Let’s not stop at hereditary lords in House reform THERE are, somewhat remarkably, 92 hereditary peers in the House of Lords. Since 1999, 90 of these choice gentlemen have been farcically elected to sit on the burgundy benches from out of the greater body of hundreds of barons, earls, viscounts, and marquesses whose ancestors were given magic names by the monarch for engaging in the valuable kind of bastardry on which monarchies in bloody times depend ...
THERE are, somewhat remarkably, 92 hereditary peers in the House of Lords. Since 1999, 90 of these choice gentlemen have been farcically elected to sit on the burgundy benches from out of the greater body of hundreds of barons, earls, viscounts, and marquesses whose ancestors were given magic names by the monarch for engaging in the valuable kind of bastardry on which monarchies in bloody times depend.
This might strike you as a somewhat incomplete summary of their family histories. In fairness, some of these lords’ and ladies’ kith and kin got their pretty ribbons in exchange – not for medieval and colonial bloodshed – but for being friendly press barons, minted friends of the government of the day, and for all sorts of ordinary but politically useful perfidy.
The roll call of second and third-generation political children now ensconced in the upper chamber because their great-great-grandad was big in a 19th or 20th-century cabinet also reflects the compulsive need UK political life continues to demonstrate for ennobling commoners who come within a sniff of political power.
Thanks to the constitutional cowardice of the first Blair government, we have now been forced to benefit from the wit and wisdom of these reactionary aristocrats for a quarter of a century, clinging on to their privileges, popping up to moan about fox hunting in The Telegraph, and generally contributing to the suffocating sense that the constitution of the United Kingdom and the values running through its uncodified codex of conventions, pieties and pomposities remain inimical to basic ideas of democratic citizenship and civic equality.
Having conceived of a plan in opposition to scrap the current membership of the House of Lords and replace it with a Senate of the Nations and Regions (Gordon Brown™), Keir Starmer has decided to revert to the timorous constitutional mean in office, and to use his thumping majority to achieve far less than he might and far less than he should.
Instead of a wholesale purge of the more than 800 peers and meaningfully democratising the upper........
© Herald Scotland
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