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Originally Posted by furball
The Queen, as recommended to her by the Prime Minister. Blair's been in office for nearly 10 years, go check out how many people he's made peers. It's a lot.
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I'm not overly bothered by the Lords / Commons issue, but the above could be argued to be a blow to the independence of the Lords. Sure, the time lag involved means the makeup of the Lords will often be very different from the Commons - ideologically speaking - (which means they might help provide balance between
parties) but they don't necessarily provide a balance between people and the government generally. Most of the people in the Lords are (or were) someone who was once seen in a positive light by powerful politicans. I'm not sure if that's a good character reference.*
I suppose if you think that the parties in this country do a pretty good job at representing the country overall then this is less of a concern.
* = The same criticism could be made of the US Supreme Court of course. Although it does seem you can pretty much make someone a peer for being the PM's mate, which I presume would be frowned upon with the Supreme Court. Because there's so few SC justices I suppose people take the whole thing a bit more seriously.