With the rise of the new political classes, a different political dynamic is emerging. Drawn from similar backgrounds (often middle-class, university educated, with little prior career experience outside politics itself), members of parliament increasingly sound alike, think alike and act alike. The evolution of a monochrome political establishment is producing a radical disconnect, which the Brexit denouement is throwing into stark relief. What we appear to be witnessing is the corrupt mutation of the notion of the representation of the people in parliament, into the substitution of the will of the people by the interests of the political class. We are entering the realms, no less, of state capture.Lords reform has become even more necessary since the popular Brexit vote, a vote that that the political class anti-democrats in the upper chamber are determined to overturn. Well, there's not time in the next few months to reform the chamber, so Boris must fall back to Plan B, oft recommended here, to flood the chamber with People's Peers.
The Express reports (the old Crusader seems to get many more juicy stories these days than the Daily Remain. I wonder why..) that Boris is considering Tim Martin amongst others. The 'spoons boss is surely more deserving than anyone of a red dressing-gown - he went out on a limb for Brexit.
But most delicious of all will be the combination of Boris' People's Peers with Failure May's resignation list. She is reported to have left Hammond off the list in revenge for the Treasury refusing to bung her £25bn of tax money to create a 'legacy' in her final weeks. Watching Hammond being frozen out whilst Brexit heroes such as Tim Martin are ennobled will raise a smile on millions of faces.
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| Lords remainiac Rennard has been dogged with allegations of groping his young staffers - is it time-up for his kind? |
22 comments:
Flooding the House of Frauds with "peoples peers" is fine providing that, when the Brexit job is done, either abolition or fundamental reform is carried out.
Never again can we have a chamber of unelected, unaccountable placemen/women who have the desire, and the power, to overturn the result of a democratic vote.
We need to replace the "upper" house with the sovereign people.
For the purposes of scrutinising new laws, repealing bad law, recalling bad representatives and proposing new ideas for legislation, I would suggest my oft repeated call for direct democracy.
For those that say that such a device would not provide a challenge for the state, I say look at Brexit... the result of not quite the procedure I recommend since Cameron called it rather than it being the culmination of a process, but a good indication.
There is nobody that can say that Brexit has not provided a thorough examination of our system and found it wanting.
I think we do need a second chamber, as a car needs brakes. Since wealth and power are no longer (for now) based on land ownership, perhaps the Lords should be composed of successful entrepreneurs like Tim Wetherspoon - but not the money-shuffling mosquitoes.
The Harrogate Agenda should form the basis of our governance after we've left the EU.
There are many thousands of recently retired people still willing to contribute. Take a thousand of them (me! me!), enoble them, on the basis that they promise to close down the House of Lords and then resign. That's half the job done.
The other half is putting something else in place. Although it seems counter-intuitive you could select the House of Validation members from retired Civil Servants and similar people from public service. Selection carried out away from government interference. Yes, they would resist change and would insist on checks and balances - but that is their job. Make their 'tenure' limited (say 7 years). The government of the day can always override them but will have to consider their resistance to daft legislation.
I would like to see a HoL where there are both voting and non-voting members of the HoL and where the voting members are selected by each political party in numbers proportional to the number of votes cast for their party at each GE.
These voting members would also include those from parties who did not manage to gain an MP because of the FPTP system but never-the-less did receive sufficient votes to have at least one HoL representative.
No! No! No! to every preceding suggestion/proposal.
Let's have some democracy FFS - an elected Senate (100 max 150 Senators)
We are entering the realms, no less, of state capture.
Capture? Shirley he meant 'control'?
The issue at hand doesn't rest with the House, it is symptomatic of a global effort to subvert elected democracies.
If we allow the eco nutjobs to push this climate emergency BS to its full extent you will find people agreeing (or failing to object to - which would be worse) the cries to create a Global Governance to put checks and balances into place and once such a motion is approved then no amount of 'House' will be able to stop a global will to force control and change on countries, let alone the peoples of those countries.
Exactly as the EU has been trying to do to the UK during its period of membership. One nibble at a time, under various guises that are kept from public discussion or vote etc.
Unless people are made aware of the fact they are being lied to, mentally abused/terrorised over nonsensical climate alarmism etc then they will sit back and actually welcome external control(lers) that make our problems with a Second House pale into insignificance.
You need only look at the angst and faux fear over the Amazon forest issue - check the facts of the matter and it's as plain as the nose on your face that it is manipulative BS and Bolsanario knows it (perhaps spoken to this effect but certainly not reported by the MSM) but the 'man in the street' seems adamant that (perhaps) a regime change in Brazil would be welcomed to stop the 'destruction of the planet'.
THIS is how insular and ignorant much of our population has been conned into believing and if you think changing our own Houses will repair that type of damage then you're thinking too close to home.
It might be a start but it would be far too late given the rollercoaster the eco-freaks are riding.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
H.L. Mencken
I don't know, the Good Doctor appears to have given up on Brexit these days.
DeeDee, the "job" of leaving the European Union will never be done.
There will be an endless concatenation of adverse consequences, for which the industrial-scale Blame Merchants will forever spill their divisive bile towards the entirely innocent, as they have been doing for some time now.
An apt escription JPM - perhaps the equivalent of cancer, where you are never sure it might crop up again and always with fatal consequences.
Prevention was always better than a cure but we were never fully informed of the disease before being subjected to it, creepingly and insidiously.
It took a couple of centuries to escape from the grip of the Roman Catholic Church, which had much in common with the EU.
Don Cox
@Anon
If the actual EU came into being via the Lisbon treaty, and the Euro started 1999 then it is 20 years old.
Not very healthy is it?
The Euro will blow it apart but this dream of reforming the Roman empire probably will never go away.
They've been trying one way or another for 1500 years. It might dawn on them one day.
"See the mice in their million hordes, from Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads", wrote David Bowie.
Well, he had a point. There are about seventeen million of them.
A decent future for the country depends upon the efficient mobilisation of the fifty million others.
JPM - I look forward to seeing you attempting to mobilise the c. 13.4 million of that 50 who are children.
You are the Pied Piper of Hamelin and I claim my five euros...
In another parish recently (Guido's I think) I mentioned that the HoL is the 2nd biggest legislative body in THE WORLD! The only one bigger is China's National People’s Congress. Effing ridiculous.
Strip it to the bare bones: 25 herediatry peers plus 75 citizens (this may include a MAXIMUM of ONE previous MP per party if that party has held more than 10% of any national vote in the last GE)
No lackies, no Bishops, no fuckwits.
SG, in nine years half of them will be adults.
How many of the seventeen million will be left, do you think?
@Cheerful
Your assumption is that 17 million who voted leave were deceived into doing so or were just stupid. That we were just some sort of fluke conjured into being by evil forces to thwart our manifest betters.
Why do you assume that the only direction opinion can move going forward is pro reich? Has it actually been moving that way?
If you believe it is, why are you bothered? No "deal" presumably will be a catastrophe and the criminally deprived majority, in the election that will surely follow, can right the wrong engineered by the Trump controlled media and we can rejoin.
The march to the sunlit uplands can continue, the pitiful kiplingesque circus of fools having been buried forever.
I'll stick an oar in even though I'm a Yank with no skin in the game.
Allow NO politicians or civil 'servants' or academics. No MP's, no local councils, no NGO's, no one who has swilled at the public trough.
JPM - what is the significance of your nine year horizon?
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