The British peers used to have all kinds of legal privileges denied the commoners (denied, even, to a lord’s sons if they bore only a “courtesy title” rather than a full peerage title). For instance, a lord accused of a crime had the right to be tried by the House of Lords as a jury of his peers – and, if convicted and condemned, the right to be hanged with a silk noose.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the peers’ privileges were much reduced. By the time Tony Blair became prime minister, they amounted to the rights to (1) style themselves by their titles; (2) attend and participate in royal coronations; and (3) sit and vote in the House of Lords, a body with much-reduced powers relative to the Commons. That’s all, as far as I know.
Now Tony Blair has pared down the House of Lords to a core body of judges and career politicians. (Or at least, announced his intention to do so – I don’t know whether he’s put this through yet.) If a peer can’t sit in the Lords anymore, what’s left? What privileges do peers still have that set them apart from commoners?
Life Peers still have the right to sit in the House of Lords, heraditary Peers haven’t had that right for a year or two now (a few still do though as they were voted to stay on).
Oddly enough one of my 19th century ancestors was offered a Peerage as he was the ‘Father Of the House of Commons’ (the longest serving MP in the house), but refused it preferring to remain a Baronet.
I have a copy of the 1990 edition of Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage (For the sheer “look, that’s my name!” value, as listed as belonging to the collateral branch of a Baronetage):
As the same page explains, members of the House of Lords are also covered by parliamentary privilege which includes the exemption from jury service. The House of Lords Act 1999 made no mention of this issue, but the assumption seems to be that those hereditaries who no longer sit in the Lords are still entitled to those particular privileges. In other words, this is another way in which the 1999 reforms were half-baked.
So, peers have a certain degree of immunity to arrest and jury service; they have “the right of access to the Sovereign”; and they are allowed to use certain heraldic devices.
Hardly seems worth all the fuss, does it?
Yet I have heard that British politicians – some of them – are ambitious to become a “life peer.” What is it about a peerage, even a life peerage, that makes it so desirable? Is it just because a peer can count on invitations to aristocratic social gatheringns? Or is it just because a peerage is a higher and more prestigious “honor” than an O.B.E. or a knighthood?
It’s still a political job, and they don’t have to win an election to do it. That means that members of the House of Lords don’t have a constituency to represent, there’s less compulsory work and less travelling. It’s a job politicians like to have as they reach normal retirement age or if there’s a particular political subject they want to specialise in.
Members of the Lords often claim that they get a better quality of debate there than in the Commons, but that’s because most of them are old and so they’re more polite to one another.
Hereditary peers who have been excluded from the House of Lords now have the right to sit on the steps of the throne in the House of Lords. This is actualy inside the House of Lords chamber, put you cannot vote or participate in debates.
This was a priviledge that used to be exclusively for the eldest sons of peers, so they could see how the chamber works prior to succeeding to their father’s peerage. Now excluded hereditaries can also sit there.
Excluded hereditaries also have the right to elect one of their number to replace to remaining 92 hereditaries when they die.
The desirability of a life peerage is partly the title, but more the right to sit in the House of Lords, vote on bills, get paid generous expenses, be a member of the “best gentleman’s club in Britain”, drink heavily subsidised alcohol, etc, etc
In regard of numbers - there are 92 hereditary peers left with the right to sit in the House of Lords. The peers excluded from the Lords haven;t ceased to exist, they’ve just lost another right.
There are (about - I’ll check later) twenty-four remaining non-royal Dukes (including two Irish Dukes) and five royal ones (including Charles, who is the Duke of Cornwall & Duke of Rothesay)
I read that article, and I think what it means is that there are only 92 hereditary peers left in the House of Lords; but there is a much larger class of “excluded” peers, who vote among themselves to elect those 92. I think there are several hundred hereditary peerages still in existence in the UK, perhaps more than a thousand, but I don’t know the exact figure.
Why does Guinastasia ask how many peerages are left? It’s not as if they’re going anywhere, is it? Or is there now a trend among heirs to disown their titles?
And TW Duke, I don’t get the Christopher Guest reference.
As long as we’re on the subject, do we have any Noble Dopers who want to own up?
Spectre Pithecanhropus, quite a few titles become defunct as there is no-one to inherit them (I believe each title has slightly different rules on how they can be inherited), also, yes, several heirs do disclaim titles (for example left-wing British politican Tony Benn who disclaimed his title which allowed him to sit in the House of Commons as an MP).
As I said before my name is in Debretts Peerage and Baronetage but currently I’m about 6th or 7th in line to get the title, so there’s little prospect that I will.
In the comedy film Splitting Heirs, Eric Idle plays a man brought up in London by an Indian immigrant family, who finds out he was adopted (which he never suspected before despite his blonde hair and blue eyes), and what’s more he is the switched-at-birth rightful heir to a dukedom. He seeks out a lawyer (John Cleese) for advice, and after he explains his wildly implausible story, the lawyer says, “And that’s what you’re going to tell the House of Lords Committee on Privileges, is it?”
Does anyone know more about this Committee on Privileges? Presumably it has the authority to decide who is or is not a peer – but I wonder if it still exists in the new scaled-down House of Lords, and, if not, whether some other body exists to perform the same functions.
The Committee for Privileges is simply the standing committee of the House of Lords which exists to rule on any disputes concerning the privileges of the House. There is a similar committee in the Commons. In the case of the Lords’ Committee, its remit includes exercising the House of Lords’ right to decide legal cases involving claims to peerages. Such cases are rare but not completely unknown.
The 1999 reform left those powers intact, even in cases where the peerage no longer entitles the holder to sit in the Lords. While this is probably just another way in which the 1999 reform was not fully thought through, there are some precedents - the Lords heard all Scottish peerage cases between 1707 and 1958 and all Irish peerage cases between 1801 and 1922, even although not all Scottish and Irish peers sat in the Lords between those dates. This will be yet another obscure complication which will come up eventually once the present Government begins to flesh out their vague proposals for a Supreme Court. One obvious step would be to say that peerage cases should just be treated like any other civil case.
Given that there are over 1,100 hereditary peerages, that the current rate of extinctions (or abeyances) is only about one or two a year and that there have only ever been a handful of disclaimants (some of which have been reversed), it will take roughly 1,000 years for them all to die out.
