We have a long running issue in the UK with honours allegedly being exchanged for cash contributions to certain political parties. This is hardly a new thing, and has been regularly repeated throughout history. And the original “Lords” certainly needed plenty of cash to maintain their position … it is rarely mentioned, but honours have been removed when a Lord lost too much money.
Personally I suspect that it has always been the case that if you were careful and ‘helpful’ to the party in power, it has always been possible to exchange your surplus cash for an honour.
So why not make it official ? Making honours something you can buy will stop all the backdoor deals that probably go on in exchange for honours.
Make someone who wants to sit in the House of Lords, pay up £5 million. Of that, £3 million goes either to the political party of their choice, or into the general tax funds; £1 million goes towards the cost of maintaining the Lords.
The final £1 million goes to a random person selected from the electoral register, gets a title, and must sit in the House of Lords. They could probably do with a salary as well (which is where the ‘maintenance’ comes in).
This kills two birds with one stone … takes the sleaze out of the honours system, and helps counter-balance the tendency of the Lords to be weighed down with establishment cronies. It tastes better to me than the idea of making the House of Lords just another house full of politicians … whilst the old Lords packed full of establishment cronies is a pretty bad thing, one thing that is good about it, is the relative freedom from party politics. And adding some good old common sense from the common people to keep the excesses of the politicians in check is worth trying.