New Statesman & Society leader, 11 March 1994
"l'm afraid," said Lord Dacre, best known as the historian who said that the forged Hitler diaries were genuine, "it smells to me a little of political correctitude. This bill is rather like burning down the house in order to have roast pig."
And to what insurrectionary outrage was the Tory peer referring? Why, none other than the shameless attempt by Lord Diamond, formerly a Labour Cabinet minister and then an SDP defector, to change the rules on hereditary peerages, currently passed down from father to son, so that eldest children – daughters as well as sons – would inherit titles. "It's as if one were to burrow through antique architectural rubble in order to create a difficult side way into a house of which the front door is already open," Dacre fumed in the House of Lords on Monday.
Nor was he alone in his opposition to this dangerously radical measure. Indeed, the charge in the chamber was led by the 22nd Earl of Shrewsbury, whose title goes back to 1442, and the llth Baron Strabogli, whose title was created in 1318. "The present system has been with us since before the Norman Conquest," said the earl. "I can imagine much confusion, uncertainty and family friction," said the baron. And, in the end, the Lords voted by 75 votes to 39 to prevent the change in the rules. Britain's hereditary peerages will continue to be handed down from father to son, just as they have always been.
An "insult to every woman in the land", as Lord Diamond put it? Certainly. But the problems go deeper than that. Diamond's reform, if successful, would not have addressed the far more important issue of the very existence of the hereditary principle in what purports to be a democratic polity.
Of 1,203 members of Britain's upper house, 774 are hereditary peers. More than half the members of our second legislative chamber are there not because of anything that they have done, but as a reward for their ancestors' actions. Unsurprisingly, the hereditary peers are completely unrepresentative of the public as a whole: apart from their overwhelming maleness, most are rich and nearly all are Tories. And most turn up at the House of Lords only to swamp the rare revolts of working peers against the Tory party.
The legislative role of the hereditary peers is an outrage and must go – but that is not all that is wrong with the Lords. If it is insupportable for most of the members of a second chamber to be there because their fathers and fathers' fathers were adept at bribery and kow-towing to power, it is almost as bad for the rest of it to consist of people who are there because they themselves have precisely the same skills. Although many life peers work hard and perform a valuable legislative function, most are washed-up hacks given titles for their consistent time-serving. The life peerage system is essentially one of political patronage, and even if the politicians running it are themselves directly elected, life peers do not have the legitimacy of elected representatives. In short, there is an overwhelming case that, if we are to have a second chamber, it should be elected directly.
That, however, is not the end of the story. For a start, there are the thorny questions of whether we need a second chamber at all and, if we do, how it should be elected. Here, there are no better answers than those provided by Labour's Plant Commission, which – despite its inability to come up with any consensus on elections for the Commons – argued convincingly that a revising and delaying second chamber was a useful safeguard and that the upper house should be elected using a regional list system of proportional representation. Last year's Labour conference backed this recommendation, and there is no good reason that it cannot form the basis for a government programme.
But there are still details of strategy and tactics to be worked out. And here, according to Graham Allen, Labour's dynamic spokesperson on constitutional reform, there are three views that have significant support in Labour circles.
The first is that the job should be done in one fell swoop – immediate abolition and replacement of the Lords with an elected second chamber voted in on the first available Thursday in May. Second, there are those, apparently including John Smith, who reckon that, because the hereditary peers are the major affront to democracy, hereditary peerages should be abolished first, with the introduction of an elected upper house delayed, perhaps until a second term. The final viewpoint holds that the best way of dealing with the Lords is to hold elections for the upper house without actually abolishing hereditary or life peers, so that, for a time, elected peers would sit alongside unelected ones. This hybrid Lords would be left to decide in its own time what to do – the assumption being that hereditary and life peers would not dare to argue against the elective principle once it had been established.
Which of these routes Labour chooses will be decided by the party's Commission on Democracy within the next year. Each could provide a means of getting rid of the Lords in its present form – but there is a strong case for Labour not opting for the most gradualist approach of abolishing hereditary peerages first. Leaving aside the possibility that Labour would not win a second term, such a strategy would send all the wrong signals about the seriousness of Labour's commitment to democracy – not least because it would almost certainly necessitate the creation of. a large number of life peers to force the abolition of hereditary peerages through the existing Lords. Rather than raise suspicions that a Labour government would once again renege on a promise to do away with the most glaringly anti-democratic political institution in Britain, the party should make it clear that a democratic second chamber would be operating by the end of the first term of a Labour government.
