Anywheres that dominate our culture and institutions.
I spoke in my last article on the Lords about the necessity of balancing incentives to exercise power with different — but equally beneficial — incentives to exercise power. Well, what could be a better incentive for doing one’s best for the long term of one’s locale, than having one’s child’s and one’s grandchild’s title and wellbeing tied to that area?
Especially in an age of organised professional politics — current year politics — where local MPs are often parachuted into seats they have no connection to, whose children won’t grow up there, and who will leave the moment they no longer hold that seat in parliament and have been offered a lucrative job doing nothing for Goldman Sachs.
The other unspoken — and rather unintuitive — advantage to having hereditary peers is it injects some controlled randomness into who ends up in the Lords. We never know whether we’ll have a son or a daughter; we never quite know exactly what our children will be like or what their perspectives on things will be, but we know in broad strokes that they’re more likely to like x than y because of the environment they’ve been raised in; they’re more likely than not to be fairly intelligent because a substantial part of intelligence is genetic (as uncomfortable as that makes us) — and the Lords and their ancestors didn’t end up there by being stupid — and they’re more likely than not going to have a beneficial set of incentives encouraging them to take an interest in their locale, in their community.
That’s randomness within a set of parameters that’s pretty likely to result in some interesting, non-partisan, locally minded people in the Lords with a fairly wide range of perspectives that may not be held by the sort of people who would put themselves forwards for an election. They also aren’t under pressure to offer their community ‘bread and circuses’ or to appease the mob. They can take a long-term view of what’s best for the community and country, and safely argue for or against ideas that may sound bad or good in the short term, but in the long term may be great or terrible. Let’s face it, short-termism in politics has been a disaster for our country. We need people to think further ahead than the next election.
In an ideal world, hereditary peers would be much like mini Royals. Perhaps in their youth encouraged to get involved in local businesses and charities, brought up deliberately and consciously to be integrated into the fabric of their community by their parents. In my ideal government, I’d have them funded by the State, removed from commercial interests and temptations, but we can’t let the perfect get in the way of the good, and obviously in the current year that’s extremely unlikely to happen, which is a shame because I suspect it’s the best way we have of tipping the odds in favour of producing statesmen that meet 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.”
So, unlike most of my liberal egalitarian generation, who see no legitimacy in or benefit to archaic hereditary power in the current year, I think there’s most certainly a place for it. Donald Kingsbury once said:
“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.”
Well, Blair threw away the solution that was so exquisitely detailed by Sir William Blackstone back in 1765, and now we have a whole new problem. A weak House of Lords filled in part by cronyism and nepotism which the public has largely lost trust in and can’t understand why it even exists.
And the current year hasn’t seen a change to human nature, nor any improvements to governance. We need balanced incentives in government. It would be all too easy to argue that since government has become more democratic, and more egalitarian, the standard of governance in the United Kingdom has become gradually worse. Where’s the modern William Pitt, Grenville, Disraeli, or Gladstone?
Do we need more Boris Johnsons or Jeremy Corbyns, more Rishi Sunaks or Keir Starmers, who make vapid promises in nasally voices based on current year zeitgeists that are as poorly thought through as they are easy to virtue signal with to unthinking crowds?
