Britannia Radio

Today's musings on the Lords' fiasco will probably close the matter 
for the moment.  The government will wish to forget about the whole 
issue to avoid further damage but will have to go ahead with its - 
probably toothless - inquiry.

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TELEGRAPH   28.1.09
Peers already have the power to put their tarnished house in order   
[shortened]
The Lords must recover the credibility lost in ruinous reforms and 
mediocre appointments, says Simon Heffer.

Simon Heffer

Don't you love that phrase "denies any wrongdoing"? Four peers of the 
realm  are allegedly caught negotiating large sums of money for 
seeking to "amend legislation", and yet they "deny any wrongdoing". 
Either they are quite right to do so - no doubt my learned friend's 
advice has been sought - or standards are now so non-existent in our 
public life that using a seat in the legislature to coin it 
imperially is no longer defined as "doing wrong". I suppose next we 
will learn that when Earl Grey passed the Great Reform Act he was in 
the pay of some proto-opinion pollster, or that Lord Salisbury's 
entire legislative programme between 1895 and 1902 was the result of 
backhanders from Tory-supporting brewers. Do me a favour.

Anyway, the four peers allegedly entrapped by the Sunday Times "deny 
any wrongdoing". [- - - - - - - - - - - - - - ]

  Let the police crawl all over this and see whether a crime has been 
committed: I have no idea whether one has or not. But a crime is not 
the same as a gross impropriety.

As far as I am concerned - and as far as anyone who has heard the 
tapes or read their transcripts will be - a gross impropriety has 
certainly been committed. When the House of Lords was full of 
gentlemen, anyone who had trespassed so would know what to do: he 
would retire from public life and never show his face in the House 
again. But then in those days people did not enter the Lords to make 
money; they did it to serve their country. No doubt the thought of 
never being able to collect again the daily allowance of £335.50, tax 
free, for those peers who need an overnight stay in London (it is 
half that for those who don't) would unsettle many of our 
increasingly venal peers.

Let us cut through the nonsense of "sanctions" on unlordly behaviour. 
There is much huffing and puffing about a law to allow the expulsion 
of peers from the House.   [-- - - - - - - - - -]

But then the absurdity was that it was ever conceived in the first 
place: for it was pointless. There is a means, of long constitutional 
standing and precedent, of booting a peer out of the Lords and 
removing his peerage: it is the Bill of Attainder. I am well aware 
that this is usually only used for enemies of the state, but it is 
not exclusively reserved for them. It was widely applied after the 
1745 Scottish rebellion to remove from the peerage those who had 
fought for the Pretender against George II. It was last used in 1917 
when two royal dukes - Albany and Cumberland - were attainted for 
fighting on the wrong side in the Great War.

Rather than adding yet more laws for the statute book, and having an 
army of regulations about what peers can or cannot do while retaining 
their position, let us retain instead the simplicity of the 
attainder. If a peer commits a crime and is deemed unworthy of a 
place in parliament, let parliament decide the matter, and pass an 
Act of Attainder to consign his peerage to history. I bet if it did, 
there would be very few offers to amend legislation for cash in the 
foreseeable future.

It can hardly be understated what a disaster this episode is for the 
reputation of the Lords, the majority of whose members do have a 
sense of noblesse oblige and whose House was, as a result, the 
remaining bastion of integrity and decency in our legislature.

I am told that officials who serve the Lords are deeply demoralised 
by what has happened; yet I also hear that many considered this 
scandal an accident waiting to happen. The four men in the frame - 
Lords Moonie, Snape, Taylor and Truscott - ended up on the red 
benches not because of any massive distinction in their lives, but 
because they were in three cases trusties of the Blair regime, in 
another (Lord Taylor) a trusty of the late Lord Callaghan.

One is tempted to say that, having been in the House more than 30 
years, Lord Taylor should have known better; hearing his conversation 
with the reporter posing as a lobbyist, it manifests itself only that 
he appears to be exceptionally experienced at using his position to 
make money. After a gasp from the reporter at a claim that companies 
would pay him £100,000 a year, Lord Taylor volunteers that "that's 
cheap for what I do for them". He probably wouldn't miss his daily 
allowance, then.

