Boxer96
War hero
There is an excellent article in the Sunday Times (paywall, reproduced below) concerning the Parliamentary old folks home, the House of Lords.
I have long thought that this outdated anachronism is long past its sell by date and needs replacing.
Long a repository for the ex-parliamentary failures, donors to political parties or simply to quiet a rebellion.
Then we have pandering to the public, with honours to "do gooders" or elevating Stephen Lawrence's mother, Doreen to the peerage.
Out with them say I and replace them with an elected house, term limited to 10 yrs and an upper age limit of 70 yrs (if it is good enough for high court judges..)
This house of frauds needs an end‑of‑the‑peer show
Quentin Letts
Sunday July 26 2020, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
Vanity is now the chief propellant at the House of Lords. Vanity is what draws them to the “upper house”. Vanity is not without its political uses. By stroking vanity, a prime minister can corrupt and compensate lower mortals, and that makes government easier. But vanity it is, plus maybe an ounce or two of venality.
With another dumper-load of peers about to be announced — they will range from the bombastic Sir Ian Botham to that gluey naysayer Philip Hammond — let’s no longer kid ourselves that the Lords is some convocation of elders cradling our kingdom’s destiny in their papery-veined hands.
Let’s not fall for the idea that the 33 committees of this tottering institution do “important work” or that their fact-finding trips to Russia and elsewhere are missions of patriotic reconnaissance. Those bottoms polishing the red leather benches do not belong to sages intent solely on legislative revision. Today’s Lords is a racket, a stink-pit, a parade of vain non-entities to match the I’m a Celebrity jungle.
My beef is not with Lord Botham of Linseed Oil, or whatever title he chooses before his introduction ceremony. And what a ceremony it is: an ermine-clad pavane at which a wigged clerk proclaims a cod-medieval royal letters patent and some plump goose from the College of Arms minces round with a mini billiard stick in his pinkies.
Nor is this an ad hominem gripe against Hammond, hood-eyed gloomster though he be. As a former chancellor he at least has a stronger call on a peerage than serial smarmers such as Ed Vaizey, for six years an exceptionally pointless minister for the arts. Vaizey in the Lords! That, far more than Botham, confirms that this is a house on its uppers.
The place is riddled with such middlers, given the nod because a departing prime minister needed to make up the numbers. Take Labour’s Lord Watts, who in 18 years as MP for St Helens North never once, that I could discern, said anything brave or poetic. Take the Liberal Democrats’ Lord Cotter, first name Brian, comb-over hairdo, grey shoes, such a mouse that when he spoke in the Commons it seemed he might at any moment projectile-vomit from nerves.
Or take — because the voters of Croydon Central no longer would — Gavin Barwell, who as chief of staff at No 10 for two years, was the genius behind Theresa May’s administration. He is “Lord Barwell, of Croydon in the London Borough of Croydon” now, please, rewarded for the worst premiership in our country’s history. Welcome to modern, levelled, global Britain.
The new tranche of peers will top things up nicely, pushing the size of this bloated body back past 800. By way of comparison, the US Senate has 100 members. Senators, schmenators. Mere elected blow-ins. But to be a British lord temporal, to have a coat of arms, to be called “milord” or “milady” by tailcoated flunkeys, to have access to wood-panelled dining rooms, and to become a curlicued adornment to the boards of start-ups in former eastern bloc countries — now you’re talking.
The perks of being a peer outweigh any minor intrusions. As noted by the intelligence and security committee with its Russia report last week, peers need not publish much about their financial interests. An ermined Peter Mandelson or Greg Barker need not detail how many hundred thousand spondulicks they pocket from hiring themselves out to a Russian defence conglomerate or energy firm. Vagueness suffices for a Robert Skidelsky — no champion of the free press, he — when he lists dealings with the Russian oil giant Russneft.
Please, these are “noble peers”, their honour beyond question. That even goes for a ripe specimen such as Lord Truscott, inexplicably rich former MEP and minister in the Blair government, disgraced and suspended in a lobbying scandal, so devoted to Russia that he nominated Vladimir Putin for the 2013 Nobel peace prize. Truscott’s wife, Svetlana, daughter of a Red Army colonel, invariably bags prime position at state openings of parliament, bejewelled and begloved, the chandeliers glistening off her tiara and her sharp teeth.
If all this, along with its attempts to torpedo Brexit, had not already tarnished the Lords, the government has accelerated the process during lockdown. It has truncated debates and silenced the better peers (they are not all bad) who have questioned Downing Street policy on, for instance, Huawei. Virtual proceedings have neutered debates and protected weak ministers. One reason the debates have been so dire is that hundreds of peers have applied to speak, so as to be able to claim their daily bung.
It has been a pitiful spectacle: gabbled one-minute speeches on matters as complex as abortion, and technically inept souls desperately trying to operate their Zoom machines. Peers are not as dotty as they were.
Some of the more embarrassingly gaga ones have retired and there are now perhaps only two peers who are certifiably mad. But somehow they were easier to take when there were eccentrics. Today’s naked careerism is sickening.
This house cannot be saved by colourful appointments such as Botham. Most of those committees, open as they are to posturing, should be scrapped. The house’s total numbers should probably be cut back to 250. Should we even have a second chamber? A few countries do without, although abandoning all checks and balances might be foolhardy.
One thing, though, is certain: the House of Frauds has gone beyond a joke. It needs to be detonated.
