Axe 200 peers? Best just to get rid of the whole lot
THE House of Lords must axe 200 peers urgently according to a committee of MPs – ignoring the better option of binning it completely.
With 800 members, the Lords is the world’s second largest legislative body after National People’s Congress of China.
With longevity of the rich and appointments, we will soon have more unelected peers than bicycles in China, probably.
And there are already more than our 650 elected MPs.
For just showing up, we pay peers £300 a day, even if they just pop in for a nana nap.
Michelle Mone, Baroness Mone of Mayfair to you and me, has spoken just three times during her three years in the House of Lords.
This included her maiden speech, when she quoted Whitney Houston song The Greatest Love of All.
She told the House: “I normally sing this at karaoke – I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way.”
What Churchillian oratory her silence has robbed us of.
But take heart, for a £20,000 fee she will make an after dinner speech. Just be prepared to revisit your starter.
Although some peers refuse payment, our Michelle, the millionaire with a billionaire on her arm, claims the full whack when she attends the Lords.
She turned up on 19 days out of 157 in a parliamentary year and missed key debates. Yet she had time to make a YouTube video of her home after “eight hours of organising”.
Rona Mackay, the SNP MSP, called her the ultimate poster girl for the abolition of the Lords.
She said: “While Westminster politics faces the chaos and financial ruin of Brexit, one of its toughest challenges for generations, she’s been missing in action.”
Michelle was actually not “missing”, as verified by her countless holiday snaps on social media.
The daily rate for peer attendance is a third more than the weekly wage of a school cleaner, illustrating that wages are rarely commensurate with worth.
The Lords is a parasitic anachronism belonging in the pit of bad ideas beside the teasmade and the Royal family.
It’s the limp arm we slept on for too long, there but with the blood barely pumping.
Peers are not independent, appointed on the advice of the Prime Minister. They are partisan, whether through party patronage, means or geography.
London has five times more members in the House of Lords than the north-west of England, which has the same population.
Scotland barely figures at all, with the SNP refusing to take seats on principle.
And the list of the ignoble ennobled is long, including my favourite, the coke snorting, prostitute-paying, bra-wearing, all-round crazy egg, Lord Sewel.
Membership of the elite club is rarely rescinded, as the recent case of Lib Dem peer Lord Lester of Herne Hill has demonstrated.
The privileges and conduct committee said Lord Lester would be suspended until June 2022 for sexual harassment and “corrupt inducements”, after three separate inquiries over a year but the House blocked the punishment.
The old boy said he didn’t do it, so that’s that.
We do need a second chamber but an elected one, in keeping with the vague notion of modern democracy.
The Tory monster currently eating itself cannot be left unchecked. That’s if Scotland has to remain hitched to the Westminster hell cart at all.