Remind me why we do this again?

Moving from cinematic explosions at Westminister to political ones, I read in yesterday's Globe that Tony Blair is enmeshed in a scandal about appointing people to the House of Lords in return for secret loans to the Labour Party. Now, apparently, one of the sugar daddies in question is resigning from his post at the head of an outsourcing firm.

I have never liked Tony Blair. I will grant that he is an eloquent speaker for the causes he espouses, that some of the reforms he's implemented in Britain's public services are worth a look as we here in Canada try to figure out how to reform our own, and that, for whatever it's worth, he seems to be a sincere believer in most of what he's set out to achieve in public life.

The trouble is that his signature achievements have been a wrenching of the Labour Party to the right, a move that in my opinion was far more dramatic than necessary to defeat the hapless Major Conservatives, a contempt for civil liberties and an enthusiastic endorsement of the most boneheaded foreign policy idiocies of the Bush administration. As I say, I don't doubt that Blair is sincere in believing that all of these things were good and necessary for Britain. I am sure, however, that at least on Iraq, the most vitally important of the three, that he was completely and catastrophically wrong. So if he goes over this scandal, along with the Labour Party's disappointing results in the last election, I won't be sorry.

The other thing that strikes me about the scandal is that it highlights exactly how ridiculous and anachronistic the House of Lords is. The House of Lords is an institution that takes everything I dislike about the Canadian Senate-patronage, clubbiness, the absurdity of an unelected legislative body and so forth-and adds an added dash of class snobbery on top of it to boot. It is possibly the British institution with the least good to be said about it. With that in mind, I can't say that I'm sorry to see its prestige, such as it is, take a hit along with Mr. Blair's.