The Present Position of the House of Lords
More than once since 1831 the House of Lords has come into conflict with the House of Commons when a Liberal Government has been in power. A compromise was effected between the two Houses over the Disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1869, the Lords, on the whole, giving way. When the Lords proposed to “amend” the Army Reform Bill (for abolishing the purchase of commissions) in 1871, Gladstone overpowered their opposition by advising the Crown to cancel the Royal Warrant which made purchase legal, and to issue a new warrant ending the sale of commissions. This device completely worsted the House of Lords, for a refusal to pass the Bill under the circumstances merely deprived the holders of commissions of the compensation awarded in the Bill. The Army Reform Bill became law, but strong objection was taken by many Liberals to the sudden exercise of the Royal Prerogative. In 1884 the Lords refused to pass the Bill for the enfranchisement of the rural labourer unless a Bill was brought in at the same time for a redistribution of seats. After some discussion Gladstone yielded, the Redistribution Bill was drawn up, and passed the Commons simultaneously with the Franchise Bill in the Lords.
Several Bills have been rejected or “amended” by the Lords since the Liberals came into power in 1906, and the crisis came when the Budget was rejected in 1909. In June, 1907, the following resolution was passed by the House of Commons by 432 to 147 votes: “That in order to give effect to the will of the people, as expressed by their elected representatives, it is necessary that the power of the other House to alter or reject Bills passed by this House should be so restricted by law as to secure that within the limits of a single Parliament the final decision of the Commons shall prevail.” This resolution was embodied in the Parliament Bill of 1911. Between 1907 and 1911 came (1) the rejection of the Budget, November, 1909; (2) the General Election of January, 1910, and the return of a majority of 124 (Liberal, Labour, and Irish Nationalist) in support of the Government; (3) the passing of resolutions (majority, 105) for limiting the Veto of the Lords; (4) the failure of a joint Conference between leading Liberals and Conservatives on the Veto question, followed by (5) the General Election of December, 1910, and the return of the Liberals with a united majority of 126.
The Parliament Bill declared that every Money Bill sent up by the Commons, if not passed unamended by the Lords within a month, should receive the Royal assent and become an Act of Parliament notwithstanding, and that every Bill sent up for three successive sessions shall in the third session become an Act of Parliament without the assent of the Lords.
The Lords passed this Bill with amendments which the Commons refused to accept, and the Parliament Bill was returned to the Lords in August. But, as in 1832, the Prime Minister announced that he had received guarantees from the Crown that peers should be created to secure the passage of the Bill if it was again rejected; and to avoid the making of some three or four hundred Liberal peers, Lord Lansdowne—following the example of the Duke of Wellington—advised the Conservatives in the House of Lords to refrain from opposition. The result of this abstention was that the Lords’ amendments were not persisted in, and the Bill passed the Lords on August 10th, 1911, by 131 to 114 votes.
By this Parliament Act the Lords’ veto is now strictly limited. The Lords may reject a Bill for two sessions, but if the Commons persist, then the Bill passes into law, whether the Lords approve or disapprove.
The real grievance against the House of Lords, from the democratic standpoint, has been that its veto was only used when a Liberal government was in power. There is not even a pretence by the Upper House of revising the measures sent from the Commons by a Conservative ministry; yet over and over again, and especially in the last five years, Liberal measures have been rejected, or “amended” against the will of the Commons, by the Lords after the electors have returned the Liberals to power. The permanent and overwhelming Conservative majority in the Lords acts on the assumption that a Liberal ministry does not represent the will of the people, an assumption at variance with the present theory of democratic government, and in contradiction to the constitutional practice of the Crown. The great size of the House of Lords makes the difficulty of dealing with this majority so acute. In 1831 the creation of forty peerages would have been sufficient to meet the Tory opposition to the Reform Bill; to-day it is said that about four hundred are required to give the Liberals a working majority in the Lords. The rapid making of peers began under George III., but from 1830 to the present day Prime Minister after Prime Minister has added to the membership of the House of Lords with generous hand. Satire, savage and contemptuous, has been directed against the new peers by critics of various opinions, but still the work of adding to the House of hereditary legislators goes gaily on, and Liberal Prime Ministers have been as active as their Tory opponents in adding to the permanent Conservative majority in the Lords; for only a small minority of Liberal peers retain their allegiance to the Liberal Party.
Thackeray gave us his view of the making of peers in the years when Lord Melbourne and his Whig successors were steadily adding to the Upper House. (Between 1835 and 1841 Melbourne made forty-four new peers, and twenty-eight more were added by 1856.)
“A man becomes enormously rich, or he jobs successfully in the aid of a Minister, or he wins a great battle, or executes a treaty, or is a clever lawyer who makes a multitude of fees and ascends the bench; and the country rewards him for ever with a gold coronet (with more or less balls or leaves) and a title, and a rank as legislator. ‘Your merits are so great,’ says the nation, ‘that your children shall be allowed to reign over us, in a manner. It does not in the least matter that your eldest son is a fool; we think your services so remarkable that he shall have the reversion of your honours when death vacates your noble shoes.’”
J.H. Bernard, in his “Theory of the Constitution” (1835), was no less emphatic:—
“As the affair is managed now, the peerage, though sometimes bestowed as the reward of merit, on men who have adorned particular professions, is yet much more frequently—nine times out of ten—employed by the minister of the day as his instrument to serve particular views of public policy; and is often given to actual demerit—to men who hire themselves out to do his commands through thick and thin. The peerage is now full of persons who have obtained possession of it by disreputable means.”
But in spite of satire and hostile criticism members of the House of Lords have always enjoyed a considerable social popularity. They are widely esteemed for their titles, even by those who denounce hereditary legislators and desire to abolish the Second Chamber.
Disraeli created six new peers in 1867-8, and seventeen more from 1875 to 1880, in addition to conferring the earldom of Beaconsfield on himself. Yet Disraeli had written in “Coningsby” (1844):—
“We owe the English peerage to three sources: the spoliation of the Church, the open and flagrant sale of its honours by the elder Stuarts, and the borough-mongering of our own times. Those are the three main sources of the existing peerage of England, and, in my opinion, disgraceful ones.”
Gladstone made fifty peers in his four premierships, and Mr. Herbert Paul, the Liberal historian of “Modern England,” makes the following comments:—
“No minister since Pitt had done so much as Mr. Gladstone to enlarge and thereby to strengthen the House of Lords.
“Mr. Gladstone was lavish in his distribution of peerages, and rich men who were politically active, either in the House of Commons or behind the scenes, might hope to be rewarded with safe seats elsewhere.”
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman exceeded all previous records of the last century by making twenty new peers in less than two years—1905 to 1907—and Mr. Asquith maintained this vigorous policy by thirteen new creations in the first year of his premiership. Already many of these peers, whose titles are not more than six years old, vote with the Conservatives. Great Britain is now the only country in the world that combines a democratic form of government with a second chamber of hereditary legislators, and many proposals are on foot for the reform of the House of Lords. While the Conservatives are more anxious to change the constitution of the Upper House, and to make it a stronger and more representative assembly, the Liberals prefer that its power of veto should be abolished. No Act of Parliament was required to abolish the veto of the Crown on Acts of Parliament, but the growth of a democratic public opinion did not prove strong enough to end the veto of the Lords on the Bills passed by a Liberal majority in the Commons, and therefore the Parliament Act was passed.