And so the merry-go-round of politicians goes. From a career of success and ambition to rejection and ejection by the Great British public… to the House of Lords, it now seems.
Wait a second – wasn’t this chamber meant to be comprised of experts of the relevant fields, there on merit. Patronage has sadly instead taken over the red benches.
Former Labour MEP and Eastenders actor Michael Cashman is straight in, along with a collection of other insiders.
Notable in today’s announcement of the new peerages is that there are of course no UKIP peers.
The government’s Coalition Agreement which agreed to make the Lords proportionate in line with the 2010 election results has gone out of the window. Even the Green Party have had a peer in this Parliament. This is the same far-left party who received less than a third of the votes UKIP got in 2010. I guess they aren’t deemed any sort of threat to the status quo.
Yet worryingly it is the “jobs for the boys”, reward for failure which is threatening to critically diminish the Lords.
Martin Callanan, a man who was judged by the democratic process when the people booted him out of office in the European Elections, is rewarded with a grand title and seat in Parliament. Some democracy!
It reminds me of the curious case of Richard Corbett, the fanatically pro-EU MEP who lost his seat in 2009, only to be given a cushy job as an adviser to the winnable assassin of nation state democracy: Herman Van Rompuy. Everyone’s a winner in the establishment game of musical chairs patronage.
The most scary aspect of this is how our own political system in such cases resembles the anti-democratic monstrosity that is the European Union. How frightening indeed.
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