Making a meal of democracy
The Big Issue, 31 January 2012
Exactly what century are we living in? Like you, I thought it was the twenty-first, all zappy and hi-tech and interconnected, where we look with wide-eyed wonder at the strange behaviour and stiffness of those Downton Abbey characters.
Yet it seems we were wrong. It seems Britain has quietly been thrust back to the sixteenth century. For last week, a bishop – loved by God, sure, but elected by nobody – marshalled other bishops and some Lords and Ladies to strike down proposals put forward by elected government officials.
And having an unelected man of the cloth boss about politicians who were voted in by us, the people, doesn’t strike me as a very suitable thing in the twenty-first century.
In his capacity as a peer in the unelected House of Lords, the Rt Rev John Packer, Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, was rebelling against the Lib-Con government’s proposed welfare reforms, specifically its plan to introduce a benefit cap of £26,000 per household.
Now, it doesn’t matter a fig what you think about those reforms – I know good people who are in favour of the cap, and I know good people who are against it. Whichever side of the divide you find yourself on, though, you should be more than a little freaked out about the fact that, in 2011, it is still possible for holy men and wealthy men to block proposals put forward by the democratic representatives of commoners.
The bishop clearly sees himself as representing some higher, mystical authority than us mere plebs. So despite the fact that the government’s proposed reforms were a) put forward by elected officials and b) have the support of 76 per cent of the public, according to polls, still the bishop and his equally unelected mates sought to flamethrower them.
Packer said his amendment to the government’s reforms was about standing up for those who have “no voice” – specifically children, whom he claims will be hit hard by the government’s proposals. “Children have no vote in society”, he said. “This amendment goes some way to protect them.”
But there’s a reason children don’t have the vote – because they are not considered mature enough to have a say in the important business of running a country. That is something best left to adults, to morally autonomous men and women who fought for centuries for the right to influence local and national political affairs.
In claiming to speak “on behalf of children”, the bishop and his buddies in the Lords arrogantly elbowed aside the millions of adults who voted for the Tories or the Lib Dems and whose cross in a box should carry far more political weight than one man who happens to wear a cross around his neck.
Yet alarmingly, the bishop has been heartily cheered by many liberal columnists who normally balk at the idea of religious men meddling in political affairs and who aren’t usually fans of the unelected second chamber.
Kath Viner, deputy editor of the Guardian, tweeted that the bishop made her “proud to be from Ripon!” Other left-leaning commentators, exasperated by the Lib-Cons and clearly disillusioned with the masses too, are increasingly calling on the Lords to shoot down bills they don’t like.
One describes the snoring inhabitants of the Lords as “the only decent politicians left”. Another describes them as “a blessing”. Radical campaign groups such as 38 Degrees – which describe themselves as democratic – call on their supporters to “Email a peer” in order to try to convince him or her to vote against government measures on welfare, the NHS or whatever.
This is a very dangerous game. In calling on the Lords to fight battles on our behalf, the anti-Lib-Con side of the cultural elite are empowering the least democratic, most aloof section of the British political class.
Indeed, today, people like the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds do not derive their moral authority over the moronic masses from God – rather they get it from the likes of Polly Toynbee, from increasingly desperate members of the liberal classes who are so keen to get one over on the Lib-Cons that they will even sidle up to unelected peers and plead with them to use their aristocratic clout to put the Commons (and by extension commoners) in their place.
We shouldn’t flatter the second chamber in this way. We should abolish it. It is more than 200 years since Thomas Paine, that great British radical, described the House of Lords as “the remains of aristocratical tyranny”. If you are opposed to government proposals, then you should say so in free and open and mass debate, rather than trying to coax these descendants of tyranny to ride roughshod over the democratic realm.
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