Hereditary peers are gone, yet Britain still belongs to unaccountable power

This week marked the end of hereditary peerage in the UK. But while Keir Starmer’s Lords reform bill might have put a minuscule dent in unaccountable power in Britain, the country still belongs to the wealthy.

Not that the move wasn’t popular…

As YouGov reminds us, a majority of Brits have been opposed to people inheriting peerages for years:

You can dip back into YouGov’s full 2024 study here. It describes the current system pretty accurately as:

Britain’s ‘upper’ legislative chamber that counts bishops, aristocrats who inherit their position, and people appointed largely on the wishes of the prime minister as members.

The aristocrats mentioned here are the ones whose time has come — the rest of these appointees are still in the Lords.

And YouGov found:

An entirely elected House of Lords is by a clear margin the most popular option among Labour voters (68% support), Lib Dems (65%) and Reform UK voters (54%). Conservatives are instead most supportive of a part-elected, part-appointed body, which half of Tory voters (50%) are in favour of, but they still marginally prefer an entirely elected chamber (41%) to the status quo (35%).

The speaker of the upper house, lord Forsyth, praised the last 88 peers who’d inherited their titles at an event on Monday 27 April. He said they had shown:

a willingness to act with “conscience rather than convenience.

The Telegraph wrote his comments up as:

an implicit criticism of the Prime Minister’s decision to remove the last 88 hereditary peers from the Lords chamber.

And, case in point, the billionaire-owned Telegraph isn’t a bad place to start in our quest to understand the hard limits of British democracy.

Privately owned media

Nobody with a democratic pulse will be sad to see the back of the thousand-year-old tradition of hereditary peers. But Britain’s problem with democracy is far bigger than that.

As the Media Reform Coalition pointed out in a 2025 report:

Just three companies – DMG Media, News UK and Reach – control 90% of UK national newspaper circulation.

They argued:

We need urgent action to break up the corporate juggernauts and global Big Tech cartels that dominate the UK media.

The essential principle that significant media power should be met with substantial public responsibilities has been diluted and ignored by successive generations of political decision-makers, with ever deeper and compounding consequences for the needs and interests of the British public.

And here is the key passage:

It is long past time for comprehensive public intervention to address the impact of media concentration on British democracy.

But the issue doesn’t end there… here are just a few pressing examples of how democracy doesn’t apply to the powerful.

Lobbying for influence

Lobbying by private and state interests is another way in which the wealthy and powerful trample over democracy. Transparency International has reported that:

UK citizens currently have little opportunity to understand who is lobbying whom, how, for what purpose and with what funds.

They warned that:

much of the problem is with rules governing politicians and officials. For instance, all elected legislators in the UK are allowed to receive personal payment in return for providing advice to lobbyists. In practice, lawmakers across the mainland UK are permitted to retain conflicts of interest so long as they are declared.

And, just to circle back to peerages, the group said:

At the extreme of using money for influence in the UK, major party donors can be offered positions in the legislature itself through appointment to the House of Lords.

While some lobbying is ethical and right, there are loopholes big enough to fly a jumbo jet through. For more on dark money in British politics, you can dip into the work of Democracy for Sale.

UK — dictatorship of the foreign policy

Another field in which unelected generals, officials and arms firms have more say than you is foreign policy. The current war in Iran being just one current example. For all intents and purposes, the UK is a dictatorship when it comes to issues of war and empire.

Support for Israel, US bases in the UK, defence deals, the roll-out of AI death firm Palantir in the military and NHS — the list goes on…

Perhaps the most important example of the last quarter century might be the Iraq war. Reporter Peter Oborne broke part of the problem of the British system in relation to that war down in his 2016 book ‘Not the Chilcot Report’.

He said (free PDF here):

The Iraq invasion damaged the core institutions of the British state. This in turn has led to basic questions about the British system of government itself.

He then wrote of the “pre-modern” nature of British democracy:

According to the textbooks the British state is a constitutional monarchy. This bland formula conceals the fact that the British state contains pre-modern elements, which enable a great deal of government to be carried out in secret.

Parliament had wrested away power from the monarchy over the centuries. But the precise nature of these powers has never been codified, as it would in a country with a written constitution.

“In practice”, he argued:

this means that the executive branch of government inherited very significant residual powers from the monarchy.

And, “as a consequence”:

there has always been an unresolved contradiction between an essentially medieval system of government and Britain’s democratic tradition as it evolved over the last two hundred years.

Adding:

Prior to Iraq this contradiction had rarely become a live political issue – the British governing elite had hitherto been assumed to be honest, decent and disposed to act in the national interest.

British ‘democracy’ is still a mere 200-year-old fledgling, like most modern liberal ‘traditions’. The unaccountable power of the rich and privileged is much older and far more entrenched. Getting rid of 88 aristocratic peers isn’t a bad thing. But in an era of growing authoritarianism — not least Starmer’s own — we still have to fight for a world where lawmakers — and private interests — are properly accountable to the popular will.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

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