Georgia L Gilholy is a freelance journalist and social media consultant for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).
Labour’s latest plans to upend our country’s constitution are receiving little to no opposition, even as the plot to remove the last of the hereditary peers. Each day disproportionate column inches are dedicated to the latest “woke” hysteria or foreign conflicts, whilst no one seems bothered about plans to change Britain forever, and Conservative complicity in doing so.
For all Keir Starmer’s dogged campaign for a so-called ‘People’s Vote’ in years gone by, he has not committed to a referendum on his array of mooted constitutional changes. This is an emergency. Labour plans to permanently rob yet more power from voters and dole it out to unaccountable, wasteful, and inferior institutions like “devolved” assemblies and parliaments. Their push to sabotage our Union to create yet more useless political jobs has flown under the radar for far too long, and soon are likely to be fully realised.
Why didn’t major politicians, commentators, and organisations step up and say something? I doubt it is because they fail to grasp the scale of Stramer’s plans. Instead, I believe it is because they either do not care, or actively support them. After all, the Conservatives have had over a decade to repeal New Labour’s damaging attacks on our constitution, but have not.
Has the run-of-the-mill PR or devolution supporter ever been offered both sides of this argument? Or do they back it simply because it has become an “approved” opinion that “the right sort of people” hold? Much is the same approach to the House of Lords, including the issue of hereditary peerages, most of which were scrapped by Tony Blair in 1999, and which Starmer has now pledged to bin wholesale.
Blair also abolished the Law Lords- our previous final appeal court- to be replaced with a vastly inferior and alien Supreme Court. With the number of hereditary peers already a rump of its former self, Starmer may now draw far closer to full Lords abolition, which his plans to stuff our upper chamber with Labour peers will surely aid.
While it would be easy to let reverse snobbery get the better of us, and call for these privileged few to be removed, we would do best not to fall into this well-decorated trap. The purpose of the Lords is to offer balanced scrutiny of the populist and partisan moves made by MPs who must be re-elected by voters to maintain their seats. The House of Lords can only achieve this if all peers, both hereditary and life, are permitted to sit, vote, and veto bills, which would require the repeal of the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949, along with the House of Lords Act of 1999.
Alexander Pelling-Bruce summarised it best for The Spectator amidst the 2019 debate over the proroguing of parliament: “… since the removal of most of the hereditary peers, the Lords has acted without restraint where reticence is required and given in to the Commons where it should have been assertive.”
Just like supporters of radical and unpopular policies such as mass immigration, ‘modernisers’ like Blair and Starmer constantly attempt to portray themselves as the defender of the status quo and sense rather than the radicals they truly are. They are skilled at portraying their plans as sensible and inevitable, despite being precisely the opposite.
By further downgrading the Lords, and ripping away its proper functions, Starmer and his ilk know they are setting the groundwork for its eventual abolition to be replaced with yet more party loyalists. Or we could be offered the constitutional infantilism of unicameralism, of which Israel is one of the most chaotic developed examples.
Any fellow journalists who have been forced to watch hours of Parliament TV, even those who despise the Lords as an institution, as I once mistakenly did, are forced to admit that the quality of discussion in our upper chamber is of a higher calibre than that of the Commons.
Starmer’s complaint that the Lords is “indefensible” for no other reason than “it is the current year” reveals his iconoclast leanings, and unveils his lust for compromising the accidental brilliance of our historic constitution. It is always much easier to destroy things than it is to build them, as Starmer will no doubt find once he has entered Number 10.
The post Georgia L Gilholy: Starmer’s plot to remove hereditary peers is a signal of his constitutional ignorance appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Georgia L. Gilholy
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