REGARDLESS of the size and direction of the swing in tomorrow's General Election, two dozen MPs from the last Parliament will take seats in the new one. And they will have gained them without any of the distasteful antics required in the month-long thrash around the hustings.

The fortunate few include Giles Radice, Labour MP for Durham constituencies centred on Chester-le-Street since 1973, and his South Shields colleague David Clark, briefly a Labour cabinet minister as the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

The Conservative side of the group includes Peter Brooke, a former Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Norman Fowler, a relic of the Thatcher cabinet, and John MacGregor, a one-time Transport Minister. Sir Paddy Ashdown, the former Lib-Dem leader, heads a six strong Lib-Dem contingent, while Ken Maginnis slips in with another Ulster Unionist colleague.

Transferred from the Commons to the Lords, all these form the latest batch of life peers. Long service as an MP, which is the only common factor in the group, virtually guarantees a continuing place in Parliament - a voice and a vote in decisions that affect all our lives.

Thatcher, Callaghan, Healey, Hattersley, Howe - they're all still there, old timers still with a hand on the political tiller, even if they can't always shove it their way. Betty Boothroyd had barely quit her Speaker's chair in the Commons before she re-appeared in the Lords. Mo Mowlam could have been about to join her but she has let it be known that she has turned down the offer of a life peerage "for the time being".

Do you not find it offensive to have unelected people placed over us, influencing and sometimes directing the nation's affairs? I certainly do.

Once, no doubt, serfs accepted rule by hereditary peers as the natural order of things. But a House of Lords peopled only by hereditary peers long ago hit the buffers of public acceptabilty. More recently, any birthright place in Parliament has been seen as an anachronism. Hence New Labour's proper attempt, ludicrously botched, to remove the hereditary peers. Their surviving rump is utterly preposterous.

But life peers, especially those from the Commons, are scarcely more defensible. These ex-MPs have chosen no longer to face the electorate. Why should they afterwards be any closer to government, to decision making, than you or me? They've had their go, their chance to create the paradise for which we all yearn. If they have now tired of the task, to the point of not wanting public endorsement, they should leave the Parliamentary stage to others.

But what about a second chamber? Do we need one? With the present lap-dog House of Commons, yes. But perhaps we should concentrate on making this premier forum more effective. The bottom line is that the nation should be governed only by those that we, the people, choose for that task. The biggest mystery is how socialists in particular, champions of the people, can accept the plainly-privileged position of a life peer, which has no basis in democracy.

'EDUCATION, education education.'' Once again that's been a General Election battle-cry. But on past evidence - the 56 years of universal secondary education - its products will end up watching the equivalent of Big Brother.

MO MOWLAM and her political staff had to be innoculated after one of her team feared, wrongly as it turned out, that she had contracted TB on holiday in Colombia. Bearing in mind the continuing foot-and-mouth slaughter, shouldn't Mo and her entire team have been culled?

Published: 06/06/2001