The Anglo Files by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

POSTSCRIPT

That should have been the end. But the government had not thought it through properly. Its blueprint for the reconstituted, post-hereditary chamber was vague, or, as you might say, nonexistent. Would its members now be elected? Appointed? Chosen by aliens crawling from the earth’s core? Who knew?

And so the chamber lurched on, having swapped an undemocratic hereditary system for an undemocratic appointed one.

Oddly for an unelected chamber, the Lords suddenly started having frequent elections. In 2006, it elected its first official Speaker, a real job with a salary of £140,000 a year, to take over the role the lord chancellor had once held. (Though he had to give up a lot of his responsibilities, the lord chancellor also won the right to change his pants, trading his breeches-and-slippers combo for trousers and normal shoes.)

Baroness Hayman got the Speaker’s job, beating off such rivals as Lord Redesdale, who had pledged that, if elected, he would “do as little as possible in the chamber, apart from sitting on the Woolsack.”

There were also regular minielections to fill the seats of the hereditaries who had been allowed to stay but who then died, which happened fairly often, on account of their age.***

Meanwhile, the slimmed-down chamber continued to harass and annoy the government, unexpectedly making trouble by calling Blair to account on proposals that threatened to encroach on Britons’ civil liberties, like one to force citizens to carry mandatory ID cards.

Debates still occasionally veered off into madness, which was, in its way, kind of comforting.

In 2004, for example, the Lords discussed a proposal to ban gay marriage.

Lord Tebbit wondered aloud what would happen if two people got married and one had a sex-change operation. Or how about if one partner “purports to be the husband and then gives birth?”

Lord Lucas helpfully pointed out that a person “who has his testicles shot off is not then compelled to become unmarried.”

Earl Ferrers was worried about the possible ramifications for the principle of primogeniture, the principle upon which his entire family history was built. He used an earl with two children, a son and a daughter, as his generic example.

“Let us suppose that the daughter is older and that she has a sex change and becomes a man,” he began.

“Does she then become Viscount Chump instead of her younger brother, who, up till now, was Viscount Chump? If she does become Viscount Chump, does she inherit the title of earl instead of the proper Viscount Chump, and all the cash?”

No one could answer that one, either.

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