Thoughts on the hereditary principle

LORDS REFORM IAIN MONCREIFFE OF THAT ILK

Sir lain Moncreille of that Ilk. DL, PhD. eleventh Baronet and twenty-fourth Laird of .11oncreitle, is Albany Herald.

'I knew a lord once, but he died.' Writing as the Master Snob, I feel sad whenever I hear that wistful plaint. The world shouldn't be filled with people like ants, all conforming and brain- washed and dressed alike. It should be full of variety, with people like tropical birds to add to its infinite kaleidoscope. How dull it would be if we all had numbers instead of names, to avert 'social inequality': if there were no Mc- Gillycuddy of the Reeks, no Marquess of Chol- mondeley, no Knight of Glin, no Wali of Swat, nor even the biggest tease of all, our own West- minster Isna,, Mr John Smith. Writing as the twenty-fourth Ilk, I know how much ragging we have to stand nowadays. But that is as it should be. We are not there to show off, but to add to the fun.

Asked by a Danish journalist why I preferred to be called Sir lain as opposed to Dr Mon- creiffe, I teplied that it would be boasting to call myself Doctor, since I had earned the doc- torate myself—but as a Baronet I was only a liv- ing memorial to a greater man, the first Sir Thomas (a back-room boy on the grandest Scot- tish seventeenth century scale). Similarly, the continuing existence of a Duke of Wellington is our most resplendent living war memorial.

The whole thing springs rightly from the Fountain of Honour. Earls were originallr genuine cousins of the Sovereign, and so dressed up similarly with little crowns ('coronets') and Velvet robes to help in our national pageantry. When the Queen made Attlee an earl she was making him an honorary member of the family, a 'well-beloved Cousin.' Other peers copy earls; and we barts have to make do with neck badges.

People link Peerage with Parliament too much. Men were created Irish peers specially td prevent them from sitting in the House of Lords, nor did peeresses in their own right have any seat until lately. All the same, because it is topi- cal, I suppose I must discuss the hereditary principle from the political point of view. For, in an age of technocratic change and 'gritty purposive government,' it is too readily dis- missed as an irrelevant anachronism and as an obstacle to the rightful domination of the numerical majority.

Yet absolute power vested in a numerical majority can corrupt that majority just as much as it can corrupt a single ruler. Allied to no moral principle, it could some day seem logical for 51 per cent of the electorate to enslave the remainder. So, in civilised Western Europe, wise compromises have been evolved whereby the enthusiasm of democracy is tempered by sena- torial safeguards and.the neutralising force of a constitutional monarchy. In the days of their greatness and wisdom, the British solved both these problems in the same way: through the hereditary principle.

It should be clearly understood that, in this context, the hereditary principle does not re- quire hereditary talent. Some ancient Greeks selected men for office by casting lots: but this was only practical in tiny city states where the free citizens were financially independent. We cast the lot of birth, within a group of families chosen by history. The object is to produce a completely independent person, of a family that is at least average in ability (the average for the country would perhaps be about stationmaster level), and who has if possible private means (so that he is a free man, for that is the only way to be free) and been bred to a sense of re- sponsibility. And if democracy means the mass of the people getting what they want, then the hereditary principle is not at all undemocratic. For, in This Day & Age, most of the people continue to adore the Queen and to love a lord.

As usual, the people are right. Most stable democracies in civilised Western Europe—Nor- way, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Belgium,

Luxembourg—have an hereditary sovereign as head of state: of course, those excitable Latins chop and change. An elected but nominal president is a dead bore in a country effectively governed by its Chancellor or Prime Minister.

He just isn't romantic: and in times of rapid change, those who are coming into power are the very people who voted against the distin- guished old buffer, so there is nobody above politics to hold the nation together.

It isn't nationally relevant, though interesting personally, that Winston Churchill descended from Simon de Montfort and William of Orange, from Mithradates and from a brother of St Thomas Aquinas. also (through the Jeromes) from several million Red Indians. But it's very relevant that the Queen and Prince Philip both descend from Alfred the Great and Harold and William the Conqueror, from King Duncan and Robert Bruce and Mary Queen of Scots, above all from Queen Victoria, and that the present Prince of Wales descends from Old King Coel and Rhodri Mawr and Llywelyn the Great. For, in our national history, they act as living links between the past and the future. The Queen is also the present focus of national unity, precisely because nobody has ever had to take sides to vote for or against her.

To turn to the House of Lords, it is similarly because they haven't had to commit themselves to anybody, that the hereditary peers form our principal body of independent thinkers and speakers with a nation-wide platform. More than half of them arc not in receipt of any party whip; 736 are there by inheritance, enough to man an entire battalion from commanding offi- cer (Lord Carrington) to drummer-boy (Lord Foley?). They are a well-chosen mixed bunch. About a third of them are real aristocrats, in that their predecessors actually wore coats of arms over their armour in the days of tourna- ments. Another third represent the capable families who helped to establish us in our hal- cyon days, between Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria. The remainder are mostly of middle- class or working-class origin.

Taken all in all, they're the best group of in- dependents, with a built-in cautious approach to unnecessary new laws, that we're likely to get. It isn't really their job to attend unless they feel they have something to say; the life peers and regular attenders are ample for normal busi- ness. If the Upper House tends to be conserva- tive with a small `c,' that is as it should be, for it is intended to be a brake-on the Lower House: not its rival. A radical second chamber is almost a contradiction in terms—for how, then, is it a safeguard for the minorities? But, with no writ- ten constitution, many of us would feel safer if somebody (other than the paid professional Commons) had the power to oblige governments to go to the country for a fresh 'mandate' when they find it their duty to break their major pledges to the electorate.

