Unlike the rest of us, not only do the dinosaurs in the Lords have jobs for life – all 804 members of the crony factory have jobs for eternity. Mirror columnist Brian Reade says Oliver Cromwell got it right in 1649 when he said they were “useless and dangerous to the people” and proposes a smaller, elected chamber
BACK in the day, parents used to tell their school-leaving offspring that they should get a job for life. They told us to forget airy-fairy notions of picking up a guitar or jumping on the hippy bus to Greece and instead write to local manufacturing firms, the council, banks, the civil service and department stores.
That way, if you kept your head down and your nose clean, you’d be guaranteed wage slips for half a century and a big clock at the end of it.
Margaret Thatcher changed all that. She claimed that job security was a filthy communist notion which bred laziness and was the reason Britain had become the Sick Man of Europe.
So everything changed. Unions were smashed, council finances decimated, banks became Wild West casinos, civil servants were demonised and factories moved to Asia – all in the name of progress.
Which is why today no worker has any security past their notice period and the idea of a job for life seems as distant as the dinosaurs.
Except for two groups of living dinosaurs: The monarchy and the House of Lords – the apex of the Establishment who Thatcher chose not to take on and who remain on the state payroll riding the gravy train all the way to the graveyard. To many outside Britain, this weird arrangement seems as dated as the medieval penchant for burning your cat to chase away the Black Death.
Which is why King Charles and his queen have flown 10,000 miles to wave at their Australian subjects but the nation’s six state premiers have all made excuses to avoid meeting them.
Indeed the pair are shown on posters and T-shirts under a banner that says Monarchy: The Farewell Oz Tour. Their days, Down Under at least, are numbered.
As are those of hereditary peers here, after a draft law to boot all 92 of them out of the Lords passed to its next stage this week. The party of privilege don’t like it of course, with shadow deputy PM Oliver Dowden claiming Labour is “obsessed with change for change’s sake”.
Clearly he thinks it was a great day for democracy when Tory Prime Ministers elevated Michelle Mone (who says she regrets lying about links to a company being sued by the UK government for £120million of dodgy Covid gear) and Charlotte Owen (awarded a peerage at the age of 29 for running Boris Johnson’s diary) into the upper law-making chamber where they can claim £361 per day, tax free, plus travel expenses, for life.
So why stop at the hereditaries? At 804 members, the Lords is the largest legislative chamber outside communist China, and it grows constantly because its members never leave.
It is a bent crony factory, a cosy private members’ club for bishops, PMs’ chums, party donors and retired MPs, and it is high time we retired all of the unelected ermine-clad barons and baronesses.
Labour’s next manifesto should promise to do what Oliver Cromwell did after the execution of Charles I in 1649, declaring the Lords “useless and dangerous to the people”, and scrapping it. Then propose a smaller chamber made up of people representing the interests of all regions and classes in the UK, who are elected for fixed terms.
Maybe then we can have a grown-up debate about our unelected heads of state whose family members are guaranteed not just jobs for life, but eternity.
