Selling peerages has been illegal since 1925, when the Honours (Prevention Of Abuses) Act was introduced in response to David Lloyd George’s flogging of hereditary titles for £50,000 apiece.
For anybody who thinks it still doesn’t happen, I have a bridge to sell you. The current price is about £3 million.
We know this because a newspaper investigation last week revealed that 15 of the past 16 Conservative treasurers — all of whom donated £3 million or more to the party’s coffers — were offered seats in the House of Lords.
It is impossible to prove someone bought their seat on the red benches.
Andrew Neil: Selling peerages has been illegal since 1925, when the Honours (Prevention Of Abuses) Act was introduced in response to David Lloyd George’s flogging of hereditary titles for £50,000 apiece
It is very British corruption. No written agreements are made, no receipts are issued, and no invoices are created. It will all be fine with a simple wink and nodding.
There’s no point in calling for the Old Bill to investigate, unless your sole aim is to generate virtue-signalling headlines for yourself, in which case you should be done for wasting police time.
Precisely one person has been convicted under the Act and that was Lloyd George’s ‘honours broker’ Maundy Gregory — 88 years ago.
It continues. It looks as though it will continue for the future. This is why it’s imperative that we remove the Lords completely from our Constitution.
It has been allowed to degrade our democracy for too long, a symbol of institutional corruption at the heart of our constitution, bloated with ministerial has-beens, placemen and women, undeserving beneficiaries of political patronage and lobby fodder — an expensive and posh care home for politicians and other public figures long past their sell-by date.
They have the ability to regulate our lives but they are not chosen by us.
It is remarkable — shaming, indeed, for a country which pioneered modern democracy — that we have allowed this antediluvian relic to survive into the 21st century.
Andrew Neil (pictured in December 2019): It is remarkable — shaming, indeed, for a country which pioneered modern democracy — that we have allowed this antediluvian relic to survive into the 21st century.
Many will claim that abolishing the House of Lords would cause a crisis. Reform is, however. But we’ve been trying to reform the House of Lord Lords for over 100 years, usually without much success, sometimes, in fact, making things worse.
Let’s just abolish it. Don’t try to drag it into the democratic age. It’s best to get rid of it. Back in 1911 the then Liberal government cut its powers because it was standing in the way of a much-needed ‘People’s Budget’, which it had been elected, twice, to deliver. Although the Lords lost their power over Commons legislation in 2011, it was still a fully hereditary entity for another 50 years.
Then in the late 1950s, a Tory government introduced the concept of ‘life peers’ — people appointed to sit in the Lords with titles that were not hereditary. This was regarded as progressive but, in practice, merely increased a prime minister’s power of patronage to reward friends and remove enemies from the Commons.
Of course, hereditary Lords were largely made up of British aristocracy and still held their places at the red benches.
That’s the way it stayed for another 40 years. While there were attempts to further reform the system, there wasn’t a consensus as to what that should look like. The political gridlock, parliamentary wrangling and legislative gridlock always proved to be defeating reformers.
After Tony Blair won a massive majority of votes in 1997, nothing much had changed. In 1999, he was able to finally get rid his hereditary siblings. This was not a successful job.
It is true that the privilege of being a hereditary lord at the core of the constitution was lost to the 750 hereditary rulers. Blair and his advisors were coerced into permitting 92 hereditary spaces to remain. These places would be selected from an electorate comprised entirely of hereditary peers.
Lucky 92 is all white, male and aristocratic. More than half of the students went to one school, but that is not what I am referring to, Paisley Grammar and Eton.
You don’t need to be a woke warrior to believe this to be a scandal in the modern age. However, it is not true that the contemporary British society has more life-like peers. Our class system is perpetuated throughout the entire country. Products of public schools and Oxbridge — and white males — still predominate.
This is the House of Remainers, which cannot be held accountable in a country who voted for Brexit. When you look at the Lords you see a snapshot of Britain’s past not its future. It has been a place where politicians should have retired many years ago.
Alone among political elites in the world, the British political elite knows that, even when the elected bit of their career is over — and no matter how much of a hash they made of things when in power — a nice little sinecure awaits them for the rest of their lives on the banks of the Thames.
My peer was a diligent one who always showed up. He always arrived in time for his subsidised lunch, washed down with some fine claret, then took a nap in the library to sleep it off before heading to some other well-paid sinecure he’d clinched because he was a lord — but not before trousering the daily attendance allowance, now £323. Nice work if you can get it.
When in Opposition, party leaders railed against unelected Lords but soon found that it was a handy tool of patronage. Recent prime ministers have made so many new appointments that the Lords is now more than 800 strong, which makes it the second largest legislative assembly in the world, only outbloated by that other exemplar of democracy, the Chinese National People’s Congress.
Yet somehow the U.S. Senate, the most powerful legislative assembly in the world, manages with just 100, Germany’s Bundesrat (upper house) just 69 and even France’s Senate gets by with 348, which many across the Channel regard as excessive.
I don’t rule out a new second chamber, starting from scratch, elected by proportional representation, perhaps from constituencies based on our nations and regions.
Its electoral cycle would be different from the Commons — perhaps a third up for election every four years — it should have no more than 200 members and its limited powers clearly delineated.
The House of Lords should be avoided. In 21st-century Britain we should not be calling those who work for us ‘lords’.
So let’s just consign the upper house to the dustbin of history and see how we get on without it. There are too many politicians. We will be able to eliminate hundreds, save money, and reduce corruption.
In 1649 the Commons voted to abolish the Lords because it was ‘useless and dangerous to the people of England’. It was unfortunately revived after the Civil War.
This time, let’s kill it off for good.