Mr Warner on good form this evening

Jack Straw’s vacuous plan to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a 300-member “Senate” demonstrates that, to the bitter end, Labour is obsessed with the kind of constitutionally illiterate vandalism that has characterised its 13 disastrous years in office. We already have a completely superfluous Supreme Court, on the American model; now Straw wants to add a Senate. American institutions are first-rate – for Americans. They are totally alien to Britain.

The reason for this persistent constitutional tinkering is that Labour (and now its Vichy Tory clones) thinks that such synthetic constructs are more “modern”. A favourite claim is “No other developed nation has a House of Lords”. That reflects the cultural masochism that leads “progressives” to imagine that every other society is superior to Britain. Most “developed” nations have contrived paper constitutions, cobbled together after the overthrow of their monarchies and other evolved institutions provoked periods of revolution, civil war, totalitarianism, general unrest and instability.

We have the inestimable advantage of an organic, evolved constitution that was traditionally the envy of the world. Yet, because it is enveloped in the trappings of past eras, despite its enduring efficiency and adaptability Labour and Tory modernisers want to smash it. It is a characteristic of modern Lab-Con Britain that everything that is unbroken is gratuitously mended, while the many things that are indeed broken are left unrepaired.

It is also significant that Straw’s plan is expected to include mechanisms for gerrymandering the Senate in favour of the usual suspects – women, “faith groups”, etc – as has already been done in the Commons via all-women and other forms of rigged candidate selection lists. The voter is being deprived of choice and is increasingly an extraneous cipher in the process of engineering an appointed parliament in both chambers.

It is widely assumed that Straw’s plan will not progress: but do not underestimate the potential for the Tory traitors to pick it up and run with it. What could “detoxify” a gang of Etonians more impressively (in their own demented imagination) than abolishing the House of Lords? It typifies the decadence of our times that the only section of the membership in the whole of Parliament that has not been mired in expenses and corruption scandals – the hereditary peers – is the one element that is designated for expulsion.

The implications of all these incoherent attempts to ape less mature and successful constitutional models is ultimately republican. The monarchy is the eventual target of the so-called modernisers. Pomp and pageantry are anathema to them. The grey-suited, serially corrupt apparatchiks of the European Union are their role models – and don’t forget what a plum the office of President would offer to a succession of retiring expenses junkies.

It is not the House of Lords that the public would prefer to abolish, but the House of Commons. The loathsome canaille on the slime-green benches – despite the sycophantic vocabulary of journalists such as “dedicated public servant”, “devoted constituency MP” and suchlike crony-guff – are detested by the electorate. They have banned country sports, driven smokers out of pubs, irresponsibly flooded the country with immigrants, handed us over trussed and gagged to Brussels, harassed the nation with “green” tyranny and political correctness, persecuted Christians and remorselessly robbed every taxpayer in the country.
The public knows, however, that there is no means available to it of abolishing this chamber of horrors. So, cleverly, it has opted to neuter it. An opinion poll recently showed that 34 per cent of voters actively want a hung parliament. That provoked spluttering outrage among the political class. Did these clowns of voters not understand that a hung parliament would destroy confidence in Britain’s ability to fix its economy? How stupid could they get?

The voters are not stupid at all. They know what they are doing: reducing the political class to impotence. And not before time. The transparent lie that the markets will trash Britain because of a hung parliament – when most of the countries whose bonds they purchase are in a state of permanent coalition government – impresses the British public as much as global warming scares. The difficulty about securing a hung parliament is the mechanism for engineering it. The only secure method is to deny votes to the three major parties. It is time to put them – not the peers – out of business.