Thursday, November 10, 2005
Booby prize
Whilst the House of Lords remains unreformed and its membership determined by Party patronage it's credibility will always be questioned. The latest batch of peers, the names of whom are leaking out at a rate of knots, underlines this point. Amongst them are people who have given hundreds of thousands of pounds between them to the Labour and Conservative Parties. Their peerages undermine the political process.
The other interesting leak is that one of the new Peers is to be Maggie Jones, the woman who lost Labour's safest seat in Wales last May. To be fair it was not entirely her doing. The events leading up to that defeat are well-documented and it is fair to say that the vast majority of the blame for a 19,000 Labour majority becoming a 9,000 margin of victory for Independent, Peter Law, has to lie with the Wales Labour Party. Nevertheless, the enoblement of Maggie Jones does give the impression that her peerage is the booby prize, and what does that say about the House of Lords?
Update: James Graham has an interesting take on Maggie Jones and the Terrorism vote:
The other interesting leak is that one of the new Peers is to be Maggie Jones, the woman who lost Labour's safest seat in Wales last May. To be fair it was not entirely her doing. The events leading up to that defeat are well-documented and it is fair to say that the vast majority of the blame for a 19,000 Labour majority becoming a 9,000 margin of victory for Independent, Peter Law, has to lie with the Wales Labour Party. Nevertheless, the enoblement of Maggie Jones does give the impression that her peerage is the booby prize, and what does that say about the House of Lords?
Update: James Graham has an interesting take on Maggie Jones and the Terrorism vote:
- The Government pontificating on the need to listen to professionals when it comes to the police, while doing the exact opposite in the far more complicated field of medicine.
- Labour legislating to prevent “losers” in first-past-the-post elections to the Welsh Assembly from also standing in the top up list elections, and calling for similar reforms to be made in Scotland, while simultaneously rewarding one of their most famous losers in this year’s General Election with a life peerage.
