Noble lords? This was more like an EastEnders brawl
Peers, by long custom, refer to each other as ‘noble lords’. The adjective seemed inaccurate yesterday as the unelected House debated the tax credit savings by which George Osborne hoped to cut billions from our deficit.
It felt more like a bar fight in eastenders than a discussion among our Legislature’s wise ancients. Noble lords? Peevish lords, partisan lords, more like; purple- faced lords shaking knobbled forefingers at one another: we had that and more.
The edifice of the establishment Left, encouraged by an Anglican bishop who called the savings ‘morally indefensible’, was in full gallop. With each anti- Osborne speech they worked themselves into ever greater grades of vexation. By the end we had a parade of preening as the will of the elected Commons was splintered and smashed.
The old House has in recent years been contaminated by the viruses of hyperbole and hectoring. Yesterday we had scoffing laughter, extravagant derision, and such a large attendance that they were standing four deep near the Throne.
some of the worst spongers in the national trough turned up to claim their daily allowance. Look, there was expenses fiddler Lady Uddin (ex-Lab), who has taken to wearing a headscarf since she hit the scandal fan. And there was ‘ cash for influence’ Lord Taylor of Blackburn, also ex-Labour. When billions of pounds are in the balance, it’s people like this who steer our nation to the way of righteousness.
We even had heckles, with Labour’s Lord Foulkes, that edifice to wind (most ephemeral of elements), shouting ‘disgraceful!’ and ‘they’re all millionaires!’ at the Conservative benches. Foulkes, who over the years must have siphoned a few million spondoolicks from the public tank, was furious that Tories kept rising to ask polite questions of Lady Meacher (Crossbencher). He accused them of ‘harassing’ dotty Molly Meacher as she proposed an unprecedented change to the Government’s spending plans.
she claimed that the Commons was relying on the Lords to do this work for them. Although the Commons had approved the measure three times, Tory MPs had not really meant to support it, apparently. Lady Meacher may have made one of the weaker speeches heard in the Upper House for years but in that regard she
faced competition from Lady Manzoor (Lib Dem). She came up with the novel line that the Lords had a ‘democratic mandate’. Magnificent!
The Government’s position was put at glacial speed by the Leader of the House, Lady Stowell, who was nearly sunk by a torpedo from one of her Labour predecessors, Lord richard. Yet ‘Tina the Typist’ Stowell stuck to her task as chewing gum to a high heel.
FROM the margins came a flash of candy-pink varnished fingernails: Lady Lane- Fox, so young that were she vintage port she would not yet be drinkable. Tory Whips had pulled in some far-flung peers. Lord Lloyd-Webber, migrant from Broadway, steamed into port. In the Labour contingent glowered boot- slurping former MPs such as Peter Snape, Barry Jones, Michael Wills, Clive Soley. God help us.
When the Bishop of Portsmouth stood up, cassock and surplice flowing, to tell us how ‘appalled’ he was by George Osborne’s morality, who should rise but Quentin Davies, the onetime Tory europhile who defected to Gordon Brown’s government and bagged an immediate Ministerial job, kerching? Davies is the most flea-bitten of coyotes. It is a wonder the bishop, with his sensitivities to low morality, did not hold up his pectoral cross.
No one intervened on the bishop to seek his view on the morality of debt, alas. Lady Kennedy of the Shaws (Lab) peered at the throng through Dame edna-ish spectacles that may have been acquired on a trip to a 3D cinema. During words from Lord Tebbit ( Con), Lord Foulkes snarled ‘get on yer bike!’. Lady Hollis (Lab) adopted a voice of victorian melodrama to describe little children with hurty toes who would no longer be able to afford shoes, all ’cos the Tories were going to send them ‘ Christmas letters’ taking away their money. She must have said ‘Christmas letter’ ten times.
What a triumph: an Olympics of rancour, indignation, exaggeration and socialist lunacy on unsustainable public debt that will have to be paid one way or other, whatever they say.