Toby on Tuesday

'Cronies And Cronyism

"There was no doubt of the integrity of the members of the House who had served as EU commissioners and it would be distasteful to call on them to declare their interest when speaking."   That was the finding of a House of Lords subcommittee in 2007 when ruling that former EU commissioners, the Kinnocks and Mandelsons of this world, need not declare their EU pensions when speaking in support of the EU, a condition of payment of those very pensions.   It is a measure both of the way in which the EU's tentacles have permeated every nook and cranny of British life, and of the self-serving nature of the so-called Upper House, that a subcommittee should have used the word "distasteful".   Readers of this blog might feel that the description should be applied elsewhere.   And all this becomes relevant as the Bill to trigger Article 50 faces its next challenge in the House of Lords.   Now the old, pre-Tony Blair House of Lords was an eccentric, indeed slightly bonkers, place of which P.G. Wodehouse would have been proud. 

All those backwood peers from the Shires gave it a strong rural flavour which for us in North Yorkshire was no bad thing. But because its composition was arbitrary and illogical it did not seek power.   Broadly it did no harm because most of its members recognised that they were there purely by accident and therefore never tampered materially with legislation coming up from the Commons.   In short, it was ripe for a takeover by Tony Blair and his cronies.   And the Blairite precedent was zealously taken up by the heirs to Blair, the Camerons, Cleggs and Osbornes, who ensured that anyone who questioned the Euro-project was openly and aggressively excluded from the lists of new peers.   And disgracefully, despite close to 4 million votes at the last General Election and being proved wholly right on the EU, all nominations for new UKIP peers have been contemptuously rejected.

To understand  the extent of damage done to the reputation of the House of Lords, you only have to google "List of life peerages 2010 - present."   The total figure amounts to nearly 270 new appointments, a degree of patronage that leaves the Stuart monarchs well in the shade.   And whereas in the past new peerages were usually granted to distinguished soldiers, sailors and other public servants, no one will have ever heard of most of the new peers, their obscurity justifying the assumption that essentially they are all placemen, party donors and various assorted cronies.   In summary, the House of Lords now consists of 689 life peers, the surviving 90 hereditary peers elected by a bizarre system of voting from among their own number, and 26 bishops, 805 in all.   Of these, 252 are Conservative, 203 are Labour, an incredible 102 are LibDem (largely put there by David Cameron to keep Nick Clegg sweet), 178 are Crossbench and 44 are others, including UKIP's three peers, while we can safely add the 26 bishops, Remainers all, to the LibDem list!   Indeed the excellent Bishop of Burnley, who has no seat in the House of Lords, late last month accused the Church of England of jumping on a "middle class establishment bandwagon of outrage and horror" over Brexit.   "As if set to auto-pilot, the C of E has joined in with those who are decrying the collapse of the liberal consensus." So if there are still to be bishops in a reformed Upper House, they should all take the brave Bishop of Burnley as their model.

Next week, many peers will use every trick in the book to try and derail Brexit.   Even if they are not successful, the very danger that they might seek to frustrate the will both of the Referendum and of the Commons must now prompt the demand for fundamental reform of what should be a revising chamber.    At present it simply perpetuates the failures and misjudgements of the past generation.   And in this context it's worth reading an article by Peter Zoeftig in UKIP Daily (www.ukipdaily.com/reforming-house-lords/) dated 6th August, 2016, in which he calls for the Lords to become a revising chamber elected by proportional representation to provide a further check on the executive.   This now seems an eminently sensible solution which UKIP would do well to pursue.   The 1911 Parliament Act under which the Lords surrendered executive power should stand, but its membership now needs to be put on a democratic footing on a basis that differs from that of the House of Commons.   And of course the House of Lords is now the only assembly in the world where convicted criminals are welcomed back once they complete their prison sentences. 

Their Lordships may think it "distasteful" for former EU commissioners to have to declare their interest and risk their pensions when speaking.   For most of us, however, the word "distasteful" is better applied to ex-jailbirds happily resuming their seats in our Parliament at our expense just as soon as they have been released from the slammer!

Until next Tuesday!
Toby