So, the Government want to make the House of Lords fully elected.
I just want to outline why i do not agree.
The first reason is this and overlooked by some.
The commons does not do its job in scrutinising line by line legalisation, See if they did this then they would have a good case to put on abolishing the Lords altogether.
The second
What about mandate, lets just say we have a Tory commons but a Labour Lords, what happens? (OK some will point out not much difference between them but you know what i mean), Does the Lords have a stronger mandate of does the commons?
The third
Do we want a mirror of the Commons? do we want people with no real life experience parachuted into *safe seats* as they do in the Commons?
Do we want to lose the valuable experience that we have in the Lords to trade union officials and greasy pole climbers? Yes i want a check on the Commons, but i don't want a rival.
Fully agree. In my view the Lords worked better two or three decades ago than it has done in the last 15 years during which time it has been emasculated. Giving people fancy handles does not mean they will turn up day after day in the chamber.
ReplyDeleteBut we are modernisers nowadays so anything left unchanged is deemed automatically wrong. Blair must carry a lot of the blame for this but so does the media and, I am afraid, the complacency of the Great British public.
I don't give the monarch five minutes after Her Majesty has completed her glorious reign and, forget about Brussels, the country will be run from Islamabad.
The hereditary House of Lords worked better than the present one for one reason: people got into it by accident. The first holder of a title would have been some rich thug who had barged his way in, but his descendants were not. Also, they had usually had some kind of life in the real world before they inherited the title. One of the features of the old house was the remarkable range of expertise of its members.
DeleteUnder the present system of life peerages, almost all the lords are rich thugs who have bribed their way in, plus a few burnt-out cases who have been ennobled long after they are on any use. Far too many peers come from the political parasite class.
The latest proposals mean that all the peers will be of the political parasite class. That is the worst possible composition. It will simply be a second version of the House of Commons which, as is widely recognised, is with few exceptions composed of morally disgusting incompetents.
I thought the only Lord's you cared about was the cricket ground, Billy! Good luck trying to get the public to be arsed one way or the other to do something on such a Constitutional question. "Gimme a can o' beer, a packet of crisps, a football match on the telly, and I'm a pig in shit! 'Oo bloody cares about all that political shite, they'll all just fuck ya soon as look at ya no matter 'oo's in, or what system we've got!" That's what you're up against.
ReplyDelete