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They knewYour browser does not support the element. they must fall. But they stood anyway. If there is one thing at which the English aristocracy excels it is the brave stand in the face of overwhelming odds. They charged in the Light Brigade. They went over the top in the Somme. And on December 11th Britain’s remaining hereditary peers walked into the House of Lords to face their own end.On one side of the debate was the fate of several dozen hereditary peers and 700-odd years of history; on the other, the “House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill” and a commanding government majority. The outcome of the debate was not in doubt. England’s queen, it was once said, “must sign her own death-warrant” if Parliament sent it to her. And so when, on a chill Wednesday, the Lords was sent a bill demanding the “Exclusion of remaining hereditary peers”—a Labour manifesto commitment—they too, like turkeys voting for Christmas, would have to approve it. But not being turkeys, and certainly not chicken, the noble lords and ladies rose to fight it first.The arguments against hereditary peers are not hard to make. The House of Lords is an affront to democracy, vocabulary and hosiery. It enables people to win power because 500 years ago their ancestor was chums with Henry VIII. As David Lloyd George, a former prime minister, said, it long enabled “500 men, ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed”, to wield power in Britain. It requires the government to publish guides on how to address an earl over email (“Dear Lord”) and a baron in the flesh (grovellingly). It obliges far too many men to wear tights in public each year.The House of Lords is one of the oldest assemblies in the world. It is also one of the oddest. Its 827 members make it the world’s largest second chamber: France’s has 348 members; Germany’s a slender 69. It is the only legislature in the world to be larger than its lower house and is second in size only to China’s National People’s Congress. The only other country to have hereditary members in its second chamber is Lesotho, which has its tribal chiefs. It is, as Sir Tony Blair, another former prime minister, observed,“a funny old place”.It can offer a certain dark comedy. During a debate in 1978 on the victims of crime, one hereditary peer, Earl Russell, rose to argue that “naked bathing on beaches or in rivers ought to be universal” and that “this house is indisputably Marxist”. Whether such comedy is desirable in one’s democracy is another question. Having hereditary peers, regardless of their quality, “brings our Parliament into a degree of disrepute and ridicule”, says Meg Russell, a professor of British politics at University College London. The cure for admiring the House of Lords is, the Victorian journalist (and editor of this newspaper) Walter Bagehot once observed, “to go and look at it”.However, as few know better than Sir Tony, it is easier to criticise the Lords than to reform it. The current bill is a piece of unfinished Blair business. In 1999 Labour tried to abolish all hereditary peers. More than 600 were booted out. But 92 (who were, in a fudge for the ages, to be elected by their fellow hereditary peers) were kept as an interim compromise. And 25 years later they are still there. A quarter of a century is brisk by House of Lords standards. The first bill to attempt to limit its size was put forward in 1719; three centuries on, nothing has happened about that, either. The rule of Lords reform, says Professor Russell, is that it is “always on the agenda and nothing ever happens”.Yet this week something started to happen. The largest constitutional change in a quarter of a century—or, as its critics put it, a “purge”—began. Although, this being the House of Lords, it began quite slowly. It opened with some prayers from a bishop, and a mace being carried into the chamber. And then Black Rod, in tights, following it in. This particular revolution also involved quite a lot of “the noble Lord-ing”, and no small amount of “the noble Lady-ing”, plus a very lengthy break for lunch. But make no mistake. This was bloody revolution, House of Lords style.
