Total Politics is a new monthly magazine; Iain Dale is the publisher. The November issue has an article, ‘Why we need the House of Lords’, by David Seymour, former political editor of the Mirror group. As he admits, he has moved from being a committed advocate of Lords reform to being a supporter of the present House:
“I should make a brief confession here. For much of my life I believed that members of the Upper House should be elected. I now realise that the quality, experience and knowledge of peers provide such a wonderful breadth and depth to the UK’s legislative process that they must be retained.”
He makes a solid case for the present House. The article can be read at: http://www.totalpolitics.com/magazine_detail.php?id=148
One small aside. The online version has the text but not the picture that accompanies the printed version: it shows men in red robes and wigs walking from Westminster Abbey to the Palace of Westminster. The only problem is that they have nothing to do with the Lords. They are judges (not even the law lords). The giveaway is the wigs. Peers do not wear wigs. Picture editors please note!
Ah, Mr Dale is no fool in the ‘logrolling’ stakes by providing free copies of the magazine to everyone in Parliament…
That said, it would be churlish to condemn this ‘product placement’ given that this is not the BBC, and few people seem to need to pay to get access to this magazine. Indeed, since it is, as you point out, available online, I’m not sure how his ‘business model’ really works.
So Mr Dale is unlikely to have had his view swayed by anything other than the strength of the argument. Whether this will be the case for his current trip to Israel will have to wait until he has seen ‘both sides of the fence’, so to speak.
Come Lord Norton, such colloquialism:
“Peers do not wear wigs”.
Such a sweeping statement surely you meant to say:
“Peers do not wear perukes or periwigs”?
I feel sure that peers do avail themselves of the odd toupee or hairpiece especially those who are given to tearing their hair out over matters political.
Senex: I did think about using the term ‘formal wigs’! Having said that, toupees are not much in evidence in the Lords. We tend to accept nature.
Marvellous article; though I do hope that it doesn’t come about in the next Parliament. The idea that a future Parliament should be bound by the attitude of the present one is farcical – all Parliaments are equally sovereign and can do what they damned well please. I hope it never comes up again.
Perhaps I am being over sensitive but even a phonetic spelling of ‘Whig’ is just a little too creepy coming from a Tory peer given that they might be regarded as synonymous by some.
I was therefore offering you a euphemism.
I once heard somebody say that because the Tories backed the wrong side in the Jacobite rebellion they were banished from political life for sixty years or more. It was this that gave rise to the Whigs and ultimately to our loss of the American colonies to revolutionaries.
The same prospective loss of a political party, New Labour to the political wilderness also creeps me out because what will rise in their place: the ‘banished’ Liberal party or some other?
Ref: History para 4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Whig_Party
Senex: There is a strain of Whig thought in modern British Conservatism. If you wish to explore the contribution of Tory and Whig thought to contemporary Conservatism, may I modestly recommend P. Norton and A. Aughey, Conservatives and Conservatism (London: Temple Smith, 1981)?