Britain sent its last hereditary legislators home in April, Aristotle filed democracy among the deviations, and the UAE pays its young citizens to marry one another. The old argument for the crown is quietly back.
In 2026 Britain decided that the trouble with inherited power lay with the 81 hereditary peers still sitting in the House of Lords. It left the inherited Crown exactly where it was. As places to draw a line go, it is a strange one, and it has prompted the question this magazine has been meaning to answer for some time.
The usual verdict is that Parliament finished a job begun in 1999 and that democracy won. We take the other side. In our view a good king, with a hereditary aristocracy that answers to him and to the country, is a better form of government than the one most Western voters now enjoy. We also think the choice those voters are offered is often a choice of rosette rather than of policy. The argument is old, Aristotle made most of it, and it deserves a hearing in plain English.
A few terms need defining first. By a good king we mean a monarch with real authority who governs for the whole country and expects to hand it on in better order. By aristocracy we mean families who hold rank by inheritance and owe it to service, which is Aristotle’s sense of the word. An inherited class of money is something he called oligarchy and counted as a failure. By the illusion of choice we mean an electorate that can change the face at the top more easily than the direction underneath. Where we are giving an opinion, we will say so.
What did Aristotle actually say about kings and democracy?
Aristotle’s Politics sorts governments by two questions: how many people rule, and in whose interest. Rule by one, a few or many for the common good gives kingship, aristocracy and what translators call polity or constitutional government. Rule by the same numbers for their own benefit gives the three deviations: tyranny, oligarchy and democracy.
“democracy, of the needy: none of them the common good of all”, in Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Book III of the Politics.
His democracy is not quite ours. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that for Aristotle the real line between oligarchy and democracy is whether the wealthy or the poor hold power, not how many people do. A modern reader should keep that in mind before quoting him at a dinner party. The ranking is still worth knowing. At 1289a38 he lists the regimes in order of goodness: monarchy first, aristocracy second, then polity, democracy, oligarchy and tyranny. Democracy comes fourth of six, which makes it the least bad of the bad ones.
He is no cheerleader for a crown, and we would rather say so than be caught out. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out that he allows a case for popular rule in Book III, chapter 11. In the same book he says that if a state can find several men of similar quality rather than one, aristocracy is preferable to kingship. He also names a habit he finds typical of one kind of democracy, which is ruling by decree instead of by settled law.
We think that sentence about several good men is the most useful thing he wrote on the subject, and we will come back to it.
What is the illusion of choice in a modern democracy?
This is opinion, and we hold it firmly. A modern voter gets a real choice of personnel and a much thinner choice of direction. The parties that can form a government have to win the same marginal seats. They staff the same departments with the same permanent officials, and they hear from the same lobbies on the same Tuesdays. The voter picks a colour. Very often the policy arrives already chosen.
None of that means voting is pointless. A vote decides who sits in the minister’s chair, and sometimes that matters a great deal. What it rarely decides is how far ahead the person in that chair is thinking. The horizon of an elected government is the next election, and the measures that pay off after it are always the first to be quietly dropped. Aristotle’s worry about rule by decree has a modern form: the manifesto rushed through because the clock is running. An election is a contract that expires before the bridge is built.
A hereditary ruler has a different set of incentives. He never stands for election, so nobody can buy him at one. He owes his position to his country rather than to a donor. And he expects to hand everything to a child, which is the most reliable long-term planning device anyone has found. Families who hold land, houses and names across generations will recognise the habit. Elected governments rarely have time to acquire it.
What happened to Britain’s hereditary peers in 2026?
The government that took office in July 2024 had a manifesto commitment to reform the Lords, and it introduced the Bill that September. The House of Lords Act 1999 had already removed all but 92 “excepted” hereditary peers. The 2026 Bill finished the work. It came back to the Lords for its final round of ping-pong on 10 March, and the Commons’ reasons for rejecting the Lords’ amendments were accepted without a division. The House of Commons Library records that the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 18 March. When the session ended on 29 April, the remaining hereditary peers lost the right to sit and vote by virtue of their peerage. The Upper House now consists of life peers and the Lords Spiritual alone.
