Time to close down leeches’ care home
The Lords should go the way of ashtrays on aeroplanes
THERE are certain parts of our body that evolution tells us we no longer need.
Wisdom teeth, male nipples and, for most people over 50 as it only leads to disappointment, sex drive. Progress has also seen off the likes of VHS recorders, ashtrays on planes, car tax discs and A Question Of Sport (sorry, that was just wishful thinking).
So how has the House of Lords survived? Or, put another way, if a nuclear bomb wiped out Britain and the lucky survivors started to put it together again, would they ever dream of letting 800 unelected, overwhelmingly old, careerist cronies have the power to rip-up laws passed by MPs we elect, at a cost of £100million a year?
Anyone who’s unsure should look at the past week’s events. We had Theresa May throwing her leopard-skin Doc Martens over the arm of the best seat in the Upper Chamber, giving peers the kind of threatening glare last seen on the head bully at St Trinian’s, daring them to derail her Brexit Bill.
Those not trembling were warned by her henchman Norman Lamont that unless they give May what she wants she’ll call a General Election with a manifesto pledge to abolish the House of Lords.
So what is the point of having these peers, if whenever they get to vote on a crucial issue they cower under the threat of abolition? Mind you, when they’re given £300 just for turning up, you can see why they don’t want their gravy train derailed. A worker on the adult minimum wage would have to do a 42-hour week to earn what they can pick up in the time it takes to sign on.
Former Lords Speaker Baroness D’Souza has told a BBC documentary, which goes out on Monday, that she’s seen a peer leave a taxi running outside Parliament while he legged in to do just that.
“There are many, many, many peers who contribute absolutely nothing but who claim the full allowance,” she said.
The documentary also shows lords sipping taxpayer-subsidised champagne and scoffing silver service lunches before having a kip in the library or whining about the loss of the TV room where they watched horse-racing. One peer calls it London’s finest “elderly care home”. Then there are the lords appointed by a political party who decide that they don’t agree with that party any more, so instead of handing their robe and title back, defect, to stay in the House. Currently, six are said to be abandoning Labour. That’s gratitude, eh?
Others put the boot in to further their own agenda. How lovely of Baron Mandelson of Foy to shaft every Labour canvasser in Stoke and Copeland this week, by saying, just before polling, that he is working “every single day” to bring down party leader Jeremy Corbyn. According to Mandelson, Corbyn lives in “a parallel universe”.
This from a man who lives in an £10million London mansion, who was sacked twice from ministerial posts – once for trying to arrange a dodgy mortgage – and who, when representing the workingclass of Hartlepool used to get himself invited on to oligarch’s yachts by the Rothschilds.
What a perfect lord he is. How neatly Mandelson sits on that medieval boil on the face of the so-called Mother of All Democracies, The House of Robber Barons, which, like wisdom teeth and male nipples, no longer serves any purpose.
When Westminster gets refurbished, let’s turf them out and build a new hall for a smaller, elected second chamber.
Turning what’s left of their old home into a Dignitas Clinic to remind us what we should have done to them years ago.