All the same, the White Paper proposals are not nearly as half-baked as they've been made out in the debates. Roughly speaking, they are that the Prime Minister of the day (he used to be called the Cabinet) can force through the Second Chamber any legislation he likes, pro- vided only it isn't opposed by the votes of (a) the whole Opposition, themselves political nominees within the consensus, together with (b) most of the mandarins nominated by the bureaucracy, to be known as cross-benchers. So the only check on legislation by the executive

is to be the retired executive, and then only for six months. Since we've already given up our liberties to them, and can never recover them in your time or mine, we might as well face reali- ties: the White Paper gives logical expression to real power, and the dreaded placemen will at least be made free men (probably too late) by the grant of private means.

In such a context, in the interests of all non- conformists, we must insist on retaining inde- pendent voice as opposed to the useless irritant of independent vote. The White Paper's greatest defect is that it proposes to exclude from its 'two-tier' system the voice of future hereditary peers, and thus gradually to deprive the House of all its young men and most of its last free speakers. There will, in a generation's time, be nobody like the late Duke of Bedford or the present Lord Colville of Culross.

Most outside speakers today, whether they realise it or not, depend for their careers on con- forming. The Establishment imperceptibly merges into the consensus, which in turn has managed almost all the mass-media since the rapid suppression of the free wireless. Radios Caroline and Scotland would have been much wiser to have had some minority party political broadcasts, say for the Liberals and the styp, in order to bring the real issue of free speech into the open. What use is a soap box in Hyde Park when trying to inform an electorate of over fifty million? Soon only the hacks and the man- darins will be left in Parliament: and (doubtless to the amusement of Lords Balogh and Kaldor, imbued with a sense of our present great national practical joke) the voice of Russell and Cecil, Cavendish and Stanley, will no longer be heard in the land—unless, of course, they aban- don all their other local duties to become county absentees as well-whipped Westminster profes- sional politicians. On this single point of future peers having no voice, the whole scheme, in my opinion, should founder.

But, in stressing that the hereditary principle does not require hereditary talent, I've perhaps implied that the peerage families as a whole are not more talented than the average. This is, of course, far from the case, and I suspect is the real reason why they're under attack. This Day & Age is the Age of Envy. The best, we are told, is the enemy of the good: and certainly there is much hatred of excellence today. What school is most attacked? Eton. What regiments are most attacked? The Guards. Which House of Parliament is to be deformed? The Lords. But few people could name better schools, troops or Second Chambers anywhere in the world. (Guy Fawkes is the chap who'd attract most people's votes.) And, although throughout all mankind no family is in fact any older than any other, the trouble about our so-called 'old families' is that they will tend to be talented beyond the average.

Readers of Galton's Hereditary Genius will realise that (apart from rare mutations) all talent is inherited, both physical and mental, and that they tend to go together. Happily for the rest of us, talented families often produce amusing eccentrics: so we are able to enjoy Lord Stanley of Alderley and 'Body' Arran, also the aptly named Lord Strange : nor would Lord Egre- mont wish to be exempted. It it's eccentric to win the Victoria Cross, the higher aristocracy out-rival the general population fantastically. Although it's only about a hundred years old, the grander peerage families tend to have won it almost as a matter of course. Men who could have been Premier Duke or Premier Earl of Scotland have won it. Even middle-class peerage families like Moynihan descend from a vc. Per- haps more surprisingly, since the George Cross has barely come of age, men who could have been Premier Duke or Premier Earl of England have won that, too.

The Lindsays (who naturally won the first military vc) may serve as examples of heredi- tary talent. Froissart called them polished, and they have produced poets and playwrights and lovers of art and architecture ever since the Middle Ages. Their head is Lord Crawford, and it is not 'privilege' but civilisation that has made him rival even Sir Colin Anderson in cultural chairmanship. Yet, in This Day & Age, the twenty-seven ducal families haven't been able to give us anything better by way of statesmen than Churchill (who might have been Duke of Marlborough) and no better philosopher than Bertrand Russell (a mere earl, but who might have been Duke of Bedford). And when we were fighting for national survival, the earls' families fobbed us off with Lord Caledon's brother, Field-Marshal Alexander.

Recently the Tory party, after a lot of talk about everybody having an equal chance to prove himself, sacked Sir Alec Douglas-Home (who has proved himself perhaps our leading statesman, as opposed to politician) because he was a fourteenth earl in disguise. This was ironic, for the Homes have had little to do with politics since they defeated and slew King James III in 1488 over an Inland Revenue dispute. The real reason for Sir Alec's inborn interest in pub- lic affairs is his descent from 'Radical Jack' Dur- ham and Earl Grey, the Reform Bill Prime Minister, two of the leading left-wing statesmen of their day. Perhaps earnest men in the corri- dors of power will never get over the casual approach which the aristocracy pretends to bring to the problems of government. We all re- member the deceptively able Victorian noble- man who entered his new Ministry, as Colonial Secretary, and inquired of his Permanent Under- Secretary : 'Tell me, Mr Merivale, where are the Colonies?' Mr Merivale took him literally, as all too many people took Lord Randolph Churchill's 'damned dots,' and still take Sir Alec's doing his sums with matches today.