More ''who's who'' in House of Lords

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, APRIL 27. The Blair Government's attempt to take some of the stuffiness out of the House of Lords by bringing ordinary people into it has backfired with the first lot of ``people's peers'' turning out to be simply more of the same kind.

It has been called a ``sick joke'' played by the Government on hundreds of people - teachers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, nurses, doctors, engineers, journalists - who applied for the job after being led to believe that they were precisely the sort of ``peers'' it was looking for in order to make the second chamber more representative. In the event, the final list of 15 ``ordinary peers'' reads more like a ``who's who'' of British establishment. Seven are knights, one Lady, three big names in charity, three high-profile professors and a leading businessman. Many of them come with OBEs and other royal commendations - in effect, people who may have been in the queue for a place in the House of Lords anyway. They were chosen by a government-appointed commission from among 3,000-odd applicants, majority of whom were male, white and largely middle class.

This is the first time that a group of non-party peers has been handpicked by a commission, rather than being nominated directly by the Government. They are to be called independent peers, who would be expected to bring professional expertise into a House dominated by party loyalists and heirs. The list has touched off a furore with even Labour MPs calling it a ``farce'' and a ``gimmick''. It was widely described as old wine in a new bottle - the usual suspects who dominate the New Year's Honours, a spokesperson for the pro-democracy Charter 88 said. A trade union leader said it remained very much an ``exclusive club''. ``This is a pseudo-democracy, not the real thing'', said the spokesman of a Labour thinktank Demos.

The commission, however, defended itself saying all were selected on sheer merit. It clarified that the term ``people's peer'' was coined by the media, and it was now being unfairly hurled back at the commission. ``You haven't got your hairdresser in this list but if you go back to our criteria, one of them is that the human being (selected for the job) will be comfortable operating in the House of Lords,'' the commission chairman, Lord Stevenson said suggesting that a certain kind of ordinary people did not simply belong there.

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Section  : International
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