Few changes more historic have gone as little noticed as the abolition of hereditary peers in the United Kingdom. On March 10, 2026, the English parliament passed the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill, whereby 92 hereditary peers who still continued to be a part of the upper house of parliament were expelled.
This represents the ultimate triumph of an agenda which the English Labour Party had long championed. In 1999, the government of prime minister Tony Blair had abolished more than 600 hereditary peers. Now the remaining few dozen have also been axed. Those expelled are mostly educated, wealthy, white, Christian men who come from families that have remained a part of the English parliament for almost 700 years. The unbroken chain has now been broken.
The irony is that this milestone in the history of democracy has received little attention, both inside and outside the UK. To appreciate its true significance, it is important to first place the English parliament in its proper historical context. Aside from the Catholic Church, the English parliament is perhaps the oldest continuously operating political institution in the Western world. It’s considered the cradle of representative democracy – a form of government that has become nearly universal today. It has served as the principal source of inspiration for elected assemblies in the over 56 countries, including Pakistan, which were once a part of the English commonwealth.
But ‘inspiration’ is where it ends. And this is the interesting part. We seldom pause to notice that the exact composition of the English parliament has nowhere been replicated. When the first former English colony – the US – gained independence in the late eighteenth century, the backlash against the English aristocracy was strong and French Republican ideas were in fashion. That is why the Americans did not stick to the English model. The same was the case with the South Asian and African constitutional framers.
The English parliament may have been the birthplace of modern democracy, but up until recently, it was not structured on exclusively democratic lines. Instead, thanks to the peculiar composition of the House of Lords, it represented an institutional space for the coming together of the elected politicians and the aristocratic, commercial, juristic, scientific and theocratic elites of society. Today, it seems no remarkable that up until 1999, the House of Lords had over 600 hereditary peers. And up until 2009, the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, staffed by ‘Law Lords’ functioned as the apex court of the country. Even today, despite the abolition of the hereditary peers, 26 bishops belonging to the Church of England sit there.
The ‘life peers’ who have replaced the hereditary peers still have life tenure – which, to some extent, makes them technocrats who are immune from the exigencies of the Iraq war. So the English parliament, unlike parliaments elsewhere, was never meant to be just the voice of elected politicians performing governmental functions. It represented the melting pot of multiple social classes, which united to chart a common vision for society.
Today, democracy everywhere is in deep crisis. We are confronted with the seemingly unstoppable rise of elected strongmen. Be it in the form of Donald Trump in the US, Netanyahu in Israel and Narendra Modi in India, we are seeing the rise of democratic regimes which unabashedly resort to stoking up mass hysteria and eroding rule of law both inside their polities and outside. We are also observing small, close-knit interest groups – such as the Zionist lobby – repeatedly hijack the agenda of elected government, which make democracy look like mere hypocrisy.
It is precisely in times of crisis like this that constitutional thinkers ought to be asking some bold questions. We ought to be exploring unconventional avenues of thought. Could it be that there was some wisdom in the classic English parliamentary model, which blended the elected principle with the aristocratic and the technocratic principles? Could it be that the republican-inspired constitutional structures, where everyone is beholden to the exigencies of polarising, electoral politics, are inherently prone to capture by populist, majoritarian movements – such as the Brexit movement in the UK?
Could it be that when the aristocracy is abolished, the void is filled, not by the exponents of the voice of the people, but rather by the ruthless, narrow interest groups like the Zionist lobby, who are good at manufacturing consent? Could it be that in our ideological fervour, we have stripped those features of ancient political institutions that were essential for bringing a sense of balance to the elected political order?
The irony is that precisely at a moment in history when we ought to be thinking very critically about these questions, the radical reshaping of English democracy has gone almost unnoticed.
The writer is a partner at The Law and Policy Chamber. He can be reached at: [email protected]
