Keir Starmer has announced that he will introduce legislation to remove the last remaining voting rights of the 92 hereditary peers remaining in the House of Lords after Tony Blair’s 1998 massacre. In terms of legislative quality, this is a travesty. The innumerable “life peers” pushed into the Lords by Blair and his successors are prey to every fashionable delusion and serve no useful purpose. Conversely, hereditary peers, all 805 of whom should be included in a Second Chamber shorn of its corrupt Life Peers element, are an essential part of democratic governance, that could usefully be copied by the United States.

As Sir John Marriott (1859-1945) explained in his magisterial “Second Chambers” published in 1910 in an attempt to prevent the emasculation of the House of Lords by the dozy and vindictive Liberal government of H.H. Asquith, good democracy requires the existence of a second chamber of government, chosen by some method independent of the first chamber, which can block the sillier ideas of the first chamber and propose saner alternatives. As of 1910, the great majority of House of Lords members were hereditary peers, although there were 27 Bishops, a few Scottish and Irish peers elected by their fellows, and a handful of life peer Law Lords. However, the chamber had a full right of veto on all legislation presented to it by the House of Commons, although since 1861 it had been held by convention that the veto would not be used on purely financial legislation such as the annual Budget. Finally, until the 2005 establishment of a spurious “Supreme Court” of self-appointed lawyers by the meddling Blair, the House of Lords was the supreme Court of Appeal.

As John Stuart Mill wrote,

“a majority in a single assembly, when it has assumed a permanent character, when consisting of the same persons habitually acting together, and always assured of victory in their own house, easily becomes despotic and overweening, if released from the necessity of considering whether its acts will be concurred in by another constituted authority.”

We have seen this frequently, especially from governments of the Left – the iron rule of Nancy Pelosi in the United States being as despotically overweening as was that of Tony Blair in Britain.

Marriott described the Second Chamber’s advantages as “the advisability of a check on hasty and ill-considered legislation; the value of an appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober.” He also discussed the Rump Parliament and its temporary replacements, which from 1651 to 1660 had ruled without a Second Chamber (although under the firm hand of Oliver Cromwell from 1653-58) and had several times assumed the judicial function arbitrarily and attempted to perpetuate itself. This was deemed unsatisfactory even at the time; the Protectorate’s second attempt at a constitution, the “Humble Petition and Advice” of 1657 had proposed a Second Chamber “Other House” of no more than seventy life members, to be nominated by Cromwell himself. This was welcomed by all sides; as Cromwell said: “unless you have some such thing as a balance we cannot be safe.” In the event, Cromwell after much careful consideration summoned 63 potential members of the Other House in January 1658, only 42 of whom responded, four of whom were Cromwell’s relatives.

The current House of Lords, full of Life Peers mostly centered on London and prone to all the evanescent follies of fashionable existence, does not provide this — Philip is as drunk in the current House of Lords as he is in the House of Commons, if not more so. Rural and permanent interests are largely ignored by the Life Peers, almost all of whom are metropolitan and evanescent. In the United States, the Senate is a mere replica of the House of Representatives when both Chambers are controlled by the same party, whereas control of the two Chambers by opposing parties produces deadlock more often than wisdom.

Even in 1910 Marriott saw the danger of Life Peerages, an attempt to create which had been made in 1856. Such creations, if unlimited “might place in the hands of the ministry of the day a dangerous weapon and might threaten if not destroy the independence of the Second Chamber.” Equally, a total ban on new creations, such as was contained in the Peerage Bill of 1719, was also unacceptable — Marriott described the dominant Whigs of that period as: “regarding with equal suspicion the Crown and the people.” (That abortive Bill was defeated by Sir Robert Walpole, using phony populism as the tool of his own ambition, as Whiggish types have done so frequently, before and since.)

By 1910, the House of Lords’ ability to introduce legislation had been severely limited – Sidney Low’s 1904 “Governance of England” said that it “is scarcely a legislating chamber; it is a machine for discussing the legislative projects of ministers.” Thus, even by 1910 the House of Lords’ proper function was becoming atrophied, although as Marriott remarked “the only advantage enjoyed by the Commons over the Lords is that of a first taste of the legislative dishes served up by the ministerial chefs.”

Marriott described the U.S. Senate as “unquestionably a stronger Second Chamber than the English House of Lords.” He particularly approved of its recruitment method, which at that time (before the Seventeenth Amendment) still selected Senators by state legislatures, thereby representing the states rather than the people directly, a wholly different system from the House of Representatives. Marriott regarded a differentiation of selection mechanisms between the first and second Chambers as essential, otherwise they would fall into the same vices of petty party bickering.

The U.S. Senate no longer fulfils Marriott’s criterion of a separate election mechanism and is thus no longer useful as a Second Chamber. Nor is a House of Lords consisting of Life Peers. The importance of Marriott’s criterion is emphasized when we think about the principal intellectual deficit of a Chamber elected every five or fewer years – its inability to focus on the long-term issues and the future of the country. That is equally true of a Chamber consisting only of fashionable well-connected Life Peers, who will almost entirely have achieved their success by following the twists and turns of the short-term Zeitgeist.

One example of an issue such a short-termist Second Chamber is incapable of addressing is climate change. Chambers reelected so frequently must inevitably follow the intellectual fashion in their search for re-election; they are thus climate change cultist from 2015, lockdown-friendly in 2020-22, trans-friendly in 2021-23 and Ukraine-obsessed in 2022-24. Life Peers are even more likely to be enthusiasts for such short-term follies; indeed they may well obtain their life peerages by creating them. Similarly, short-termist politicians and fashionably liberal life peers do not care about the long-term problems caused by excessive immigration – note, for example the Biden administration’s bragging about GDP figures and employment figures, when U.S. GDP per capita is declining and employment figures show immigrants (legal or illegal) displacing the jobs of native-born Americans at record rates.

A viable Second Chamber must take the long-term interests of the population properly into account, with a time horizon of several decades, far longer than that of the fashionable, the metropolitan and those elected for short political terms. The U.S. Senate’s pre-Seventeenth Amendment election by local state legislatures achieved this to a degree, because it liberated Senators from political winds and created a large number of small-state Senators whose seats were effectively held for life.

However, an even better solution is a hereditary Second Chamber, composed of representatives whose descendants will still be members a century from now. To achieve this, there should be provision for creating a modest number of new Members regularly, say no more than ten per quinquennium. (The current House of Lords’ hereditary peers contingent resembles one subject to the Peerage Bill of 1719; it has not had a new member since Harold Macmillan was created Earl of Stockton in 1984. It was an utter disgrace that the bureaucracy’s dislike for Sir Mark Thatcher prevented her from receiving the hereditary Earldom or even Dukedom that she so eminently deserved. None of her successors has deserved so high a title, but plenty of them have been worthy of hereditary baronies and should receive them under the new dispensation.)

The current “half-life” of a hereditary peerage – the period after its creation by which it will have suffered a 50% chance of extinction – is about 100 years. Creating ten peers per quinquennium will thus eventually produce a House of Lords about 400 strong, half the current size, with a slow shrinkage from the current 805, with more peers being extinguished initially than are created. It is however comforting to consider that, even with no new hereditary peers being created, there will still be around 30 current hereditary peers left in AD 2500, so this solution to the problem of sound governance will continue available for centuries to come.

As for the United States, it is an almost perfect country, but if there is one thing it lacks, it is a soundly established hereditary peerage Second Chamber, replacing the Senate.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)