45 Lords a-leaping

You are the PM of a sceptre'd isle. The plebeians are revolting and a few in the faraway North have had the temerity to call for independence.

How do you remind them that whatever they do the Establishment will win? 

You appoint 45 Lords and Ladies who will leap to the Establishment tune.

Osbameron's new Lords are there to remind us all of the natural order of things. The Establishment has wrapped itself in ermine and the SS Great Britain will steam on, bearing slightly to the right, into the Sargasso Sea of neoliberalism. The Lords and Ladies are the compass that will keep the good ship Britain on course while you build your bank or your trading house.

The message from the Lords is that there ain't nothing we, the people, can do. We can protest, we can sing revolutionary songs and we can parade through the streets, but we remain the commoners, the cannon fodder for low wages and in-work poverty. 

This is how politics has been for years; "Aw, politicians, they're a' the same." The politics of distance, of a properly ordered class structure in which those at the top who know would lead those many at the bottom who don't. 

How does that leave the people at the bottom of the pyramid? Frustrated, at least, despairing of any change, certainly, and abandoned. 

(A quick test of abandonment; how often have you spoken to a Lady or a Lord? Or been consulted by one? Or seen one at a public meeting you attended? And yet these same Ladies and Lords are taking decisions on your behalf every day.)

The PM's appointments to the Lords are Westminster politics abandoning the people. Worse, they are a propaganda move. These appointments, at this time of a resurgent democracy across Europe, are designed to put the lid on dissent, to break our spirits; the people and their votes do not matter a jot to the unelected crème de la crème.

But now we live in a different time. With the Referendum in Scotland we woke up and felt a changing wind in our faces. We don't have to carry on in the same rotten carcass of a ship. 

When Scotland is independent we can build a new boat, a hand-crafted Scottish longboat built by the people for the people, and set a new course toward a functioning democracy.