Last week it was revealed that despite a pre-election promise to base the number of appointed peers on party vote share, Mr Cameron is now prevaricating. He said: “I have committed previously to keeping the party peers under review and will, of course, give further consideration to the points you raise when we come to consider recommendations over the course of this parliament.”
But the fact is the Liberal Democrats – who got just 2.4 million votes on May 7th, compared to UKIP’s 3.8 million – are expected to be awarded more peers once again, while UKIP and the Green Party get no further representation in Britain’s upper parliamentary chamber.
Mr Hannan, who is known to be overtly hostile to UKIP, despite long-standing rumours of his defection from the Conservative Party, took to Twitter today to blast the Prime Minister:
Wait, wha...Are you sure about that ? I haven't paid attention to Hannan for a while, but I'd almost have assumed he was a member of UKIP by now, given the ferocity of his Euroscepticism and his almost career-long stint as an MEP.
The LibDems shouldn't get a single peer until @ukip, @TheGreenParty and others have reached the proportionality demanded by... the LibDems.
— Daniel Hannan (@DanHannanMEP) July 16, 2015
Anyways, I just don't understand all this moaning about the composition of the House of Lords. It's as if the critics don't get, or are pretending not to get, the fact that the institution is fundamentally undemocratic...by design. That an institution that stood as a sort of brake on democratic excesses in its more traditional form had been turned into an exercise in pure cronyism by Tony Blair.
It's a bit like the Democrats in the US still whining about Al Gore having won the popular vote in 2000, when they haven't made any serious efforts whatsoever since to abolish the electoral college. Not that the electoral college was intended to subvert democracy, unlike Tone's anti-democratic 'constitutional reforms.'
Play the FPTP game right, and maybe one day you too in UKIP can give your defeated MP's a cushy retirement in the Lords. And you too can stack the body with as many peers as necessary to quash any possibility of dissent. But first of course, you need find victory in an electoral system that is specifically designed to shut out third-party opposition and maintain established power at all costs. Sucks, don't it ?
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