OPINION | Graham Stringer: Rigged Lords Must Be Abolished

DOES anybody else share my sneaking suspicion that the Prime Minister is a clandestine member of the campaign to abolish the House of Lords?

There is something fundamentally insulting to democracy if a defeated MP is immediately returned to the legislature

The expenses cheats, party donors, third-raters and sycophants he’s nominated to become peers of the realm will do more damage to the survival of the House of Lords than the sleazy exploits of Lord Sewel. This is quite a feat. Remember this Lord was responsible for standards in the Upper House as the Chair of the Privileges and Conduct Committee. His exposure wearing an orange bra, cavorting with prostitutes and snorting white powder took their Lordships beyond satire and parody. Immediately there were calls for Sewel’s head and the abolition of the Lords. 

After Sewel’s resignation the chances are that this unsavoury and colourful incident would have faded into the long history of Parliamentary sex scandals. However, full marks to David Cameron for reviving the fervour of the abolitionists.

He already has splendid form in this area. A fifth of the peers he appointed in the last Parliamentary session are party donors. The Conservative Party has banked £23million from thirteen peers in the last five years. It looks as though more money will be on its way in to the Conservative Party coffers after the ennoblement of James Lupton, an investment banker who has already donated £2.8million. Of course the reason for his elevation is that he is a leading philanthropist and supporter of the arts. 

Sun headline over Lord Sewel

Discussing ‘appointments’ to the Lords and party funding in private with a trusted advisor nearly one hundred years ago Prime Minster, Lloyd George, was very candid. ‘You and I know that the sale of honours is the cleanest way of raising money for a political party. The worst of it is you cannot defend it in public.’ In public Lloyd George denied the existence of cash for peerages and condemned it if it existed. 

The more the world changes the more it stays the same. 

If peppering the House of Lords with party donors was not enough to rile the public, David Cameron has excelled himself by bringing the MPs expenses scandal back to the electorates notice. 

Number three in the Daily Telegraph list of notorious claims was Douglas Hogg. He claimed to have his moat cleaned, his piano and stable lights fixed as well as for a full time gardener and a mole catcher. More tears for the satirists but an ideal new member of the House of Lords. 

Gregory Barker, the ex-Member of Parliament for Battle, was possibly the most incompetent minister I have ever encountered. Appearing before the Science and Technology Committee as the Minister responsible for Climate Change he responded to the request for a definition of climate change by stating that’s easy ‘climate change is climate change’. An intellectual titan who will no doubt prosper on the red benches. After the Daily Telegraph printed his claims he paid back more than £10,000.  

To add definition to this motley crew Ed Miliband has provided the spectacularly unsuccessful Spencer Livermore who was in charge of the electoral strategy that led to one of Labour’s worst ever defeats. 

David Cameron has revived the fervour of the abolitionists

To be fair some of the nominations; William Hague, David Blunkett and Alistair Darling for instance, are certainly worthy of their places if the Lords is to continue. But again Cameron has given the game away. The House of Lords is not to be a revising chamber with expertise from different professions but a rubber stamp where the majority party appoints enough time servers to guarantee a majority. 

It is extraordinary that there are no Nobel Prize winners appointed this time or anybody from the football world, our favourite sport. There are hundreds if not thousands of individuals who have excelled in different walks of life who could make a serious contribution. Sir Alex Ferguson, our most successful football manager, Professor Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of DNA finger printing or Paul Nurse, who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering work on the cell are three obvious absentees. 

This is the Prime Minister’s coup de grace against the Lordships. If there is always a Government majority then there is no need of experts. Evidence based reasoned opposition will just be defeated in the lobbies. 

The cost of this overloaded House of Lords will be nearly half a billion pounds over the course of this Parliament. There will be no end to its expansion as the majority party always has to add extra barons and baronesses of their own persuasion. Hence the unfairness of the latest list. No UKIP or SNP peers but 26 Conservatives, only 8 Labour and 11 Lib Dems. More Lib Dem peers at one go than the totality of their representation in the House of Commons. 

If it is not just the cost and the inappropriate appointments that is galling. There is something fundamentally insulting to democracy if a defeated MP is immediately returned to the legislature never to face the electorate again. 

The Lords must be abolished. This will not come about by the sheer weight of argument, there is too much vested interest. The Labour Party and the other minority parties in the Commons should now stop nominating to the Lords and therefore remove both its credibility and legitimacy. An Upper House to which only the Conservatives nominate would not last long.

Graham Stringer at work in the House of Commons