The Lords & Ladies

When the question of reform of the House of Lords came up for debate four months ago, no aspect of it shocked the peers more than the proposal to admit women to the august Upper House. "The main point is that many of us do not want women in this House!" roared the 83-year-old Earl of Glasgow. "We do not want to sit beside them on these benches. We do not want to meet them in the library. This is a House of men, a House of Lords. We do not wish it to become a House of Lords and Ladies." More gallantly, the Earl of Home suggested that "taking women into parliamentary embrace would seem to be only a modest extension of the normal functions and privileges of a peer."

Heedless of some of the Lords' qualms, the government pushed ahead with its plan to modernize the Upper House with legislation that shattered the traditional hereditary principle by providing lifetime peerages for both men and women. In Commons last week, Laborites attacked the bill with gibes and merriment, deplored any attempt at reforming the House of Lords on the ground that it should be abolished entirely. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, young (33) Laborite heir of Lord Stansgate, has long been trying to divest himself of an inheritance that will blight his political career by forcing him to leave the House of Commons. As his father listened in the gallery, he pointed out that the title descends to "heirs male of his body lawfully begotten," complained: "I am the victim of my father's virtue."

Irrepressible Nye Bevan concluded for the opposition. Noting that one impassioned Tory defender of heredity had cited Bevan's own respect for the "science of breeding" in raising pigs on his Buckinghamshire farm, Nye gleefully commented: "I must say that I thought that was an inelegant metaphor. I should never have thought of using it myself. I am not quite certain what the test is to be. In pig breeding, it is length and leanness. If we are to make the [tests] on biological grounds, we ought to have the members of another place [the Commons' phrase for the House of Lords] paraded before us, so that we can examine them . . ."

The Tory majority was not to be deterred, and the House of Commons approved, 305-251, the bill's crucial second reading. By midsummer the House of Lords should have its first ladies--and its first lords-for-life-only.

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