>Not all Lords are reactionary
No, but my point was that the British state doesn't make someone a Lord who is an enemy of metropolitan capital.
On Tony Benn, here's what Britannica.com has to say:
"Though a fierce critic of the British class system, Benn came from a moneyed and privileged family himself. Both of his grandfathers had been members of Parliament, and his father, William Wedgwood Benn (1877-1960), had been a Liberal and then a Labour MP who in 1942 entered the House of Lords as 1st Viscount Stansgate. The younger Benn joined the Labour Party in 1943, attended New College, Oxford (M.A., 1949), and was first elected to Parliament in 1950. Anticipating that inheritance of his father's title would immediately disqualify him from continuing to serve in the House of Commons, he introduced a personal bill to permit him to renounce the title. The bill was defeated; but, after his father's death in 1960, he continued the struggle, and in 1963 the Peerage Act enabled peers to renounce their titles for their lifetimes. Benn not only renounced his viscountcy (July 31, 1963) but later shed the names with which he had been christened, Anthony Neil Wedgwood, to become simply Tony Benn."
Doug