Our House of Lords

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

This is our upper house of government, a sort of Senate, which was supposed to check and modify the laws that the House of Commons wanted to put in place. In the past, it was made up of hereditary Lords and Ladies whose families went back centuries and got their titles from doing little or much or even sleeping with the King of the time. You get the bishops in there too. Very undemocratic, we all thought but although these peers sided with the Right, it wasn't all that bad. After all, when you are comfortably off, you can say what you bloody well like.

Enter Life Peers, people who got a peerage for life which could not be passed on to their kids. Now this lot were nominated by the Prime Minister of the day who told the Sovereign to get on with it. The only shred of democracy in this charade was at least the Prime Minister had been elected but after that, he could appoint anybody on a whim.

But this was not good enough for this Labour Government so they reduced the number of hereditary peers to 92 and bulked the place out with peers of their own making. No doubt the Tories would have done the same. This of course was carried out in the name of democracy ignoring the fact that none of these life peers had been elected.

So now we have four Labour life peers being accused of discussing taking money from private enterprise in exchange for influencing legislation to their advantage. Am I surprised? No! When you populate a government with people who want/need more money, corruption inevitably follows. Is the Senate any better because it has been elected? I doubt it for they have to curry favour from the voters.

Do we need an upper house? I am not sure but I do think that Government needs to be kept in check by a bunch of financially independent people beholden to no one. Maybe the heredity peers, coventional old fuddy duddies were not so bad after all.

P.S. Since I wrote the above, The Times has done a feature on this lot. It is even worse than I thought. It seems that the House of Lords cost us £305 million in 2007 in 2007-8 or £500k a head whilst the Commons cost £364 million over the same period. Not a huge difference on a per capita basis but remember the Commons are 'authors' whilst the Lords are just 'editors' and critics.

Apparently the cost of the Lords has soared since we got rid of the hereditary peers while the number of days of attendance has fallen over 5 years from 174 days per year to 148. I think they are there for the beer.

I rest my case.