The House of Lords is the upper chamber of Britain’s parliament. Canada’s (mostly useless) Senate is our equivalent legislative body, in that the members are not there through any kind of popular vote, and the general public view them — if they have any opinion about them at all — as an odd historical holdover that doesn’t really matter in today’s world. Recently, the Wall Street Journal talked about the House of Lords, and Tim Worstall wants to correct their misunderstandings about that august body:
The change to appointing Life Peers rather than hereditaries really came back in 1958, when it first became possible to appoint someone only for life, rather than appointing someone and finding out that their sons (only first son to first son of course, not all sons) to the nth generation also got membership of the House when the time came. Since then there have been very few hereditary peerages granted and those that have been have been special cases. Ex-Prime Ministers, if they desire, become Earls, ex-Speakers of the Commons Viscounts and after that, well, just some very few special people (such a William Whitelaw who became a Viscount, and everyone was assured that he only had daughters so it would not be inherited).
That is, Blair didn’t so much change the usual method of appointment, for that carried on in much the same way it had for the previous few decades. What he did do was remove the extant hereditaries (except for 92 of them, which is a whole other story). He also created a number of peerages in order to try and balance the party memberships in the Lords. But not excessively so perhaps. There’s a nice listing here of the numbers created under each PM and how many per year. Blair’s numbers are well above the historical average, yes, but rather below Cameron’s numbers per year (Cameron, of course, is trying to reverse the balance in favour of Labour that Blair engineered).
In other words it wasn’t so much “replacement” as the exclusion of the hereditaries leading to a much smaller House.
He also addresses the voiced concern that so many peers have (shock, horror!) business ties that might influence their voting:
Yes, many do indeed have contacts with firms in the economy. Quite possibly too many with not the right kind of firm. But then look back up to that first quote from the article. The Life Peers are drawn from, among other places, the captains of industry (and yes, senior trade union leaders get an equal look in, as do left leaning academics, Lord Glasman comes to mind there, as does my old professor, Lord Layard). If you appoint people from industry to the second house of the legislature then you’re going to have people with links to, and quite possibly paycheques from, industry in that second house of the legislature. George Simpson become Lord Simpson (one of them, there are several I think with that name, the distinction becoming “Simpson of Where”) while he was still ruining GEC. So, obviously, there was the Chairman of a defence related company sitting in the House of Lords. But he was appointed because he was head of GEC.
Similarly, one of the particular peers I did some work for had been instrumental in the creation and running of a very successful financial services firm. It was in part what he was made a Lord for. And while I’ve no idea what his financial relationship with his old firm is or was it wouldn’t surprise me if he was still drawing a paycheque or a pension from it.
