HOW TO DRAIN THE SWAMP

Affront Shocking Reform Slash their numbers. Draw them from all walks of life. Kick them out after ten years. No one under 60 . . .

MAYBE it is because I’m an unapologetic romantic with a deep respect for history and tradition, but I have always valued the role of the House of Lords.

At its best, it represents wisdom and common sense — qualities that are sometimes lacking in the Commons, where MPs sadly can display idiocy and arrogance.

One classic case of the Upper House’s prudence prevailing happened during Tony Blair’s New Labour government.

Peers thwarted its misguided plans to ban live music in pubs, to impose a bureaucratic regulation on Church choirs and to legalise sex in public lavatories.

The Lords also prevented Labour ministers changing the law to restrict defendants’ right to elect to be tried by a jury, and stood up for the ancient tradition of Habeas Corpus to stop police being able to detain terrorism suspects without charge for up to 42 days.

That said, something has gone hideously wrong with the House of Lords in recent years.

The latest confrontation over Brexit is merely the latest in a long line of abuses by the second chamber of its constitutional role.

Above all, the Lords — a bloated chamber of around 800 people — contains too many small-minded, venal and frankly second-rate individuals. Worse, some of these duffers are blatantly corrupt.

Without doubt, there are also too many time- servers, cronies, sycophants, party hacks and people who have paid huge sums to win their appointment. A few even, I believe, ought to be in jail.

And now, this House of Horrors has grotesquely over-reached itself by defeating the Government 14 times over Brexit.

And look at the kind of people who are among these Brexitwreckers. Baroness Uddin voted against the Government in all those divisions. Yet this sometime Labour ‘community activist’ ennobled by Blair is notorious for having fiddled her expenses.

She avoided criminal charges even though she was suspended from the Lords and the Labour Party for a record 18 months after fraudulently abusing her Parliamentary second home allowance.

To my mind, this disqualified her from ever sitting on the red benches again — but she remains in place, claiming a £ 300 daily allowance and defying the will of 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit.

Of course, peers have the right to counsel governments over what they consider to be ill-judged legislation. But their behaviour over Brexit is not only an affront to democracy, but to basic decency.

The Mail’s opinion poll findings — that 76 per cent of people believe peers are ‘out of touch with the will of the British people’ — should act as a wake-up call to the Lords.

For they prove beyond doubt that the British people have lost faith in the Upper House.

Reform of the Lords must now be an urgent priority.

There has been much talk of how this could be achieved: cutting the numbers, reducing the disproportionately large amount of Lib Dems, trimming the daily attendance allowance and so on.

For her part, I believe Theresa May made an error when she halted plans put forward by her predecessor, David Cameron, to reform the Upper House. Following a series of Tory Government defeats on key policies, such as cuts to tax credits, it had been recommended that peers should lose their power of veto over laws.

I understand why Mrs May pulled the plug on these reforms: she was determined to avoid a time- consuming confrontation because she wanted to focus on securing Brexit. How ironic, then, that Brexit has been recklessly endangered by a hostile and unreformed House of Lords. The PM should have anticipated this, because the Upper House is overwhelmingly Europhile. It was always likely an unholy cross-party alliance of unelected saboteurs would put up every obstacle it could.

It is impossible to overemphasise the gravity of the situation in which the Lords — constituted as it currently is — is bringing British democracy into disrepute.

To borrow a phrase often used by President Trump about the Washington political establishment, the time has come to ‘drain the swamp’.

One section that must be drained immediately is that of the 98 Lib Dem peers. They make up some 12.5 per cent of the total — despite having less than 2 per cent of seats in the Commons. This is a shocking political imbalance considering the Lib Dems are a party of die-hard Remainers devoted to the fight against Brexit.

But we must be very careful how the Lords is reformed. I emphatically disagree with one option — an elected upper chamber, as is now being called for by the Labour Party.

Inevitably, such a body would claim an enhanced democratic legitimacy that would damage the status of MPs who are elected under a system which means they are each accountable to a specific (geographical) group of voters in their constituencies.

Personally, I believe we should have a House of Lords that is wholly appointed. Crucially, it would be able to continue its vital function of giving advice to the Commons, but unable to block or interfere unduly with the actions of a democratically elected government.

The challenge should be to fill the Lords with people who have considerable experience of the real world — something hugely lacking in the current breed of identikit career politicians who know little of life beyond Westminster.

What the Upper House desperately needs is figures of gravitas and stature, with the skills and wisdom to guide the country through Brexit and bring their judgment to all the great moral and social challenges facing Britain. Such people should come from every walk of life, every profession, all backgrounds and from every part of the country.

Successful business people, farmers, artists, civil servants, engineers, scientists and trade unionists would all be there.

Each one should be chosen by their respective profession’s representative bodies. This ought to guarantee that no second- rater ever again is able to find themselves a Westminster retirement home at taxpayers’ expense.

Bishops should be allowed to remain, though there should be fewer than the current 26. Alongside them should be rabbis, imams, Buddhists and Hindu priests.

This brings me to the question of how many people should be in the Lords. It’s absurd that there are some 800 members, making it the second-largest parliamentary chamber in the world after China’s National People’s Congress.

I suggest this number should be halved, with an upper limit of 400. What’s more, I also believe peers should stand down within ten years.

More controversially — and without turning it into a geriatric chamber — I believe it should include no one under the age of 60.

My reason for thinking this is that one of the problems with our Parliament is that we have an excess of young MPs who do not have sufficient experience of the working world and of life outside the narrow confines of politics. A newly shaped Lords would redress that.

Above all, they would have no mandate to block key legislation, particularly any that’s been backed by the majority of the population in a referendum, as peers are doing so disgracefully over Brexit.

Crucially, too, such reform of the House of Lords would fit in perfectly with Mrs May’s philosophy when she became prime minister two years ago.

She promised to strive for a country that worked ‘not for a privileged few, but for every one of us’.

There is no time to lose.