Godfrey Bloom: Forget the envy and ignorance, and restore our old-style House of Lords

We now have the most extraordinary situation where Westminster's amending chamber with the vital role it should, and historically has performed, is in a permanent state of semi-suspension. The past predominance of hereditary peers was somehow presented to a gullible nation as being "undemocratic", whatever that may mean in the present "post democratic" era.

Arguably our second chamber, and indeed constitutional monarchy, met the classic analogy with the bumble bee which aerodynamically cannot fly but does.

It did actually work and with good reason.

A system of government which has evolved over nearly 800 years, and survived countless wars, including a vicious civil war, should not be lightly tossed aside. It has stood the test of time.

Reform of the House of Lords was a legitimate manifesto pledge, but, as so often with the Blair years, there was the usual iconoclastic fervour but simply no constructive reform.

There was all the appearance of class envy, sack the hereditary peers almost regardless of expertise and then grind to a complete halt.

We now have a vacuum where our second chamber once was, and eve of election talk – yet again – of the Government reforming the Lords. The standard of life peer has slumped to an all time low. Spivs and nonentities flourish, yet some of the most important legislation has passed through Westminster, whipped through with almost no serious examination by either House.

Whatever one thinks about climate change, the Lisbon Treaty and the credit crisis, the standard of debate has been pitiful – not helped by the almost total abrogation of responsibility by public service broadcasting.

I cannot remember a single in-depth, balanced programme on any of these subjects on prime-time BBC. To inform and entertain, so the BBC charter reads. Precious little information in the last few years.

Never has a second chamber been so vital to the nation, never has it been so weak.

Elected politicians, by the very nature of the system, produce a short-term culture. Most politicians have only one goal which is to be re-elected at the next election. There is nothing wrong with this, it is the nature of a democratic system.

A permanent amending chamber was a necessary rein on the excesses of the Commons and ill-constructed legislation by governments of which these days there is all too much.

Hereditary peers were, and are, a group outside the ephemeral nature of party politics, less in awe of whips and prepared to stand on principle.

An inherited position gives them a very much higher sense of stewardship of the nation's well being. They cannot be bribed with quangoes, gongs or money. No surprise the recent expense scandals did not involve hereditary peers.

They also made available depth of knowledge in scores of disciplines of immense value to an amending chamber where knowledge of the real world in the executive today is frighteningly absent.

Look at those now elevated to the peerage. Cronyism,

"buggins turn", political party allocations. It seems to me good men were taken away to be replaced with tired, lack lustre, political journeymen of the

worst kind.

It is a matter of regret that some members of the aristocracy have succumbed to the extent of considering giving up their titles. The previous Duke of Devonshire, whom I had the pleasure of knowing, was clearly socially more robust than his successor.

I work closely in Europe with the Earl of Dartmouth, a welcome addition to my group since July. It would seem David Willoughby de Broke, our most senior of aristocrats, is one of the few members of the Lords

to ask a really serious pertinent question of the establishment

at all.

I hunt with the Brocklesby, often on the Earl of Yarborough's estates in North Lincolnshire. He is usually out, mounted, giving continuity to a scene beloved the world over of England at its stable best. A sportsman and gentlemen, I can hear a certain type sneering already, an example to all. Where are the examples in today's Lords?

Sir Thomas Ingilby gave an excellent historical perspective in the Yorkshire Post letters column only a little while ago. Let us swap real-politik for the politics of envy and ignorance and re-establish the old Lords until we invent something better, a system that gave us Wellington, Churchill and Shaftesbury all of noble birth.

Away with the new "'aristocracy". Commissioners in Brussels, unelected, unsackable, on big, untaxed salaries, making 75 per cent of our laws in secret. Their grip on power is greater than our old aristocracy ever held, enforced by a quangocracy costing the nation 60bn per year.

Yet those who condemn the hereditary peers are remarkably silent on the new courts of privilege here, and across the water.

Godfrey Bloom is a United Kingdom Independence Party MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber.