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House of Lords

upper house in the Parliament of the United Kingdom

The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the lower house, the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster in London, England. In contrast to the elected lower chamber, membership of the Lords is granted for life, typically by way of political, non-political or ecclesiastical appointment of serving bishops from the Church of England. The House of Lords has the power to review, delay, and suggest revisions to legislation drafted by the House of Commons, but lost its authority to veto legislation under the Parliament Act 1911. Under the House of Lords Act 1999, a minority, the remaining 92 hereditary peers, are progressively being elected when one of their number dies from those with a hereditary title in the United Kingdom who are not members of the Lords. The House entirely contained hereditary peers and the Lords Spiritual until the Life Peerages Act 1958; all peers were then male

Quotes

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  • Overall, the picture that emerges from British political history is clear. Beginning in 1832, when Britain was governed by the relatively rich, primarily rural aristocracy, strategic concessions were made during an eighty-six-year period to adult men. These concessions were aimed at incorporating the previously disenfranchised into politics because the alternative was seen to be social unrest, chaos, and possibly revolution. The concessions were gradual because, in 1832, social peace could be purchased by buying off the middle classes. Moreover, the effect of the concessions was diluted by the specific details of political institutions, particularly the continuing unrepresentative nature of the House of Lords. Although challenged during the 1832 reforms, the House of Lords provided an important bulwark for the wealthy against the potential of radical reforms emanating from a democratized House of Commons. This was so at least until just before the First World War, when the showdown with Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government over the introduction of elements of a welfare state led to substantial limitations of the power of the Lords. After 1832, as the working classes reorganized through the Chartist movement and later the trade unions, further concessions had to be made. The Great War and the fallout from it sealed the final offer of full democracy. Although the pressure of the disenfranchised was more influential in some reforms than others, and other factors undoubtedly played a role, the threat of social disorder was the driving force behind the creation of democracy in Britain. The emergence of democracy in Britain and its subsequent consolidation took place in a society that had long shed nearly all the remnants of medieval organization and that had successfully resisted the threat of absolutism. They also took place in the context of rapid industrialization, urbanization, expansion of the factory system, rising inequality, and – in the period after the Repeal of the Corn Laws – rapid globalization of the economy.
    • Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (2006)
  • Fairly well, but it is like talking to a lot of tombstones.
    • Arthur Balfour, answer to Lord Riddell after he asked him how he liked speaking in the House of Lords (19 July 1922), quoted in Lord Riddell's Intimate Diary Of The Peace Conference And After 1918–1923 (1933), p. 379
  • By the Constitution of this United Kingdom, the House of Lords is the Court of Appeal in the last resort, and its decisions are authoritative and conclusive declarations of the existing state of the law, and are binding upon itself when sitting judicially, as much as upon all inferior tribunals. The observations made by members of the House, whether law members or lay members, beyond the ratio decidendi which is propounded and acted upon in giving judgment, although they may be entitled to respect, are only to be followed in as far as they may be considered agreeable to sound reason and to prior authorities. But the doctrine on which the judgment of the House is founded must be universally taken for law, and can only be altered by Act of Parliament. So it is, even where the House gives judgment in conformity to its rule of procedure, that where there is an equality of votes, semper presumitur pro negante.
    • Lord Campbell, L.C., Att.-Gen. v. Dean and Canons of Windsor (1860), 8 H. L. Cas. 391; 30 L. J. Ch. 531. reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 189-193.
  • Why should five hundred or six hundred titled persons govern us, and why should their children govern our children for ever? I invite a reply from the apologists and the admirers of the House of Lords. I invite them to show any ground of reason, or of logic, or of expediency or practical common sense in defence of the institution which has taken the predominant part during the last few days in the politics of our country. There is no defence, and there is no answer, except that the House of Lords...has survived out of the past. It is a lingering relic of a feudal order. It is the remains, the solitary reminder of a state of things and of a balance of forces which has wholly passed away. I challenge the defenders, the backers, and the instigators of the House of Lords—I challenge them to justify and defend before the electors of the country the character and composition of the hereditary assembly.
  • The House of Lords, in rejecting the Budget which provides for the national expenditure of the year, are refusing, for the first time since the great Rebellion, aids and supplies to the Crown, and by that fact and by their intrusion upon finance they commit an act of violence against the British Constitution. There is no precedent of any kind for the rejection of a Budget Bill by the House of Lords in all the long annals of the British Parliament, or, before that, in the still more venerable annals of the English Parliament. The custom of centuries forbids their intrusion upon finance.
  • The House of Lords have only been tolerated all these years because they were thought to be in a comatose condition which preceded dissolution. They have got to dissolution now. That this body, utterly unrepresentative, utterly unreformed, should come forward and claim the right to make and unmake Governments, should lay one greedy paw on the prerogatives of the sovereign and another upon the established and most fundamental privileges of the House of Commons is a spectacle which a year ago no one would have believed could happen; which fifty years ago no Peer would have dared suggest; and which two hundred years ago would not have been discussed in the amiable though active manner of a political campaign, but would have been settled by charges of cavalry and the steady advance of iron-clad pikemen.
  • I’m all for abolishing the House of Lords myself, personally. I think it’s totally past its sell-by date as an institution. The fact that we still have nearly a hundred members of the House of Lords who are hereditary peers, who are, by definition, all men, I find extraordinary.
  • The question will be asked, "Should 500 men, ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, override the judgment...of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country?"
    • David Lloyd George, On the House of Lords, speech in Newcastle (9 October 1909), quoted in The Times (11 October 1909), p. 6
  • You must handle [the House of Lords] a little more firmly, and the time has come for unflinching and resolute action. For my part, I would not remain a member of a Liberal Cabinet one hour unless I knew that the Cabinet had determined not to hold office after the next General Election unless full powers are accorded to it which would enable it to place on the Statute Book of the realm a measure which will ensure that the House of Commons in future can carry, not merely Tory Bills, as it does now, but Liberal and progressive measures in the course of a single Parliament either with or without the sanction of the House of Lords.
    • David Lloyd George, Speech to the National Liberal Club (3 December 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (1910), pp. 179-180
  • But they have not rejected the Budget; they have only referred it to the people. On what principle do they refer Bills to the people? I remember the election of 1900, when a most powerful member of the Tory Cabinet said that the Nonconformists could vote with absolute safety for the Government, because no question in which they were interested would be raised. In two years there was a Bill destroying the School Boards. There was a Bill which drove Nonconformists into the most passionate opposition. What did the House of Lords do? Did they refer it to the people? Oh no, there was a vast difference between protecting the ground landlords in towns and protecting the village Dissenter. After all, the village Dissenter is too low down in the social scale for such exalted patronage, so he was left to the mercy of a Tory House of Commons without any of this high and powerful protection. Well, the Dissenters, despised as they may be, once upon a time taught a lesson to the House of Lords, and ere another year has passed they will be able to say, "Here endeth the second lesson" .
    • David Lloyd George, Speech to the National Liberal Club (3 December 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (1910), p. 189
  • What has happened to the monastery? There it was planted in the hills, not merely looking after the spiritual needs of the people, but also their temporal needs... They have all gone. One of these parishes I find to-day with a tithe, and probably the land was owned by gentlemen who, when I was down there twenty years ago, was the anti-disestablishment candidate for that district. What is the good of talking about it? Whoever else has got a right to complain of Parliament not being authorised to deal with this trust; the present Establishment has no right, and the present House of Lords has no right. Property which was used for the sick, for the lame, for the poor, and for education, where has it gone to? ...[T]he bulk of it went to the founders of great families. It is one of the most disgraceful and discreditable records in the history of this country.
  • The fact that the House of Lords has many irrational features is not, in itself, fatal in British eyes for we have a capacity for making the irrational work, and if a thing works, we tend to like it, or at any rate to put up with it.
    • Herbert Morrison, Government and Parliament: A Survey from the Inside (1959), p. 194
  • The decisions of the House of Lords are binding on me and upon all the Courts except itself.
    • Sir John Romilly, M.R., Att.-Gen. v. The Dean and Canons of Windsor (1858), 24 Beav. 715. reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 189-193.
  • I earnestly hope that the House of Lords will always continue to justify your confidence; that it will conscientiously and firmly fulfil the duties for which I think it is eminently fitted, and which are to represent the permanent and enduring wishes of the nation as opposed to the casual impulses which some passing victory at the polls may in some circumstances have given to the decisions of the other House.
    • Lord Salisbury, speech in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (11 October 1881), quoted in The Times (12 October 1881), p. 7
  • My Lords, if I know anything of the constitutional value of this House, it is to interpose a salutary obstacle to rash and inconsiderate legislation—it is to protect the people from the consequences of their own imprudence. It never has been the course of this House to resist a continued and deliberately formed public opinion; your Lordships always have bowed, and always will bow, to the expression of such an opinion; but it is yours to check hasty legislation, leading to irreparable evils; and it is yours—though the Constitution can hardly have been deemed to have provided for such a contingency—to protect the people, not against their own hasty judgments, but against the treachery of those whom they have chosen to be their representatives.
  • I didn't realise how absolutely useless they [the House of Lords] are. There they are, they just go along to collect £15,000 a year... They've got no guts. They should be defending Britain against the transfer of power to Maastricht and our loss of sovereignty and our loss of identity... If they were bigger men, they would take the risk. Actually, I think they are quite useless and they ought to be abolished. They are no good at all.
    • Margaret Thatcher, Remarks to Woodrow Wyatt (27 January 1993), quoted in Woodrow Wyatt, The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Volume Three, ed. Sarah Curtis (2000), p. 166
  • The King governs by Law. Let us look back to the evils we had, in order to prevent more. There was loan, and ship-money, and extremes begat extremes. The House would then give no money. Let the King rely upon the Parliament; we have settled the Crown and the Government. 'Tis strange that we have sat so many years, and given so much money, and are still called upon for Supply. The Lords may give Supply with their own money, but we give the peoples; we are their proxies. The King takes his measures by the Parliament, and he doubts not but that all the Commons will supply for the Government; but giving at this rate that we have done, we shall be "a branch of the revenue." They will "anticipate" us too. But, let the officers say what they will, we will not make these mismanagements the King's error. 'Tis better it should fall upon us than the King. We give public money, and must see that it goes to public use. Tell your money, fix it to public ends, and take order against occasions of this nature for the future. We cannot live at the expence of Spain, that has the Indies; or France, who has so many millions of revenue. Let us look to our Government, Fleet, and Trade. 'Tis the advice that the oldest Parliament-man among you can give you; and so, God bless you!
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