Cutting the Cost of Politics
The costs of keeping our parliamentarians has rightly focused on the House of Commons up until now - but the expenses regime in the House of Lords is just as big a racket.
Here's an extract of an interesting article by Janice Turner from The Times newspaper.
It's good to see journalists exposing cant and hypocrisy amongst the great and good - though it would be better still if the government stepped in - and took firm action to end this scandalous abuse of public money.
Read the full article on-line at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ -
"Just a better class of stink in the Upper House"
"The next chortle was the ruling on overnight allowances claimed by nine peers. Even after aeons of duck-house and dog-biscuit-based hilarity, our sides are not too sore to relish the rule whereby peers can claim as their main residence a house that does not belong to them or even their family. A rented holiday cottage will do; one peer claimed a manager’s flat at a hotel he never slept in.
So a noble lord may have owned a £1.5 million mansion in London for 30 years, but designate a caravan in Argyll as his main residence. And he may claim £174 a night for sleeping in his comfy city pad as long as he visits the trailer once a month. Or says he does; no one is standing there with a clipboard, checking. And who made this wise new ruling? Chair of the committee was Baroness Hayman, who, for claiming £200,000 in eight years on a house in Norfolk, was one of the nine lords-a-claimin’, but later cleared.
While growing up, the hereditary House of Lords was the issue that first boiled my blood. It seemed as absurd as it was unjust. I longed for the glorious day when it would be swept out and replaced with radical peers who would then vote for their own abolition. And that seemed to be on the cards, kind of, when in 1999 Labour removed all but 92 hereditaries. Suddenly, women were better represented, black peers newly minted, and an in-built Tory majority removed. Watching all manner of marvellous, diverse people move into the centre of public life, you could forget this system was, at heart, patronage-based. And that it was supposedly only a staging post on the way to a properly democratic second chamber.
But years have passed, and peers have grown comfy on their big red benches. Politicians age and seek a ready-made second political life, one with the prestige of office but without the hassle and indignity of actual elections. Just as at the end of Animal Farm when the pigs look at the men and the men at the pigs and “it was impossible to say which was which”, the people’s peers have in a decade acquired the same entitlement as the 800-year-old land-owning gentry.
Time after time, despite MPs voting three years ago for a wholly elected second chamber, House of Lords reform has been cast aside. Instead of being trusted to vote, we’re occasionally chucked a bone of faux populism: the anointment of Lord Sugar off the telly and, it is rumoured, should the Tories get in, Kirstie “Location, Location, Location” Allsopp, herself the daughter of a hereditary peer, and — shudder — Baroness Carol Vorderman of Firstplus.
If politicians truly want to shift this dark cloud of public disgust, a new second elected chamber would be both a real and symbolic step forward. Because anything would be better than the creepy, jobs-for-ever patronage we have right now, even a Simon Cowell-produced show called Pick a People’s Peer."
Here's an extract of an interesting article by Janice Turner from The Times newspaper.
It's good to see journalists exposing cant and hypocrisy amongst the great and good - though it would be better still if the government stepped in - and took firm action to end this scandalous abuse of public money.
Read the full article on-line at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ -
"Just a better class of stink in the Upper House"
"The next chortle was the ruling on overnight allowances claimed by nine peers. Even after aeons of duck-house and dog-biscuit-based hilarity, our sides are not too sore to relish the rule whereby peers can claim as their main residence a house that does not belong to them or even their family. A rented holiday cottage will do; one peer claimed a manager’s flat at a hotel he never slept in.
So a noble lord may have owned a £1.5 million mansion in London for 30 years, but designate a caravan in Argyll as his main residence. And he may claim £174 a night for sleeping in his comfy city pad as long as he visits the trailer once a month. Or says he does; no one is standing there with a clipboard, checking. And who made this wise new ruling? Chair of the committee was Baroness Hayman, who, for claiming £200,000 in eight years on a house in Norfolk, was one of the nine lords-a-claimin’, but later cleared.
While growing up, the hereditary House of Lords was the issue that first boiled my blood. It seemed as absurd as it was unjust. I longed for the glorious day when it would be swept out and replaced with radical peers who would then vote for their own abolition. And that seemed to be on the cards, kind of, when in 1999 Labour removed all but 92 hereditaries. Suddenly, women were better represented, black peers newly minted, and an in-built Tory majority removed. Watching all manner of marvellous, diverse people move into the centre of public life, you could forget this system was, at heart, patronage-based. And that it was supposedly only a staging post on the way to a properly democratic second chamber.
But years have passed, and peers have grown comfy on their big red benches. Politicians age and seek a ready-made second political life, one with the prestige of office but without the hassle and indignity of actual elections. Just as at the end of Animal Farm when the pigs look at the men and the men at the pigs and “it was impossible to say which was which”, the people’s peers have in a decade acquired the same entitlement as the 800-year-old land-owning gentry.
Time after time, despite MPs voting three years ago for a wholly elected second chamber, House of Lords reform has been cast aside. Instead of being trusted to vote, we’re occasionally chucked a bone of faux populism: the anointment of Lord Sugar off the telly and, it is rumoured, should the Tories get in, Kirstie “Location, Location, Location” Allsopp, herself the daughter of a hereditary peer, and — shudder — Baroness Carol Vorderman of Firstplus.
If politicians truly want to shift this dark cloud of public disgust, a new second elected chamber would be both a real and symbolic step forward. Because anything would be better than the creepy, jobs-for-ever patronage we have right now, even a Simon Cowell-produced show called Pick a People’s Peer."