By the House of Lords Library’s count, the hereditary peers had made up about 11 per cent of the chamber. The Act also ended the House’s jurisdiction over hereditary peerage claims, so the body that once ruled on who had inherited what no longer has that job. The titles go on; what ended was the seat in the chamber that came with them. Inheritance has never needed a Westminster bench to survive in these islands.
We should be honest about how this was done. It was an Act of Parliament, which means a democracy limiting itself in a way it is entitled to. We think it was a mistake. We do not think it was illegitimate.
Is Britain’s crown the strong monarch this argument wants?
No, and pretending otherwise would be the easy way to lose this argument. Britain is a constitutional monarchy under parliamentary sovereignty, and its Crown reigns rather than rules. The model we are defending gives the monarch real weight in government. It then surrounds him with a council of families who hold their places by inheritance and keep them by service.
Our preference is a crown with more authority and an aristocracy with a clear job. Aristotle’s distinction matters here. A class that holds power because it is rich is an oligarchy, and he ranked it below democracy. A class that holds power because it was raised to serve, and loses standing when it stops serving, is the thing he ranked second only to kingship. What separates the two is conduct, which is why bank balances say so little about who belongs to which.
The hereditary peers who sat in the Lords until April were never quite that council. They revised legislation, and they had no power to restrain a king. Still, they were the last part of the British state whose members owed nothing to a party machine, an appointments list or an electorate. Removing them did not make the Lords more democratic. It made the Lords more appointed.
How does the UAE look after its citizens first?
For a working example of a state that plans in generations and puts its own nationals at the front of the queue, look to the Gulf. We are setting out what the UAE government says it does. We are not passing judgement on its politics.
Housing is the place to start. The Sheikh Zayed Housing Programme was set up in 1999 and offers interest-free loans, repayable over 25 years, to citizens on low incomes. Help comes as a grant, a loan or a government house depending on the case, and applicants must be UAE citizens holding a family book and an Emirates ID card. It is means-tested and limited to citizens, which matters: not every Emirati is handed a house.
Marriage is the detail people repeat at dinner. The Ministry of Family pays a marriage grant of AED 70,000 in a single instalment. Both husband and wife must be UAE nationals, the groom at least 21 and the bride at least 18 when the contract is signed, and the grant is aimed at lower-income Emiratis and those on social welfare. It began under Federal Law No. 47 of 1992 as the Marriage Fund. That fund was dissolved in 2016, and the grant carried on under the ministries that took over its work. The government states its purpose openly: to strengthen the Emirati social and demographic structure by encouraging Emirati men to marry Emirati women. It also describes the grant as “strengthening social cohesion”.
Then there is the matter of work. The Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation set 30 June 2026 as the deadline for private companies with 50 or more staff to meet their first-half targets, which add up to 2 per cent growth a year in Emiratis in skilled roles. Compliance checks began on 1 July, and the ministry has warned that “fake Emiratisation”, meaning paper hires, counts as a serious labour violation. According to Emirates 24|7, firms that miss the target face a contribution of AED 10,000 a month for each Emirati not hired.
What strikes us, and it is our reading, is the time span. A housing scheme from 1999 still lends on 25-year terms. A marriage policy from 1992 outlived the body created to run it. These are the habits of a state that expects to be around to see the results.
What happens when the king is a fool?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. Hereditary rule has no built-in remedy for a fool. The crown passes to whoever is next, competent or not, and the weak point of the whole system is the handover, the same moment that tests any family firm.
Our answer is the aristocracy itself. Aristotle’s line about several men of similar quality being preferable to one is the design principle. A council of families outlasts any single king. It remembers what his father promised and what his grandfather got wrong, and it has the standing to tell him so, because he did not appoint it and cannot easily remove it. That is the job the hereditary element is for.
The other half of the answer is less comfortable. A democracy has no remedy for a bad electorate either. If voters choose badly, the only cure on offer is the next election, decided by the same voters a little older. Every system eventually depends on the quality of the people inside it. Ours at least puts its trust in families trained for the work from the cradle, instead of in a campaign trained to win.
Should Britain bring the hereditary peers back?
Yes, as a council of service rather than a club of property. Seats should be held by inheritance and kept by attendance and work, and families who stop turning up should lose them. In our view the 2026 Act was lawful, democratic and wrong, and a later Parliament has every right to undo it with the same tools. The peers kept their titles in April. We would give them back their chairs.
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