In Defence of the Unelected
Why unelected toffs may be better for British liberty than elected careerists.
Abolishing hereditary peers from the House of Lords if a crowd-pleaser, particularly for those on the Left. Who could possibly defend the idea that people should be born into status? Blair, ever the moderniser, gutted the Lords, but retained some hereditaries, perhaps for the charm. For three years or so the present Labour Party, whose leader is on record as saying that the monarchy should go as well (he has rowed back from this), has been plotting to do away with the rest of them. This, on the face of it, is low-hanging fruit for a Left-wing party with a massive majority. Given the mess in which we seem to find ourselves, those less persuaded of the technocratic, rationalist view of the world will likely feel this particular hill is not one on which it is worth dying.
Well, fair enough. I am not sure I would die on that hill either. But however unfashionable, there is a case to be made for allowing the ladies and gentlemen on the burgundy seats to go on doing what they are doing, and not to send them to the constitutional oubliette. They stand, after all, for an emergent, evolved social structure, not an engineered one. As such they embody that time-tested practical knowledge that is distributed across society and embedded in tradition, that vehicle for intergenerational wisdom. It might not make sense at the individual level, but the hereditary principle in respect of the Lords has held for 800 years or so and has been a crucial part of the governance of one of history’s freest and wealthiest and most cohesive and best-functioning societies. To get rid of that principle and the more recent beneficiaries of it is to commit an egregious form of epistemic hubris: it is to think that a particular and contemporary understanding of equality, meritocracy or technocracy trumps the fruit of centuries of political trial-and-error.
They stand for an emergent, evolved social structure, not an engineered one. As such they embody that time-tested practical knowledge that is distributed across society and embedded in tradition.
Well, fine, you might say; but it remains the case that these men—they nearly are all men—are unelected and thus unaccountable. And you would be right. But that is half the point. They are, by dint of being those things, immune to the pressures posed by populism, by party whips, by donors, by the ghastly status-signallers of LinkedIn. Because of this independence from electoral pressure they are uniquely suited to keep the government in check. Modern liberal societies assume that political authority must come from the people; but this is a dangerous simplification. In practice, liberty depends not on the source of power, but on the distribution of it. Democratic majorities can be just as tyrannical as monarchs, as de Tocqueville teaches us. The strength of the hereditary part of the Lords lies exactly in that they do not need to care what you or I think.
It is a related point, but also a different one. These people who are born into status—something that seems anathema to the modern mind—do not need to climb. Like a tiara worn at breakfast, status without ambition has its merits. The politician, with few (and apparently fewer) exceptions, depends for his income and sense of self on saying what a large-enough group of people wish to hear. It seems to me that there is real value in having to hand in power a group of people who do not need power and who perhaps do not even want it. Cincinnatus was summoned from his plough to take control of the Roman state and vanquish the Aequi. After accomplishing this in just sixteen days, he relinquished power and went back to his farm. This story has endured because it shows that the best politician is the one who doesn’t want the job.
These people who are born into status — something that seems anathema to the modern mind — do not need to climb. Status without ambition is politically useful.
There is a more symbolic point, but it is no less important for being so. Every state, every people needs permanence and the symbols of permanence. The hereditary principle stitches together the past, present and future, as it were, ensuring that the people of this particular territory feel themselves to be part of a continuous historical group. Strip this away, cut our ties to the past—an enthusiasm for which is typical with radicals and revolutionaries—and we are moved one step closer to Pol Pot’s Year Zero, a rather uneasy combination of what Lewis calls ‘chronological snobbery’ (that is, the present is better than the past in every particular) and blank-slatism: that identity is, can be, and ought to be created in line with current fashions. Yet continuity, however ceremonial, however fabulously silly, is part of the architecture of meaning. For we understand ourselves not as individual bags of meat, moving through space, but as part of a much greater whole.
And in any case, what is the alternative? To abolish hereditary peers is not to get equality, but think-tankers, politically minded lawyers, friends of donors, and so on: power will not disappear, but relocate itself. Arbitrariness is arbitrariness, but sometimes it is better than institutional capture. There is a real irony in the fact that those who whinge so often about the quality of our politicians are all for getting rid of the hereditary principle in the hope that people unlike the politicians they so despise will, as if by magic, emerge. I suspect, not for the first time, that I swimming against the current of opinion; but this is what I think: we need institutions that are not trying to win, not trying to reflect the mood of the moment, not trying to be praised or even admired. The hereditary principle in the Lords is anachronistic: there is no doubt about that. But that is exactly why it is useful. That these Lords do not fit the logic of modern politics is why they are so very necessary.
