This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The last remaining hereditary peers are to be thrown out of Parliament. Good, you might say. What place does heredity have in our legislative process? Britain is finally moving into the modern era, you might add. Reforming the House of Lords has been a low-level objective of all three parties of government over the last 20 years; finally Keir Starmer is getting on and doing it.

Before you sans-culottes start burning your breeches, I think someone should make a defence of the House of Lords in general and the hereditary principle in particular.

First, the easy argument: it works. It works for what we want it to do in our constitution. We want the upper house to be a revising chamber, including amongst its number a sprinkling of experts, to give proper scrutiny to bills that the House of Commons simply cannot do, with its brutally guillotined debates and the quality of its members.

Too many on the Right are afraid to make the case for the hereditary principle

The second rather simple argument: that whilst there is a serious problem with the calibre of people going into Parliament, the single best group of legislators is found, by universal acclaim, amongst the surviving hereditary peers.

The single worst group is recently-elected MPs. It is almost impossible to exaggerate how embarrassingly poor they have been. They cannot speak in Parliament, they can hardly speak in public, they seem incapable of understanding basic trade-offs. There are certainly exceptions, but my word the sheer lack of quality in the lower house is excruciating to watch.

Now whilst these defences are solid, they are purely functionalist. Too many on the Right are just too pusillanimous to try to make the case for the hereditary principle — probably because it flies against the defining spirit of our age: equality.

But here’s the rub. The conservative vision of the world depends, at least in part, on an appreciation that for human beings, the primary unit of society is your family, and that this runs deeper and further than just you, your spouse and your under-18 children.

From this primal primary set of relationships come all sorts of natural human instincts. The desire to set your children up as well as you can; that sense of place where you know your roots go back generations and the hope that you are putting down roots that may last generations; the fact that children are more inclined to follow their parents into their jobs or professions because this is the world the child knows, and it is the field the parent will be able to give the most amount of hope.

All of these instincts run in the face of modern mores, and this has been a societal disaster. We are now supposed to see ourselves as stand-alone generations, which has left older generations abandoned to care homes and younger generations without grandparental support for children. Encouraging movement across country and city without any sense that the home you build — no matter how small — may be in your descendants’ care, leaves us without a sense that our actions are endowing generations to come.

This latter could be one of the strongest arguments in the climate change debate, but it is hardly ever raised because the idea that each generation owes the other anything has died. See also the resistance to housebuilding by the homeowning elderly, which tears away at the fabric of a nation that is either engaged in a project across centuries or it is nothing.

Edmund Burke put it perfectly: “Society is indeed a contract. It becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

Which brings us back to the House of Lords and the hereditary peers who are being expelled by Labour out of spite. They encapsulate one strand of the relationship between our forebears and our descendants. There is something wonderful about the Earl Attlee sitting on the Tory benches, and the Duke of Wellington arguing about relations with Europe.

Of course there are weaknesses — none are drawn from families which arrived more recently in Britain, for example. But this seems an argument for making more hereditary peerages, not scrapping them.

New threads can be woven into the tapestry of our nation’s life, made visible in their presence by hereditary right in the revising chamber of Parliament. Diversity and inclusion at its finest.

Similarly, allowing succession to a peerage to follow succession to the Crown in being open to the eldest surviving child, regardless of sex, would satisfy the complaints that almost all the hereditaries are men.

These are minor tweaks. What I hope might come out of Keir Starmer’s act of constitutional envy is a willingness actually to defend the hereditary principle not only for our Head of State or membership of the legislature, but in the way the state supports the little platoons in their instinctive interactions with each other across multiple generations. The national partnership between the living, the dead and those yet to come might be renewed.