A fine display of ignorance

Charles Clarke's personal turf war with the Lords continues. This sort of stuff always raises a grim smile. As soon as you realise you're reading an article with the words "Charles Clarke" and "the Lords" in it, there's a sick inevitability to the occurence of a third phrase, "the elected House". Mr. Clarke is an intelligent, capable man, with a fine grasp of his pernicious, malevolent brief and an unflappable (figuratively, at least) manner, which makes him a formidable opponent in debate; but his insistent, cod-oblique references to the unelected nature of the Upper House (and by extension the democratic superiority of the Lower House) are wearisome in the extreme and furthermore betray an astonishing ignorance of the purpose of the Lords. One gets the impression that Mr. Clarke believes that the function of the Lords should be straightforwardly and unquizically to ratify whatever fatuous legislation is burped up from the Commons simply because the Lower House has the dubious distinction of a mandate from our famously discerning electorate. It has perhaps not crossed his mind that the undemocratic nature of the Upper House works in Parliament's favour insofar as it enables the Lords to examine legislation in an entirely dispassionate way, free of the ever-present, nagging fear of a fickle electorate which is the lot of a Commoner MP. In other words, they are able to act entirely in the interests of the country rather than in the interests of the party, as it were with one eye on their majority. Clearly Mr. Clarke considers this a personal insult to his authority as conferred by the estimable folk of Norwich South.

Of course, it is not the only absurdity inherent in these vignettes. The fact that among Tony Blair's first acts of cock-hardening destruction when elected was to remove 90% of the Lords' hereditary peers and stuff the place with like-minded cronies in the guise of life peers should mean that the Lords is just as supine as the Commons has only recently stopped being. But it seems that even Blair's most craven lapdogs have developed a sense of history and of purpose and of civic duty once within the House of Lords. I suppose that's the problem with "life" in this context. Give even your staunchest, most unquestioning ally a meal ticket for life and, having nothing better to do, he might just develop the ability to think for himself.