Still Peerless?

It is now two years since I applied to be a People’s Peer. Of course, I never expected to get it. As much as anything else, I was hoping to place somewhere a little article on my experience of the process. But I submitted my case to the House of Lords Appointments Commission. The top and bottom of it was that, God willing, I offered several decades of representation to a position and numerous consequent views which, despite having a considerable following in the country at large, are not currently represented within the parliamentary process.

The removal of the hereditaries has greatly upped the age profile: the idea that Peers have always at least ordinarily been old is historically illiterate, and that history goes all the way up into the last decade; it used to be quite common to inherit in childhood, or even at birth as a posthumous son, and then take one’s seat at 21, which, if not 18, is still the minimum age for election as an elected hereditary.

That removal has also massively reduced the representation of everywhere outside London, including the North, with the North East particularly hard done by. That Londonisation was greatly exacerbated by Blair’s creation of huge numbers of what were almost exclusively very metropolitan Peers indeed. Add in that there is no mixed-race person in either House, that there is no one born in a remaining British Overseas Territory in either House, that no one born in Saint Helena has ever sat in either House, and that there is still (indeed, increasingly) the age-old under-representation of those of us who attended either or both of state schools and non-Oxbridge universities.

Anyway, it took them until April 2009 to write back saying “Don’t call us”. I mean, how heavy is the workload at the House of Lords Appointments Commission? No surprise there, of course. But the letter basically said, even if not in these words, that they had had a lot of applications from people like me, and that the other applicants had been more distinguished. That was, and is, perfectly possible. Off the top of my head, I could then, and can now, provide scores of names.

So, of those raised to the ermine in the last two years, who, and what proportion, went to a state school? Who, and what proportion, holds a non-Oxbridge degree? (Or, although this does not apply to me, never went to university?) Who, and what proportion, was born in a remaining British Overseas Territory, or specifically in Saint Helena? Who, and what proportion, is mixed-race? Who, and what proportion, represents a return to the days when young men inherited their fathers’ seats in childhood or at birth and then took those seats at 21, not an age for which I am in any danger of being mistaken? Who, and what proportion, is a pro-life, pro-family, pro-worker, anti-war, economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative British and Commonwealth patriot?

There certainly are people vastly more distinguished than I in each of those categories. Where are they in the only House of Parliament - which, lest we forget, is what it is - to offer them any hope of representation this side of electoral reform? After all, I was told that plenty of them had applied to be in it.

I only ask.