The real villain of the piece is Tony Blair, who dumped the other 
three in the Lords in return for comparatively minor services 
rendered. That has been done throughout history: but when the likes 
of Gladstone, or Salisbury, or even Asquith did it, it was done to 
people who would know how to behave once they got upstairs. The only 
man in history to be as reckless as Mr Blair was Lloyd George, whose 
activities with the peerage leave a stain on his reputation to this 
day. Coming a close second was Harold Wilson, who gave the Lords the 
jailbird Joe Kagan.

A peerage used to be an honour granted to genuinely distinguished 
people who would bring expertise and duty to the task of running a 
revising chamber. The Lords is vital to our constitution. The nature 
of its "reform" since 1997 has been disastrous. It has driven out 
numerous people of quality and replaced them with those of 
mediocrity. Since the cash-for-honours scandal there has been a 
little more circumspection, though it did not stop the disgraced 
mortgage fiddler Lord Mandelson getting a peerage.

Punishing bad peers is one (necessary) thing; but better to stop them 
being created in the first place. The Honours Scrutiny Committee has 
that power. It has manifestly failed to use it properly, if the 
shocking allegations are proved to be true. Newspapers around the 
world have reported, some with glee, this wound to our constitution. 
Are we happy to leave it at that, or will those with the power now 
choose to set the House of Lords in order?
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CONSERVATIVE HOME Blog   27.1.09
David Cameron pledges to introduce sanctions for peers who break the 
rules
Jonathan Isaby

As the story has continued to run this week about the Sunday Times 
allegation that Labour peers have taken money in return for getting 
laws amended, David Cameron has tonight pledged to reform the system 
which operates in the Upper House to allow for punishments for those 
who break the rules.

In short, he wants to allow for members of the Lords who behave 
wrongly or break the code of conduct to be suspended or expelled.

He is setting up a committee to advise him on how this can be done, 
but is determined that procedures and indeed laws be changed in order 
to introduce sanctions for wrongdoing.

He said:
"Today, it's not possible to suspend a member of the House of Lords 
no matter how badly he or she behaves, it's not possible to expel 
them from that legislature and yet they're making the laws that all 
of us have to obey. This is completely wrong, it needs to change and 
we will change it. We will make sure that members of the House of 
Lords, if they behave wrongly, can be suspended or expelled. Simple 
as that.

"There is a good code of conduct for members of the House of Lords 
but if they breach it there aren't proper sanctions, there aren't 
proper punishments. That's wrong, that needs to change.

"That's why I'm setting up this committee to advise me, to look at 
the issues of lobbying, consultancies, what is declared and what the 
procedures are. I think it's very important that we absolutely make 
sure that our Parliament is sorted out and everyone knows that both 
Houses of Parliament, Commons and Lords, the people there, are 
working hard, declaring their expenses and allowances properly, doing 
the things they are meant to do and are open in all the declarations 
they make about any outside interests or any other things that they 
might have.

"It's about transparency, making sure everyone declares everything 
everybody needs to know and it's making sure we have a proper process 
so bad behaviour is rooted out and dealt with."

There is little I can add except to say amen to that. If public faith 
in our parliamentary institutions is to be properly restored, 
politicians need to be going about their business transparently and 
honestly - and they need to be seen to be doing so.

As such, it is only right that those in the House of Lords who behave 
improperly should be subject to sanctions similar to those applied to 
their counterparts in the Commons.
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Short extracts via Conservative Home Blog
...And Labour also wants to expel corrupt peers
"We should be able to take a range of actions as necessary, including 
being able to suspend peers immediately while an investigation is 
being carried out, and longer periods of suspension if cases are 
proven, and the option not of removing peerages - not in the gift of 
the House - but of even longer and perhaps permanent exclusions in 
extreme cases. If the current allegations are proven, we may need as 
well to consider emergency sanctions if warranted." - Lords leader 
Baroness Royall writing in The Guardian

Earl of Onslow: We need old lags in the Lords
"I'm a Conservative. I like anything that looks like an ox cart but 
pulls like a Ferrari, and I think the House of Lords is a perfect 
example. It is an institution with immense virtues. The majority of 
people there are there on their honour, and they behave honourably. 
That is why everybody is so upset about the allegations. It really 
hurts." - The Earl of Onslow writing in The Independent
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