An old Etonian aristocrat has won a lifetime seat in the House of Lords in a hereditary peer byelection with just seven votes.
Charles Peregrine Courtenay, the earl of Devon, was among 19 aristocrats who stood for an election decided by 31hereditary crossbench peers.
Elections are democracy, right?
Not if the electorate or the ballot paper is rigged
Demos = the citizens; not just a tiny subset of them. So no, elections alone do not make a democracy.
If the Hereditaries – the only people who deserve to be in Parliament – have to go through the farce of an election, I think it is only fair that the Life Peers do too.
Preferably on TV. Perhaps with a Game Show format involving the voters phoning in.
And Jello wrestling.
SMFS:
Oops, HTML malfunction. Sorry, Tim. I blame the Russians.
Sorry, Tim this is aristocracy – or just possibly, if you feel German, aristodemocracy – since all the electors are Hereditary Crossbench Peers. (I refuse to believe that the Greeks had a word for “Crossbench” in this context).
Can we go back to just having hereditaries in the HoL?
Blair’s half-baked ‘reform’ is infinitely worse than anything a Belted Earl or the 18th Duke of Loamshire could have come up with after an exceptionally good lunch.
Unlike the entitled cronies that now infest the place, we might actually have noblesse oblige.
@Recusant, July 5, 2018 at 4:31
+1
Blair was the worst and most damaging PM UK has ever had.
I can’t think of one thing he did which “made things better”.
@Pcar
He stepped down in favour of Gordon Br—
Oh, wait …
Selling out the Sudetenland has to be numero uno. Tens of millions died.
He was obsessed with his place in history, looks like he will achieve it but not as he thought it would be.
More the great bungler than the great statesman
His continued insistence that the end always justified the means was a very frightening attribute for a PM and a clear pointer to his lack of any morals or principles
Thomas Fuller said:
“He stepped down in favour of Gordon Br—”
Actually that probably was the best thing Blair did – it was the only way to stop Brown being Chancellor.
In the UK: Abolition of betting tax, liberalisation of liquor licensing, free movement for workers with the EU, and following Tory spending plans for the first 2 years
Abroad: Kosovo and Sierra Leone
Long term: the rise of the SNP, and concentration of Labour votes in constituencies with 65%+ shares meaning it would be almost impossible for Labour to win a majority now.
It’s hard to think of a suitable punishment for Tony Blair. Cherie Blair does seem overly harsh.
@Mr Ecks
The European Parliament rejects Article 13 copyright law that could have killed the meme
Which is meaningless as Commisars and less so Council of Ministers can and do ignore. The European Parliament is a powerless advisory talking shop.
@BiS
FTFY
The Commissar scum could try to decree this shit I suppose but it is unlikely because it is a powergrab and Inet attack that they wanted slipped by.
The deal is not yet done –more EU shit coming up in August with a day of action–ie emails –on 26th–I think. But they have suffered a setback and it will be much more difficult for them to proceed now. They have failed to sleeze it thro and unilateral action by the Commission Cuntz would not work and is not likely.
It will last until the next scam the fucks dream up.
We need an Inet that cannot be shut down or controlled by the scummy state.
BTW 100+ of those emails are mine.
You can have an effect.
If every Brexit supporter with a computer had sent 100 emails to the fucking Tory Party–are you listening Theo??–I do not think we would be waiting to see the sell out that vile cunt May will try to lay on us tomorrow.
What a vile cow. Repeated the same “red line” lies at PMQ this very week and leeks the load of shit Seaman Staines has on his site today.
Time to kick off with a massive council tax payment strike for openers.
@Bongo
Those are all fails. SNP is destroying Scotland and rest of UK will pay. Mass drunk is bad. Brown fudged spending with PFI and every spend, recruit, wage rise classed as “investment”.
Boundary reviews delayed repeatedly; mass fraudulent postal votes, mass immigration…..
Green lunacy, Nuclear & Heathrow ignored…
Wars and no equipment – Snatch landies…
Nothing good.
I’m not sure it really counts as an election because the electorate isn’t (as I assumed it would be) all the hereditary peers (or all those who have declared that allegiance), but just those hereditary peers (of the correct party allegiance) who have already been elected to sit in the Lords. So it’s more like a board of trustees or parish council co-opting a new member of themselves to fill a casual vacancy..
For those who like this sort of thing, the Conservative hereditaries have a by-election coming up as well.
Manifestos here:
https://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-information-office/2018/Arrangements-by-election-29-06-18.pdf
My favourite:
Biddulph, L.
Always happy to serve.
(That’s all he put)
@ RichardT
Good point
But there are some good candidates, far better than the ones they dredge up to stand for the HoC. My favourite has to Stockton; also, he has a record of fulfilling his duties – before I lost contact with what used to be “home” I used to get reports of his travelling up there for civic and/or charity events even though he had a “full-time” job as a publisher and a seat in the HoL. Also have to admire Napier and Ettrick
P.S. – restricting the electorate to those hereditary peers who have already been elected to sit in the Lords is how we got the delightful absurdity of the 2003 Labour House of Lords election, with 11 candidates and only 3 electors.
The LibDems and the crossbenchers also sometimes manage to have more candidates than electors.
I’d have preferred it to be more like the Scottish & Irish representative peers, where all the hereditaries elect those who are allowed to sit in the HoL. But it was an interim system and was never supposed to continue for this long.
@Thomas Fuller, July 5, 2018 at 6:45 pm
Brown did have one redeeming feature – he gave the finger to loathed Blair and kept UK out of Euro.