TORY SLEAZE MANIFESTS OUR DEMOCRATIC DEARTH: LET’S LEGISLATE BY LOT CHRISTOPHER O'NEIL
Venalism infects our institutional processes, as evidenced by the reporting onslaught the government has undergone over the past month. Hell seemed to freeze over earlier this month when Andrew Neil (1) and commentators at The Times (2), FT (3), The Guardian (4) and The New Statesman (5) all agreed on one thing: the stench of sleaze emanating from Boris Johnson's administration, particularly the peerage scandal when it emerged that 15 of the last 16 Conservative Party treasurers won a seat in the House of Lords after donating over £3 million to the Tories, can only have one solution: abolishing our undemocratic upper house.
Abolition is an interesting idea with consequences that I don't think any of the above experts have considered. The word itself comes from the Latin abolere, which means "to destroy" or "to cause to die out". One option for what the abolition of the House of Lords might look like is just that - the destruction of it as a political entity. However, in my view, this is a rather superficial analysis. When abolitionists who fought the deep evil of slavery in the American South called for the abolition of slavery, they certainly demanded much more than what the freed Southern slaves and their descendants were endowed with: in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. "freedom to hunger, to the winds and rains of heaven... freedom without food to eat and land to cultivate, and therefore freedom and hunger at the same time" (6); freedom only in the abstract, freedom to share the harvest, racist prison slavery, racial discrimination, Jim Crow and segregation.
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Abolitionists fought for the exclusion of race from the set of characteristics that
determine our chances of a prosperous life, for a society in which the harm of racial discrimination is as limited in everyday life as it is in institutional life, for the destruction of the sources that make this state of affairs possible - the enslavement of an entire racial group by society. Recognising slavery as illegal is part of ending the objectification of this enslavement, but without a society freed from racism, slavery of one class to another will inevitably emerge in more subversive forms that we have not yet eradicated; as Marx wrote, "the state can free itself from restriction unless man himself has freed himself from it" (7).
Considering the possible abolition of the House of Lords through this prism requires an analysis of what a fundamental convention in British political life is the institutional manifestation of our undemocratic upper house. This, I believe, is rooted in thehttps://www.democraticaudit.com/201 ic-is-the-house-of-lords/ rejection of popular democracy prevalent in our political elite - as found most strongly in the writings of the famous British conservative Edmund Burke - because of the ignorance and ineptitude of ordinary people and their exposure to demagogic suggestion, whose whirlwind, to paraphrase Alexander Hamilton, can be directed at the cherished traditions and structures Burke's conservatives hold dear. After that, given the remnants of hereditary rule in an already sprawling House, the shocking levels of inactivity, given the high sitting fees paid to many lords who are increasingly overextended, and the recent and historical examples of cronyism in the
