Why Would Charles Assent To Ending Hereditary Peers?

Great Britain is moving toward ending a nearly 800-year-old tradition by purging Parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords, of its members by birth. A Labour party official, Nick Thomas-Symonds, hails the expulsion of the hereditary peers, saying their presence in the chamber reflects “an archaic and undemocratic principle.” The last step required to boot their noble lordships, though, is for King Charles to grant his assent. Will he?Reports in the press suggest that the king’s approval is a formality. Surely, though, Charles is savvy enough to grasp that, by allowing this measure to become the law of the land, he would be undermining his own position as the United Kingdom’s head of state. In other words, isn’t Charles, by assenting to the removal of Britain’s ancient aristocrats from their last position of power in the government, rationalizing the extinction of the monarchy ?It’s not our intention here to plump for aristocracy — the so-called hereditary principle — as a basis for government. The Sun, after all, is a small-r republican paper and our constitutional framers broke with the royal regime of the Mother Country. In Great Britain, though, the historic context cannot so easily be ignored. The head of state of the United Kingdom is, not to put too fine a point on it, a king, whose qualification for the job is his parentage. Plus, too, the rise of representative democracy in Great Britain is best seen as the flowering of the rights attained under Magna Carta by the ancestors of the hereditary peers who are about to be sent packing from Westminster. In more recent decades, the peers’ political powers — like those of the monarchy itself — have been trimmed without being severed. Yet liberal governments have long sought to crimp the peers’ role in Britain’s unwritten constitution.The House of Lords, Mr. Thomas-Symonds sneered, “should never be a gallery of old boys’ networks, nor a place where titles, many of which were handed out centuries ago, hold power over the will of the people.” Yet abolishing the peerages by birth, historian Andrew Roberts reckons, means destroying a living connection to the “greatness and drama of our national past.” Mr. Roberts stresses this by pointing to Edmund Burke’s idea of society as a contract.“It becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born,” is how Burke put it. “The hereditary element” in the Lords, Mr. Roberts argues, reflects “the ‘dead’ part of that contract.” As does the monarchy, one could say. The peers by birth, in Mr. Roberts’ telling, “represent their ancestors, whose often glorious deeds have made Britain the country that she is today.”Feature, say, Lord Frederick Ponsonby, who sits in the upper house. In him, Mr. Roberts says, we “see the shade of his great-great-great-grandfather, Major General Sir Frederick Ponsonby, whose charge of the 12th Light Dragoons helped save the Union Brigade at a critical moment of the Battle of Waterloo.” Sir Keir Starmer’s government dismisses the value of such figures in the Lords by calling them “hereditaries.”Labour’s push to expel the hereditary peers threatens to tilt Britain to a de-facto unicameral parliament. Yet the upper chamber is, like our Senate, a check on majoritarian rule. Feature the Lords’ scrutiny of a bill that Labour MPs rushed through the Commons to legalize assisted suicide. Charles would do well to bear that example in mind before he approves a measure that, if followed to its logical end, could lead to a Waterloo for the British monarchy itself.

Why Would Charles Assent To Ending Hereditary Peers?

More from the New York Sun

Airports Promote Food Banks, Gift Cards for Unpaid TSA Workers as Spring Break Begins

Michigan Synagogue Attacker Is Naturalized Citizen Whose Hezbollah-Linked Relatives Died in Lebanon Airstrike

Religious Man Sues Los Angeles County for Not Letting Him Work From Home in June To Avoid ‘Pride’ Flag, Celebrations

More from the New York Sun

Airports Promote Food Banks, Gift Cards for Unpaid TSA Workers as Spring Break Begins

Michigan Synagogue Attacker Is Naturalized Citizen Whose Hezbollah-Linked Relatives Died in Lebanon Airstrike

Religious Man Sues Los Angeles County for Not Letting Him Work From Home in June To Avoid ‘Pride’ Flag, Celebrations

Lew Lehrman: Prophet of Honest Money

Jack Schlossberg’s Congressional Hopes Imperiled as Bloomberg Endorses Nadler Protégé, Micah Lasher

Blue States, With Taxes on High Earners, Commit Political and Economic Suicide

Frustrated Fani Willis Denounces GOP ‘Clown Show’ Even as She Suffers Setback in Effort To Avoid Paying Trump’s Legal Bills

Democrats’ Calls To Tax the Rich Overlook Urgent Need To Tame Reckless Government Overspending