Pete Wishart
SNP MP FOR PERTH & PERTHSHIRE NORTH House of Lords is beyond rerform
It’s time for proper reform and for the House of Lords circus to be abolished.
Scotland gained 13 new parliamentarians last week and not a vote was cast.
These are your new legislators in the House of Lords and they will have a say in the laws that are passed in your name.
They will be able to amend and vote down bits of legislation they don’t like and they can initiate new laws. They will join some 800 unelected colleagues and they will sit in the second biggest parliamentary chamber in the world, second only to the People’s Congress in China.
The unelected, bloated, House of Lords is quickly becoming a national embarrassment and it is now little more than a receptacle for the cronies and donors of the big UK political parties.
Most of the House of Lords is appointed by the Prime Minister, approved by a little-known Lords Appointment Committee.
If that’s not bad enough, there are also the hereditary peers – an odd collection of aristocrats who have a role on our legislature because of birthright.
These people can determine the laws of the land solely because their forefathers won a decisive battle in the Middle Ages.
They are joined by 28 Church of England Bishops. The UK is the only nation in the world to have a place reserved for clerics in its parliament other than the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The whole place would make a ruler of a banana republic blush, and how dare the United Kingdom lecture developing nations about‘democracy’and ‘corruption’when we have this unelected circus as a feature of our‘democracy’.
Departing Prime Minister David Cameron rendered it even more ridiculous by appointing his very own Conservative donors and personal cronies last week.
He complied a list where his special advisors and donors, even his wife’s stylist, secured departing gongs. Even Jeremy Corbyn got into the act by appointing one new Labour Lord.
For decades various government’s have talked of reforming the House of Lords but there it sits, bigger and more absurd than ever.
The place is now beyond reform and only abolition can now resolve us of its many contradictions.
The House of Lords must be replaced by a revising chamber that is properly democratically elected and could be replaced if the public are dissatisfied with its performance.
A nation as complex as the UK needs a second chamber but it must be one without the deference and forelock tugging nonsense of‘Lords’.
Now is the time for proper reform and that must follow this circus being abolished.