Honours Lists bring out the worst in every one. Today’s New Year’s List is no exception. Every year, voices condemn this “archaic” system, with its initimate association with monarchy and the pretensions of Victorian institutional engineering, social-climbing, and the reinforcement of class in English society.
Where do I stand, on the Honours List? I am content with it, just as I am content with a constitutional monarchy. I see great advantages in having a powerless hereditary incumbent at the formal epicentre of a system of power. Noone can contend for the position, and the office-holder cannot do anything except to be, to occupy space to which noone else can pretend. A hereditary monarch is the neutral point around which the powerful can rotate, akin to a nought in mathematics, or the abstract point at the centre of that brilliant modern invention, the mini-roundabout. This morning’s news about the collapsing Argentinian Constitution highlights the importance of having someone who is committed to stick around in a crisis. And a wealthy powerless hereditary monarch is well suited to perform that function.
Given the availability of Her Majesty, as the Magnificent (if rather expensive) Nought at the heart of our Constitution, the Honours List enables us, through her, to recognise and honour those considered worthy of public acknowledgment. It is an institution worthy of Andy Warhol, using no more than the oxygen of publicity to confer honour, and | making no demands upon the public purse. Indeed, it is arguably a net economic generator, given the activity stimulated by its conferral, in terms of hats, new clothes, car-hire and parties. I am, then, no revolutionary, red in tooth and claw.
But when it comes to the House of Lords, my blood boils. The whole institution should be abolished, and the representative Commons developed as the collegiate element in our Constitution, to complement and counter the Executive. All the Government’s attempts at retain-and-reform have been an abject failure, and will continue to be. On Lords reform, Labour has sadly lost its way, wrongly considering abolition to be an “old Labour” cause.
My recent contribution to a confidential Welsh Fabian Chatroom indicates my views of the subject, and I repeat them here. My Party, the Labour Party, was committed until 1985 to the outright abolition of the House of Lords, and I deplore its change of tack. Outright abolition represents the only satisfactory constitutional solution to the problems caused by the Lords over the past century. That is no Bennite conceit, no archaic Leveller strategy. When it comes to the Lords and their absurd undemocratic flummery, I am committed to getting the tumbrils ready and the guillotines sharpened. The end of the Lords cannot come soon enough for me.
I’ve already been waiting since 1952…
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Diary Note 311201-01 
PS 3/1 My favourite Hugo Young, writing on Thursday 3 January 2002 and analysing the present-day role of the monarchy, presents a view with which I fully concur. He writes "The monarch is the liberator. Anything can be done by her elected ministers in the knowledge that it will not threaten the ultimate continuity of the state. It is her presence, uncontested and unchanging, and above the contemporary irrelevance called party, that makes politics possible". As I say, she is a glorious, magnificent, glittering Nought - more at The Guardian.