The New Statesman have a piece on my website about that speech by Hazel Blears last week. Although it was her swipes at political bloggers that got most comment, that wasn’t what I decided to pick up on. As I write over on the New Statesman:
What should happen if an unpopular politician is voted out in an election? You’d have thought that the answer is “they lose power” and – thankfully – in many countries around the world, that’s what happens.
But the UK is rather different. It has a special little retirement scheme. Got booted out of office? Don’t worry, just hang round for a while and you’ll be given a place for life in Parliament, complete with voting rights, without any risk of ever losing an election again.
I am talking, of course, about the House of Lords. What more eloquent example do we need of the willingness of some in our political establishment to freeze out the public that even now, well into the twenty-first century, we have our laws voted on week after week (when Parliament sits!) by people beyond the reach of democracy?
The rest of the piece goes on to other issues, and you can read it in full here. There’s also a response from Hazel Blears (the speed of online debate!) though I was a bit disappointed that – in my view – she doesn’t actually address any of the points I’ve made. Anyway – read it and judge for yourself.
Lynne Featherstone 
Lynne, my impression recently is that the upper house has been doing a better job for us than the lower one (not enough of you LDs, you see). The Lords does its damndest to block bad laws, and has been succeeding rather well. And the good peers have been quite approachable, very good at making their own minds up from the facts and then making a difference to the debates (e.g. Ros Scott and Merlin Erroll, to name two very different people – and someone else tells me that Tony Berkeley and Bill Bradshaw are the same). The majorities against have been so big that it can soak up a few nitwits.