Lords a-plenty

A disturbing article in today’s Times. In order to reflect the state of the parties after the election, it is calculated that the Con-Lib coalition would need to create more than a hundred new life peers. In fact 172 new ones are what is being suggested over the five year term.

The problem is that you can’t get rid of any of the existing 211 Labour ones, elevated by Tony Blair because most of the last lot were Conservative.

So if we have a series of elections (not impossible: between 1964 and 1974 we had five) the House of Lords would increase inexorably as adjustments were made and nobody died until you were more likely to meet a peer over the dinner table or at a football match than a commoner.

This is unless it is reformed, which they have promised to do but over which those self same lords will have a vote.

Here is a different idea. Let’s abolish the whole damn thing. The House of Lords is always described as a revising chamber, but why do we need such a thing? Civil servants could check that the laws promulgated weren’t idiotic. Why do we need another body to say ‘The elected representatives of the people were a little wrong here, let’s change it to this or water it down’. A bit patronising, no? Why should the people I’ve elected to run the country have their deliberations watered down or ‘revised’?

It’d save a few bob, too.

And having sacked the lot of them, if we at some stage in the future felt we needed a second chamber after all, we could just create it, along sensible lines.

But I rather feel we wouldn’t miss it.

PS We didn't get a 'resignation honours' list from Gordon Brown, but he reserves the right to elevate some of his chums. Just imagine what horrors that might contain.