Aiming at Tory Toppers

Will Prime Minister Tony Blair be able to do what Lloyd George failed to achieve back in 1909? Expel the various dukes, viscounts and other hereditary members of Britain’s House of Lords?

At present, more than half the house’s 1,100 members have a seat by right of birth in this very exclusive and sometimes useful upper house of Parliament. Nobody elected them but they chose their parents well.

In many cases, their forebears accomplished for Britain deeds that earned them a seat in the House of Lords. The Magna Carta, the par excellence antecedent of most modern constitutions, was crafted in Lords. Its purpose? To defend the rights of the people against an abusive ruler.

But that was then and this is now. That’s the message to a skeptical British public from Jack Straw, home secretary of the ruling Labor Party. For Straw the issue is whether “democracy should be defeated by aristocracy.” That’s one way to look at it, but the notion is a hard one to swallow. If that were the case, the monarchy, the mother of all hereditary rights, would be in jeopardy in Britain and this, at present, does not seem so.

Just last October, a public opinion poll on Lords showed that 61% of British voters favored retaining hereditary peers in the house. Most of those polled said none should be expelled unless and until there is a restructuring of the house. Currently in Lords there are 650 hereditary peers and 514 life peers, appointed by the crown.

Why would Blair, an astute politician, want to go against public opinion on this? Perhaps because his cause is Labor’s and with a majority in Parliament this is a chance to whack the top hats off some Tory swells.