The International Association of Amateur Heralds

JMcMillan wrote:But it doesn't give the bearer or his descendants a seat in the Spanish parliament. The inherited seat in the House of Lords was why the UK stopped creating heritable peerages, wasn't it?

You are right that Spanish lords do not have seats in the Senate (Senado). When this ceased to be the case I do not know, but it may have been as eraly as the pre-Franco republic.

Only 92 British hereditary peers now sit in the House of Lords, 90 are chosen by a vote of all the hereditary peers and 2 are ex officio. The number of life peers is now ridiculously large, leading to calls for life peers to be members of the House of Lords for only a limited time.

So...the representative hereditary peers actually represent a larger voting constituency than the life peers selected by the PM?

Michael F. McCartney wrote:So...the representative hereditary peers actually represent a larger voting constituency than the life peers selected by the PM?

No, 92 hereditaries and something like 700+ life peers.

The representative peers are elected by the entire hereditary peerage (their constituency) while the life peers are in effect selected by the PM ( their one-person constituency).

Michael F. McCartney wrote:The representative peers are elected by the entire hereditary peerage (their constituency) while the life peers are in effect selected by the PM ( their one-person constituency).

Opposition parties get a say too. The problem is that the membership of the House of Lords is, as a result, growing like Topsy. Most of the "working" life peers are now pensioners, while many of the hereditary peers who no longer have a seat are young.

But why is the Spanish honor such a high rank? Why not baron?

A good question Campbell and not one I can easily find the answer to.
I found the wikipedia article on Spanish Nobility of interest and it seems that the decision is entirely the monarch's discretion.

Cameron Campbell wrote:But why is the Spanish honor such a high rank? Why not baron?

A good question, but I guess you would have to ask the Spanish King, or the Prime Minister who presumably advised him. The Spaniards seem not to be too concerned about the occasional new grandee, of whatever rank. They after all are simply honours and, as we have discussed, give no political position, nor do any lands go with the status, as would have been expected in earlier times.

Michael F. McCartney wrote:The representative peers are elected by the entire hereditary peerage (their constituency) while the life peers are in effect selected by the PM ( their one-person constituency).

Selected by the PM of the day, but serving for life, so not necessarily in the pocket of the current PM. Baroness Masham was appointed on Harold Wilson's recommendation at age 34 in 1970, and is still serving--apparently actively--47+ years later. That's an extreme case, but as you move to more recently appointed peers, the numbers of surviving members obviously gets greater. There are 40 current members of the House who were created under Margaret Thatcher, 27 or more years ago. Part of the reason the House of Lords tended to grow exponentially was the need to add new life peers to offset those named by previous governments of the opposite party. Now, as Chris pointed out, new life peers are named in consultation with the leader of the opposition and to some extent include opposition nominees, a practice that was presumably introduced to bring this cycle of escalation under control.

We are tending to drift from the original reason for the thread. Partly my fault!