Cricket | The Times & The Sunday Times
I have long thought that this outdated anachronism is long past its sell by date and needs replacing.
Long a repository for the ex-parliamentary failures, donors to political parties or simply to quiet a rebellion.
Then we have pandering to the public, with honours to "do gooders" or elevating Stephen Lawrence's mother, Doreen to the peerage.
Out with them say I and replace them with an elected house, term limited to 10 yrs and an upper age limit of 70 yrs (if it is good enough for high court judges..)
This house of frauds needs an end‑of‑the‑peer show
Quentin Letts
Sunday July 26 2020, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
Vanity is now the chief propellant at the House of Lords. Vanity is what draws them to the “upper house”. Vanity is not without its political uses. By stroking vanity, a prime minister can corrupt and compensate lower mortals, and that makes government easier. But vanity it is, plus maybe an ounce or two of venality.
With another dumper-load of peers about to be announced — they will range from the bombastic Sir Ian Botham to that gluey naysayer Philip Hammond — let’s no longer kid ourselves that the Lords is some convocation of elders cradling our kingdom’s destiny in their papery-veined hands.
Let’s not fall for the idea that the 33 committees of this tottering institution do “important work” or that their fact-finding trips to Russia and elsewhere are missions of patriotic reconnaissance. Those bottoms polishing the red leather benches do not belong to sages intent solely on legislative revision. Today’s Lords is a racket, a stink-pit, a parade of vain non-entities to match the I’m a Celebrity jungle.
My beef is not with Lord Botham of Linseed Oil, or whatever title he chooses before his introduction ceremony. And what a ceremony it is: an ermine-clad pavane at which a wigged clerk proclaims a cod-medieval royal letters patent and some plump goose from the College of Arms minces round with a mini billiard stick in his pinkies.
Nor is this an ad hominem gripe against Hammond, hood-eyed gloomster though he be. As a former chancellor he at least has a stronger call on a peerage than serial smarmers such as Ed Vaizey, for six years an exceptionally pointless minister for the arts. Vaizey in the Lords! That, far more than Botham, confirms that this is a house on its uppers.
The place is riddled with such middlers, given the nod because a departing prime minister needed to make up the numbers. Take Labour’s Lord Watts, who in 18 years as MP for St Helens North never once, that I could discern, said anything brave or poetic. Take the Liberal Democrats’ Lord Cotter, first name Brian, comb-over hairdo, grey shoes, such a mouse that when he spoke in the Commons it seemed he might at any moment projectile-vomit from nerves.
Or take — because the voters of Croydon Central no longer would — Gavin Barwell, who as chief of staff at No 10 for two years, was the genius behind Theresa May’s administration. He is “Lord Barwell, of Croydon in the London Borough of Croydon” now, please, rewarded for the worst premiership in our country’s history. Welcome to modern, levelled, global Britain.
The new tranche of peers will top things up nicely, pushing the size of this bloated body back past 800. By way of comparison, the US Senate has 100 members. Senators, schmenators. Mere elected blow-ins. But to be a British lord temporal, to have a coat of arms, to be called “milord” or “milady” by tailcoated flunkeys, to have access to wood-panelled dining rooms, and to become a curlicued adornment to the boards of start-ups in former eastern bloc countries — now you’re talking.
The perks of being a peer outweigh any minor intrusions. As noted by the intelligence and security committee with its Russia report last week, peers need not publish much about their financial interests. An ermined Peter Mandelson or Greg Barker need not detail how many hundred thousand spondulicks they pocket from hiring themselves out to a Russian defence conglomerate or energy firm. Vagueness suffices for a Robert Skidelsky — no champion of the free press, he — when he lists dealings with the Russian oil giant Russneft.
Please, these are “noble peers”, their honour beyond question. That even goes for a ripe specimen such as Lord Truscott, inexplicably rich former MEP and minister in the Blair government, disgraced and suspended in a lobbying scandal, so devoted to Russia that he nominated Vladimir Putin for the 2013 Nobel peace prize. Truscott’s wife, Svetlana, daughter of a Red Army colonel, invariably bags prime position at state openings of parliament, bejewelled and begloved, the chandeliers glistening off her tiara and her sharp teeth.
If all this, along with its attempts to torpedo Brexit, had not already tarnished the Lords, the government has accelerated the process during lockdown. It has truncated debates and silenced the better peers (they are not all bad) who have questioned Downing Street policy on, for instance, Huawei. Virtual proceedings have neutered debates and protected weak ministers. One reason the debates have been so dire is that hundreds of peers have applied to speak, so as to be able to claim their daily bung.
It has been a pitiful spectacle: gabbled one-minute speeches on matters as complex as abortion, and technically inept souls desperately trying to operate their Zoom machines. Peers are not as dotty as they were.
Some of the more embarrassingly gaga ones have retired and there are now perhaps only two peers who are certifiably mad. But somehow they were easier to take when there were eccentrics. Today’s naked careerism is sickening.
This house cannot be saved by colourful appointments such as Botham. Most of those committees, open as they are to posturing, should be scrapped. The house’s total numbers should probably be cut back to 250. Should we even have a second chamber? A few countries do without, although abandoning all checks and balances might be foolhardy.
One thing, though, is certain: the House of Frauds has gone beyond a joke. It needs to be detonated.
Cricket | The Times & The Sunday Times