House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I join in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Brady of Altrincham, whom I am proud to call a friend in the non-parliamentary sense of the word. I also thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Quin’s valedictory speech was lovely, and I am very grateful to her personally, because she was instrumental in putting up a plaque to my great aunt Kathleen in Newcastle, who was imprisoned for suffragette activities. I am glad to put that on the record.

I am sitting next to the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, and I admired the self-sacrifice with which he went to the scaffold, as it were. But it rather spurred me in the opposite direction. Why cannot those of us who oppose the Bill, and many of us clearly do, act like Prince Blücher to his ancestor and get there just in time? I think we should try to.

Your Lordships may be familiar with the story of Randolph Churchill, the irascible son of the great Winston. Randolph was diagnosed with a tumour. Surgeons removed it and, having inspected it, declared it benign. On hearing the news, Randolph’s acerbic friend, the novelist Evelyn Waugh, remarked, “How typical of modern science to find the only part of Randolph which is benign and cut it out”. The Government are offering similar surgery today.

It is generally agreed in your Lordships’ House, and has been repeated by the Government Front Bench, that the 92 hereditaries do good work in this place, and their collective presence is benign. Yet here we have a government Bill whose sole purpose is to excise them from the body politic. This is a strange approach to constitutional reform.

Last week, the Prime Minister sought to revive his prematurely flagging Government by announcing six milestones. Milestones mark progress on a journey. On what journey will the Bill take us? We already have good reason to suspect that no other Lords reform will come into Parliament before the next election. So this journey is a cul-de-sac and, when drivers go down a cul-de-sac by mistake, the only sensible thing they can do is reverse. But, since it is likely that the Bill will become law, we need to think ahead. Speaking as a journalist, one thing you sometimes say when inventing a headline is, “Let’s throw it forward”—and that is what we have to do here.

What will this House be once the last element of the principle on which it has existed for 800 years has been surgically removed? I do not want to pursue my Randolph Churchill analogy any further because, even without the hereditary element, your Lordships’ House will do its best to remain benign and public spirited. But I foresee two things. The first is that it will inevitably become more partisan. This is partly because the change will weaken the Cross Benches, who will lose significant numbers and talent, including that of their Convenor. More generally, it is because a House chosen almost solely by government patronage will naturally tend to put party first. There is surely enough partisanship in the other place: the more it is replicated in your Lordships’ House, the less valuable and distinctive we will be.

The second effect is on public perception. Shorn of the historic associations that many people respect, and which the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Belgravia, so well described, we who remain shall be looked at more bleakly. Once accident of birth is fully removed from our composition, we shall be exposed as creatures of successive Prime Ministers. We shall lack the legitimacy of tradition on the one hand or of democratic validation on the other. As the noble Lord, Lord True, pointed out, we shall be a House of Lords born in 1958—therefore very slightly younger than me, and therefore not to be revered.

It is no coincidence that, since the great majority of hereditaries were removed in 1999, your Lordships’ House has been ridiculed and challenged more often than in the past. This experience fulfils the famous prophecy of Ulysses in Shakespeare:

“Take but degree away, untune that string,


And, hark, what discord follows!”

Because we observe our own workings every day, we can see the genuine value of our collective contributions to the work of Parliament. We should recognise that this may be much less obvious to the wider public. We probably tend to think of the 92 as a rump. But I predict that, if the Bill is enacted, we life Peers shall look like a rump instead, and so, as is the way with rumps, more people will want to kick us.