Britain’s parliament is too enormous. But the retort is not to chop the number of MPs as David Cameron intends. Plans for a further 40 appointed peers in the summer must be stoppedSpeculation that Downing Street plans to make up to 40 fresh life peers in July after the EU referendum,most of them Conservatives, should be taken seriously. David Cameron has the means (the prime ministerial patronage system), or the motive (stopping the government defeats in the Lords),and the opportunity (he may not be prime minister by summer 2017) to do this. He also has past form on stuffing the Lords. All this makes the stories this week depressingly credible. The move should be stopped in its tracks by the body that has the power and responsibility to do so: the House of Commons.
The case against more peerages could start and discontinuance with the argument that it is morally wrong for the head of government to appoint the legislature. But there is more to thing to. Mr Cameron has become a serial stuffer. He has sent 244 people to the Lords as prime minister and 56 since May 2015 alone. Another tranche will put him on course to be the most generous dispenser of peerages of our era, well above Tony Blair, and who had the genuine excuse that in 1997 the Lords was heavily stacked against Labour. It is true that Mr Cameron has no majority in the Lords,even though the Tories are the largest single party, but this is partly because of the 178 cross-benchers who make any read-across between the Commons and the Lords tendentious.
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Source: theguardian.com