Britain’s parliamentary democracy, one of the oldest in the world, has its quirks. For more than 1,000 years, its kings and queens have presided atop a pyramid of lords, earls, viscounts, and other layers of nobility. Alongside elected members of the House of Commons, these titled (and often wealthy) peers have held hundreds of hereditary seats in Parliament’s upper House of Lords for centuries.
“Undemocratic, overcrowded, dominated by silly archaic practices and unrepresentative of the British population,” is how one reform-minded member has described the chamber.
But all that is about to change: On Tuesday, Parliament adopted a bill abolishing the remaining quota of 92 seats that can be automatically filled by the heirs of titled peers. The act fulfills one of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s election pledges, completing a process started by his predecessor Tony Blair, who removed more than 600 seats in 1999.
This week’s shift signifies a major break with the past. Supporters have argued that nobility’s relative independence from shifting electoral politics and interests has provided stability and safeguarded democracy. The change raises questions for those concerned about Britain’s storied traditions. But it also offers the opportunity to align politics and society with more egalitarian values that acknowledge equality and intrinsic worth of each individual.
Amid increasing cultural diversity and economic inequality, dissolving hereditary privilege could help further dissolve entrenched class divisions and gender disparities dating from feudal times. (Titles have typically passed only to men, limiting women’s presence until the late 1950s, when prime ministers began nominating “lifetime peers” whose titles could not be passed on.)
“The principle of hereditary legislating has now been vanquished,” declared the Electoral Reform Society on its website this week. However, it is pushing for more: an elected, representative upper house that “better reflects the country it serves.”
This sentiment reflects growing public demand for more say in effective governing. Surveys in recent years showed that 28% of British people were dissatisfied with how their government works, and 15% would choose to abolish the monarchy. The royal family appears increasingly responsive to this sentiment. King Charles III has moved to curtail costs and has recently stripped his brother Andrew of all titles and benefits, over alleged connections to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. And Parliament is considering a Representation of the People Bill, to extend the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds and widen the range of accepted voter ID.
“We have a duty to find a way forward,” the leader of the House of Lords, Baroness Angela Smith, said this week. The change is not about “individuals,” she said, “but [about] the underlying principle that … no one should sit in our parliament by way of an inherited title.”
By its nature, democracy is rarely a “finished” project. It might now be time for ordinary Britons to claim a greater role in shaping and safeguarding their nation’s unique governing system.
