Arise Lord Mandy

During one of our Media Monday sessions this week we discussed the appointment of Peter Mandelson to the Lords

In a previous session we explored Mandy’s toxic history; his centrality to the New Labour project and his subsequent falling out with Gordon Brown.

But today we examined why putting a Secretary of State in charge of such a large department in the Lords was anti-democratic.

One of the fundamental principles of representative democracy is accountability and Mandy won’t have to face questions in the Commons. Since we the people effectively loan our sovereignty to MPs for the duration of parliament it means that the new man in charge of Transport can’t be questioned by our elected representatives in our name.

This also leads onto larger questions about the democratic nature of the Lords in general. This involved a bit of a heads up for the class with regard to the Unit 1 democracy element of the Edexcel course which asks students to consider potential improvements to the system of UK democracy. This means that anything from the Unit 2 element is fair game, so a general awareness about features of the UK constitution is required.

Hence the whole point of the Media Monday sessions, which are aimed at pointing students via their wider reading to the main issues and controversies that we will cover as part of the course.

Read about Mandelson’s elevation to the Lords here

There’s an interesting piece here as well about the gay mafia