What's the difference between peerage and pierage?
Peerage
Definition:
(n.) The rank or dignity of a peer.
(n.) The body of peers; the nobility, collectively.
Example Sentences:
(1) Ashcroft's decision to become a UK resident for tax purposes comes 10 years after first apparently agreeing to do so in order to fulfil the conditions of taking his peerage.
(2) Hague was also facing further questions about his role in securing a peerage for Ashcroft.
(3) His life peerage was awarded by former Conservative prime minister John Major but his allegiance has always been to the Labour party.
(4) If peerages are in effect being sold, the academics argue, “these could be thought of as the ‘average price’ per party.” Former Liberal Democrat peer, Matthew Oakeshott, who on leaving the Lords in May last year lamented that his efforts to uncover cash-for-honours deals across the parties had failed, told the Observer that the case against the system, and the parties, was now compelling.
(5) Mandelson, who was MP for Hartlepool from 1992 to 2004, twice resigned from the cabinet amid scandals in 1998 and 2001, and was granted a peerage by Gordon Brown last year so that he could return to the government after several years as European trade commissioner.
(6) The undertaking apparently worked – on 31 March, eight days after signing the letter, his peerage was announced in the spring honours list.
(7) The exchanges between the then prime minister, Tony Blair, the then leader of the opposition, William Hague , and the honours scrutiny committee detail how Ashcroft was twice turned down for a peerage, partly because of concerns about his status as a "tax exile".
(8) In 1963, when Tony Benn won his fight to renounce his inherited peerage, he was rapidly followed by Quintin Hogg and Alec Douglas-Home, who were prominent in the Lords but understood they needed to face the people to get to the very top, as Douglas-Home went on to do.
(9) A week later his peerage was announced and an agreement that Ashcroft need only be a "long-term resident" was apparently struck between a senior civil servant and a Tory whip.
(10) If the peerage is suddenly opened up to placemen, who hope for later preferment in elective politics, then we could soon have more legislators who are not only unelected, but also the opposite of independent.
(11) Business leaders worried about what this would do to our international reputation, what it said about our consistency, whether or not it made the peerage system look like a political plaything.
(12) Lord Wei of Shoreditch, who was given a Tory peerage last year and a desk in the Cabinet Office as the "big society tsar", is to reduce his hours on the project from three days a week to two, to allow him to see his family more and to take on other jobs to pay the bills.
(13) The Ashcroft letters: how tax promise was key to Tory donor's peerage
(14) I don’t want a peerage, and I don’t want a job in government.” Davis calls himself an “eclectic” politician.
(15) William Hague was said to be aware 10 years ago of a deal struck by senior Tories that eventually resulted in Lord Ashcroft secretly remaining a non-dom after obtaining his peerage, according to official documents released today.
(16) In the event, he was awarded the first hereditary peerage since the Macmillan years, and became leader of the Lords as well as deputy PM.
(17) The then Sir Anthony Bamford was granted a peerage in 2013.
(18) The list of media figures also includes Patience Wheatcroft, the editor of Wall Street Journal Europe, who has said today that she intends to stand down from the newspaper as a result of taking up the peerage.
(19) He said he was going to say nothing about us doing away with the hereditary peerage.
(20) Lord Mandelson said today he had no "present plan" to return to the Commons amid speculation that he intends to take advantage of legislation that allows peers to renounce their peerage.