The Life Peerages Act 1958 established the modern standards for the creation of life peers by the monarch of the United Kingdom. Life peers are barons and are members of the House of Lords for life, but their titles and membership in the Lords are not inherited by their children. Judicial life peers already sat in the House under the terms of the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876. The Life Peerages Act vastly increased the ability of the Prime Minister to change the composition of the House of Lords and considerably lessened the dominance of hereditary peers.
The Act allowed for the creation of female peers entitled to sit in the House of Lords; the first such women peers took their seats 21 October 1958.
A life peer is created by the Queen by Letters Patent under the Great Seal on the advice of the Prime Minister.
Before the Act was passed, former Prime Ministers were usually created Viscounts or Earls (which are hereditary peerages) in gratitude for their public service in high office. The last Prime Minister and the last person to be made an Earl was Harold Macmillan under the Thatcher government in the 1980s.
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or act:
“The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: “he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.””
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)
“Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)