NOT since Harold Wilson’s 1976 Resignation Honours has there been such a scandalous set of announcements to the peerage as yesterday’s. The row over Wilson’s Lavender List four decades ago was that he awarded peerages to Labour’s enemies in the business community. Strangely innocent days, these seem now.
While paying lip service to the democratic requirement to reform the House of Lords, Conservatives have often talked the talk then tip-toed back whenever it came down to it. As that doughty defender of the hereditary principle, Lord Sudeley once put it: “If it isn’t broken, why mend it?”
The trouble for the likes of this Monday Club veteran is that almost everyone else thinks the Lords is broken and needs of mended. Another 45 appointments, taking membership above 800, makes the point. Wry observations about the Lords being the world’s second biggest political chamber after China’s National People’s Congress are no longer amusing. Quite simply, the House of Lords must be reformed to become an elected forum within a more federal system.
As to yesterday’s appointments, a case can be made for the likes of William Hague, Ming Campbell and Alistair Darling offering the benefit of their political experience to a properly constituted revising chamber. But adding them to the current unreformed edifice is an insult to democracy and, perhaps, their talents and experience. Is Michelle Mone, a lingerie entrepreneur with a decidedly mixed track record in her business career, to be considered in the same light as a former Tory leader and Foreign Secretary, the former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer who saw us through the banking crash, and a Liberal Democrat grandee?
When Ms Mone was revealed as the Government’s business start-ups czar we reported doubts within the business community about the appropriateness of the appointment and we were criticised by her publicists for doing so.
Her impending elevation to the Lords was heavily trailed but it was not inevitable. The Government could have drawn back from making this rather divisive figure a peer. In spite of widespread concerns about her Government business role, her appointment to the Lords has gone ahead. In addition, a slew of yesterday’s appointments came from the ranks of former Tory ministerial advisers. Even the Taxpayer’s Alliance, usually doughty supporters of Conservative policy, joined in the criticism, saying: “David Cameron promised to cut the cost of politics, but with this additional phalanx of peers appointed to an already overcrowded House of Lords, taxpayers are entitled to question his commitment to that goal.”
The Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders were happy to go along with the charade by putting up their own nominations. The case for devising a modern, transparent and representative revising chamber in an increasingly federal, post-devolution political landscape is all the more compelling.
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