Excellent piece from the Spectator from Douglas Murray who is a consistently excellent writer. In this piece he examines Britain’s perennial political sleaze scandals and also the role of unelected bureaucrats in our Parliament.
In examining this issue Mr Murray makes some valid and disturbing points about both houses of Parliament and how the members in both the Lords and the Commons are controlled not by the houses themselves but by unelected officials tasked with enforcing ‘standards’. I agree with Mr Murray. These unelected officials have diminished our parliament by being a governing force above those of Parliament whether the house be elected or a mixture of appointed or hereditary members. These officials have even bullied Peers in the House of Lords into accepting dubious ‘diversity’ training by threatening Peers with having their right of access to the House of Lords library withdrawn.
Mr Murray said in relation to the Paterson affair:
Because the striking thing about the whole treatment of Paterson was not just the botched defence and cowardly U-turn of Boris Johnson’s government. Nor was it the baying, crowing behaviour of Labour MPs who only days earlier had been talking of civility in politics. It was the fact that all of this came from a wretched official who sits above parliament. On this occasion the official is one Kathryn Stone, the parliamentary commissioner for standards. But it could have been any other functionary. It had been no use Paterson complaining that Stone had not listened to his evidence before condemning him. It was no use complaining that the process had not been run in a judicial manner. For Stone is not a judge. She is just one of the many functionaries who stands above our legislative chambers. Stone is a graduate of Loughborough University, where she gained a masters in ‘women’s studies’. It would be hard to imagine a CV less illustrious than hers.
Well said Mr Murray. The actions and undue influence of unelected officials like Kathryn Stone might well be why so many promising individuals who enter Parliament either as MP’s or as Peers fail to live up to early promise. They are beaten down by people nobody in the general public chose and who follow their own agendas. I’d strongly advise people to read the entirety of Mr Murray’s piece as it diagnoses much that is wrong with how our Parliament is managed.
