The House of Lords Reginald Lennard Lloyd George Lord Bootltby
Burying the Coffin Peter Howard, Professor E. G. R. Taylor, H. McMorran Selective and Non-Selective Mrs. Karen McKechnie Courses at Degree Level Mrs. Kathleen Hartley Old Age J. W. Beattie, Marjorie Backe, John Moss The Price of Money Alderman J. H. Collins Buildings Before Productions Keidrycli Rhys Biography Travestied I. Bernard Hutton `Our Man in Havana' Sidney Gilliat Half Measure Francis Searson THE HOUSE OF LORDS
Sin,--To anybody who really believes in democracy the new Peerage Bill must seem mere tinkering with a minor aspect of a long-neglected problem, which could in fact be solved much more simply than is usually supposed. Two things are unassailably true about the House of Lords in its present state. On the one hand it provides a means by which a number of persons of great ability and varied experience can debate all kinds of important public issues without the urgency and haste and concentration upon matters of pressing immediacy which under present conditions are unavoidable in the House of Commons and would become similarly unavoidable in the House of Lords if its powers were equal to those of the Commons, or even if it should be re-invested with those of which it has been deprived during the present century. In this way it discharges a function of great value for the healthy working of democratic institutions. On the other hand, the second chamber still consists predominantly of. hereditary peers. who, with the exception of the first holders of a title, become its members by the mere accident of birth, and all of whom are made incapable of becoming members of the House of Commons. Whether he has any exceptional ability or not, a man who inherits a peerage receives the right to speak and vote in that chamber and loses the ordinary commoner's right to seek the suffrages of his fellow citizens in a parliamentary election, while the electors are thus prevented from obtaining him as their representative however much they may want him. That this is contrary to the fundamental principles of democracy is no new or subversive doctrine. More than half a: century ago the preamble to the Parliament Bill expressed the intention to substitute for the House of Lords at some future date 'a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of a hereditary basis': and the Lords themselves, in March, 1910, accepted the principle that 'the .possession of a peerage should no longer, of itself, give the right to sit and vote in the House of Lords.'
It is surely time that something more should be done than merely allow peers to choose whether they will sit in the Lords or seek election to the House of Commons. And only a very simple change is required to bring these matters into accord with the spirit of English democracy. Let our Dukes and Marquises and Earls and Viscounts and Barons retain their hereditary titles but no longer be mem- bers of the House of Lords because of them. Their position in relation to Parliament would then be the same as that of Baronets. They could stand for election to the House of Commons and they would be. eligible, like ordinary commoners, for appoint- ment as life peers with a seat in the House of Lords. That House would consist solely of life peers, the bishops and the law lords. The royal prerogative
would be unimpaired, for it would still extend to the creation of any number of life peers and to the granting of any number of hereditary titles. The former is really important, as was found mitosis matandis in 1832 and in 1911, when grave constitu- tional crises were surmounted without revolution, as they could hardly have been if the Peerage Bill of 1719 had become and remained the law of the land. As for the .hereditary titles, some may feel doubt about retaining the possibility of their further extension and there are some who would like to see them altogether abolished. But there will often be men whose selection for high honour would be en- dorsed by public opinion although their merits were not of a nature to fit them--or indeed make them willing—to sit as life peers in Parliament. And modern developments have not nullified the plea, made nearly a hundred years ago by Walter Bagehot, that an 'order of nobility' helps to prevent the idolatry of mere wealth and that idolatry of 'office' which he thought worst of all. Nor would it be really democratic to ignore the fact that there are still a good many people who, perhaps half-unconsciously, 'love a lord.' We shall probably get over that sort of thing in time and already seem on the way to better social attitudes. But one of the advantages of dealing with the House of Lords in the way that is here advocated is that it would allow things to change and develop in accordance with the development of public opinion and feeling. The extent to which life peerages were awarded to the holders of hereditary titles would, for example, always be subject to public criticism and would alter with the growth of demo- cratic sentiment. The steady advance of democracy in this country, and its remarkable success, have owed not a little to the fact that, in the words of Maitland, we in England never `clean our slates.' At each stage in the democratisation of the constitution since the first Reform Bill some anachronistic vestige was left with the result that its incongruity became a stimulus to further progress. It may well be the same with the democratisation of social relations. English democracy has never been doctrinaire.
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