OF all the ancient and peculiar institutions that supposedly adorn the British state, the House of Lord is the most absurd.
Don't take my word for it. Walter Bagehot, the eminent expert on the British constitution, wrote that the simple cure for anyone who admired the House of Lords was to go and have a look at it. And I don't think he meant the actual place, the vulgar, over-ornate chamber at the other end of the Palace of Westminster from the Commons. I think he meant what took place in it.
The House has long been regarded as a repository for the geriatric and the useless, an anachronistic gathering of very senior clergy, obsolete politicians and the like. Again, don't take my word for it. The second greatest British statesman of the 20th century, Lloyd George, contemptuously described its membership as "ordinary men, chosen accidentally from the unemployed".
The Tory grandee Harold Macmillan, when he had transferred to the Lords as the newly created Earl of Stockton, said: "If you are over 90, on two sticks, half dead and half blind, you stick out like a sore thumb in most places, but not in the House of Lords."
In recent years the average age of the members of the House has gone down a little and possibly the quality of the membership has also. There are 90 hereditary members; many of the rest are former elected politicians who have in effect been put to grass. This is increasingly a recipe for cronyism, and the cynical use of patronage. .
Not all the Lords are anomalous; there are exceptions. One is Lord Robertson: I mention him not in any servile sense, because I would probably disagree strongly with George's views on most matters, but he undoubtedly brings a breadth of top-level experience to the House, not least as a distinguished and effective former general- secretary of NATO.
One of the justifications for the House has been that speeches in it are more eloquent and considered than those in the Commons. Well, possibly. Certainly by far the best Westminster tribute I heard to the late Margaret Thatcher was the one by the Labour peer Baron Gilbert. It was respectful and gracious, but at the same time quite subversive of her as a politician, for Lord Gilbert stressed in a very witty way just how extraordinarily lucky she had been in all her principal opponents (including two Labour Leaders of the Opposition). His speech was sparkling and clever.
But the main justification for the Lords is that legislation from the Commons is often ill- drafted and rushed, and the second chamber therefore has a chance to refresh it and improve it. So at times in its role as the revising chamber it does act usefully. And certainly the thought sometimes occurs that our Holyrood Parliament here in Scotland could do with a second chamber to improve, if not substantially change, legislation.
Suddenly the House of Lords is under intense scrutiny, and its very future could be in danger. A potential scandal – and I stress the word potential – featuring three of its members may well lead to wider questions about the chamber's standards, purpose and point.
Secondly, there is a Scottish issue. If, as currently (and regrettably, from my perspective) looks likely, Scotland votes No in the referendum next September, there can be little doubt that the outcome will not be the end of the current constitutional process. Far from it. There will inevitably be more constitutional change in Scotland, whichever way we vote. At the very least, the devolution settlement would be intensified and improved, and one result of this would be that the House of Commons in London would become yet more irrelevant to most of Scotland's politics. But if the sovereign House is increasingly irrelevant to us in Scotland, what about the House of Lords?
Bluntly, could there be any justification whatsoever for Scottish peers?
That is a question that will increasingly be asked, whatever the result of the referendum.
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