Sunday 17 August 2014

Independent Minds

Peter Hitchens has a silly season piece about the House of Lords.

By the time that Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, public ownership and the role of the trade unions, including within and through the Labour Party, had become integral parts of the organic Constitution.

She got rid of trade union barons because they exercised power from outside the liberal, capitalist bourgeoisie. The abolition of hereditary barons was thus made inevitable.

In any case, most of them only ever came in to vote Conservative Governments out of tight spots with the serious parliamentarians who were there every day, most (not all, but most) of whom were Life Peers, Law Lords and Lords Spiritual.

Those are still there, and the thing duly still works well. Just not in the sole interest of the party that Peter Hitchens claims to despise.

Only coming in to save that party's bacon from time to time is a very funny definition of "independent minds, who owed nobody anything and could not be pushed around by Downing Street."

In fact, that was far truer of the people abolished by Thatcher than it was of the people abolished by Blair.

3 comments:

  1. Lord Lindsay of Lanchester?

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  2. We don't need you in the Lords, we need you in the Commons. All of your posts yesterday were hugely important. The people who deprived the parliamentary process of your voice committed a kind of treason. What happened to the bloke they preferred? He is not in Parliament or a candidate for next year but he must be nearly 40.

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