This blog is shocked, as are many people, by the tawdry list of rejects, toadies and worse who have been elevated to\u00a0the Upper\u00a0House of Parliament, of a country which likes to think of itself as a democracy. At one\u00a0time the only route in was through birth. That was hardly fair and certainly not democratic, but in a perverse way it was honourable.\u00a0Later appointments of life peers were introduced to modernize the second chamber of Britain’s parliamentary democracy, which itself remained detached from any connection to any process of election. Those early appointments were by and large on merit.\u00a0Now the whole thing is out of control. It is stuffed with goodness knows whom, chosen for party loyalties, wealth or notoriety and has become the largest\u00a0government assembly in the world, outside\u00a0communist China. Nobody of true merit is appointed because any such people would refuse the offer.<\/p>\n
It should be shut down and replaced with an elected UK parliament to act as a revising chamber for each of the national parliaments. Until it does or is democratised in some way,\u00a0this\u00a0country’s claim to be democratically governed is at best an exaggeration\u00a0and at worst fraudulent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This blog is shocked, as are many people, by the tawdry list of rejects, toadies and worse who have been elevated to\u00a0the Upper\u00a0House of Parliament, of a country which likes to think of itself as a democracy. At one\u00a0time the only route in was through birth. That was hardly fair and certainly not democratic, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-malcolm-blair-robinson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9075"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9079,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9075\/revisions\/9079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}