A party funded by Russian oligarchs and by the Gulf princelings whose money created ISIS?
Or a party funded by millions of ordinary working people within, through and as the British trade union movement?
It is perfectly obvious which is the patriotic choice.
And which is not.
Does Lindsay think any of that was some kind of answer to what I said?
ReplyDeleteDoes he not realise supporters of hereditary peers also oppose the Life Peerages Act which violated the hereditary principle?
Nonetheless, Labour abolished the hereditaries so it could replace them with "Tony's cronies" (as everyone knows).
Blair appointed a staggering 357 life peers (far more than his predecessors) in just ten years.
It was a deliberate act of totalitarianism.
He wanted to dominate the Lords.
As for "incorruptible"; the hereditary peers were incorruptible in the sense that they hadn't been PR advisors to and members of political parties before being "appointed" peers by those political parties ( not in the sense that they were all saintly beings).
They defeated Thatcher over 300 times.
That wasn't the hereditaries. She used to bus them in whenever the more political Life Peers, Law Lords and Lords Spiritual looked likely to defeat her.
DeleteMost of the hereditaries rarely or never came in otherwise, and many seemed to have no idea what they were voting for or against when they did.
Blair could have created all of those Life Peers anyway. There has never been any upper limit on the size of the Upper House.
So the "Tony's Cronies" line (from before you can have had any political consciousness) does not stand up to any kind of scrutiny.
The role of local government, that of the trade unions and that of the nationalised industries were all integral to the organic Constitution as it had evolved by the 1980s.
In and by attacking them, Thatcher attacked it, and she set all the precedents that Blair followed.