We need root and branch reform in the House of Lords
NEW Labour and the Lib Dems have flooded the House of Lords with Leftleaning peers and now it no longer accurately reflects British public opinion. The Prime Minister is right to reward prominent Brexit backers with peerages and rebalance the institution that has done everything to block Leave.
If the House of Commons is skewed against Brexit, then the House of Lords is even more so. But it will take a lot of new peers to shake up this cosy club where most of the almost 800 sitting there are fully signed up members of the liberal elite determined to frustrate the result of the 2016 election.
Abolishing most of the hereditary peers that made up the House of Lords for centuries was meant to make it more relevant but it simply swapped one privileged gang for another.
Now these new aristocrats are made up of buddies of Blair, Brown, Cameron and Clegg and they mostly share the same urban middle-class values. The Greek term aristocracy literally means “rule of the best” and no doubt many of these lords and ladies consider themselves intellectually better equipped than the supposedly misguided hordes that voted Leave.
HYSTERICALLY, Lord Adonis once said “Brexit is a populist and nationalist spasm worthy of DonaldTrump”.As Iain Duncan Smith rightly snapped back: “It’s a bit rich for him to pontificate on what he calls populism, but what most would refer to as democracy, when he himself has never been elected by a public vote. He has instead relied on preferment from others.”
And that’s the nub of the problem. Most of the peers that now fill up the House of Lords are there as the result of political patronage and reflect the views of past governments now out of step with the public.
In some ways it would have been better to keep the old hereditary peers because at