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.

House of Lords Reform

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is 25 years yesterday that the House of Lords Bill reached the statute book. Many noble Lords have pointed out that the exception which permitted 92 hereditary Peers to remain was agreed because Peers of all parties did not want their unconditional abolition. They therefore secured a down payment on the Blair Government’s promise of full reform. As the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, very eloquently pointed out, that promise was not fulfilled. Now, however, the down payment is being grabbed back.

We are offered only the plain proposition in the forthcoming Bill that we should:

“Remove the remaining connection between hereditary peerage and membership of the House of Lords”.


So we must ask: why? To a certain type of mind, the answer seems blindingly obvious. It is that the hereditary right of Peers to sit in this House is, to quote the relevant Minister, Nick Thomas-Symonds, “outdated and indefensible”. Actually, this is by no means as self-evidently true as the Government suppose. After all, the succession to this Throne, which watches over our proceedings every day, is based on a hereditary right—that of one family to produce our Head of State. That right is strongly supported, I believe, by the majority of the King’s subjects.

It is not our task today to debate the hereditary principle; we need to debate the present practice and how it helps or hinders the work of Parliament. We must ask how that work would be improved if the 92 departed. We would be a wholly appointed House, as other noble Lords have said. Would that be better? Some 25 years ago, it meant more of what were called “Tony’s cronies”; today, it will mean more of Keir’s Peers. I am a defender, and indeed a beneficiary, of prime ministerial patronage, but can we honestly claim that a House composed by that means alone will add value to what we have today?

Is there something bad, not in principle but in practice, about the 92 hereditary Peers who are currently Members of this House? The 92 are in a difficulty here, because they are well brought up people and reluctant to blow their own trumpets—although I am delighted that the noble Earl, Lord Devon, blew his in the most tremendous way. If this Bill passes, it will be their duty to go in dignified silence to the scaffold. I rather feel that it falls to the rest of us to defend not the individual merits of individual hereditary Peers but the collective merits of their being here, until, at least, a better replacement is agreed.

I am still fairly new to your Lordships’ House, but I venture to observe much that is valuable. One is that the hereditaries are usually modest and courteous. They know, to use Lord Melbourne’s phrase about the Order of the Garter, that there is no damned merit about their right to be here, so they are not self-assertive; they know that they must serve. For similar reasons, I think the hereditaries are, on the whole, rarely creatures of party. They bring to bear on legislation independent judgment of the sort that the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, praised. I do not think it a coincidence that the 1999 amendment that kept them here is called the Weatherill amendment. The late Lord Weatherill was the Convenor of the Cross Benches, and in that capacity he wisely discerned the value of the public-spirited hereditary presence. He did not want that element cut out without proper reform. His attitude lives on today on the Cross Benches under its distinguished, and, as it happens, hereditary, convener. I believe it is appreciated right across your Lordships’ House.

Another fact concerns the wider balance of power in this country. It has been said, and many believe, that we are overly governed by London-based elites—mostly people on the public payroll. These are sometimes disparagingly referred to nowadays as the blob. The hereditary presence in our midst seems distinctly unblobby. The 92 are frequently not London-based; they have strong territorial connections with most parts of the United Kingdom. This makes them well-informed on matters from which Whitehall is sadly distant, such as farming, many environmental issues, and practical economic matters such as the effects of tax and regulation on small entrepreneurs and small businesses. Overwhelmingly, the hereditary Peers come from the private sector, and it is shocking how untrue that is of the other place nowadays. It is a clear benefit of their presence here.

When we debate the legislation, I hope we will not throw away an identifiable good on an ideological speculation about some better system which no one has yet devised.