House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to support my noble friend on Amendments 91 and 94 and to extend them a bit. Titles are not trivial. I have been involved in this in a certain way, which I am coming to, for more than 10 years. Titles are property and they go back to feudal times. We cannot have two laws, one of total equality for people outside this House and another for those who are affected by the ability to sit and be addressed in this House. We all take a rather shallow course called Valuing Everyone; let us start, indeed, by valuing everyone.

This is what I want to move on to: I speak for hundreds of Dames who have husbands and dozens of noble Baronesses who have spouses. It is not a trivial matter that our spouses do not share our titles, whereas it works the other way around. I was in correspondence with Buckingham Palace about this a long time ago, having tried in this House. The Palace told me it was a matter of property and a very serious matter, and that only if Parliament willed it could titles be changed so there would be equality.

So, once more, I put in a plea. If someone is a Lord, of course their wife is a Lady, though I wonder why; it certainly ought to work the other way round if that is how it is. Likewise for Dames, because we cannot exempt ourselves from the equality that applies outside and not apply it in this House. Unfortunately, the last time I tried, I was undermined by the late, lamented Lady Trumpington, who told the House that, when she and her husband, whose name was Dr Barker, checked in to a hotel together, it gave them a frisson.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

This brought the House down—as it has done again today—and I lost my point. But it is a serious one: if we are going to share titles, although I am not sure that we should, it should work both ways.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, what a pleasure it is to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and, indeed, one half of our Green Party. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and I have known each other since we met on the slopes of Mount Sinai nearly 40 years ago. She knows how fond I am of her—she supplies my family with her lovely homemade jam—but, as always, I completely disagree.

She cared very much about the gendered amendments but not about the name of the House; I am exactly the other way around. It seems to me utterly bizarre that the Government should have a view on succession to titles. I get the argument of republicanism and I get that it is an irrational thing to have younger brothers inheriting before older sisters. But it is equally irrational to have a prejudice in favour of first-born children rather than younger children. In fact, the whole thing is irrational and cannot be justified wholly on logical grounds. If you start pulling at that thread, you very quickly end up with a French Revolution-style abolition of the entire shebang. If we want to do that, fine, but the idea that you can keep the titles but apply a Guardian public sector equality test to them seems to me extremely strange.

I speak in support of Amendment 97, standing in my name and that of the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I think I said at Second Reading that even the architecture of this Chamber is a link back to the old House of Lords: that it was in the minds of Pugin and Barry to recreate the idea of a throne room and a monarch taking the counsel of his bishops and barons. There is, I think, a thread in the make-up of this House that connects us back, certainly to the earliest House of Lords in the reign of Edward III and probably to the Magnum Concilium of which the noble Earl spoke; or, before that, even to the pre-Conquest witans—I think a Saxon king taking the counsel of his thanes and aldermen would have been doing something not unrecognisable to a Chamber that contains a partly hereditary element.

That thread is being snapped; the link is being sundered. It is being sheared in two, as the Fates were said to do with the thread of a man’s life, and we are being cut off from a part of our history and our constitutional inheritance. I am Tory enough to regret that, but I am Whig enough to recognise that there is something irrational about having an inherited element of a legislature. I wish we were replacing it with something better, as was originally the deal promised in 1998, but we have lost that argument and it is an argument for a different time.

I come back to the bizarre anomaly of having a House of Lords that does not contain any “lords”—as the word would have been understood for the previous 1,000 years. That seems a case of having our cake and eating it. If there are no lords of the traditional, recognised, aristocratic variety then by what virtue and on what basis do we continue to appropriate the name?

This question has been faced before. During the Cromwellian interregnum, the Lord Protector was always trying to bring the old aristocracy back into government. He wanted to sustain the legitimacy of his rule by returning to bicameralism. His problem was that none of the lords would agree to serve. If memory serves, there was one—the sixth Baron Eure, who was a parliamentary soldier who inherited his title when the fifth Baron Eure, who was a distant cousin of his and a royalist soldier, was killed on the battlefield at Marston Moor. He was the only lord, in the old sense, to serve in what came to be known, with spectacular banality, as the “other House”—hence the convention of how the two Chambers refer to one another that we have to this day.

If you do not have any lords, in the Cromwellian sense, do you not face exactly the same dilemma? We can probably do better than “the other House” as a title—we could call ourselves a senate—but it seems utterly extraordinary that we should pretend to the authority and legitimacy that comes from this very old institution when we have deliberately, and in contravention of promises made at the ballot box, torn that thread in two.

I would like an answer to this when Ministers come to respond. Let us please hear their defence of titles.