It is often forgotten (but not by this diary) that the House of Lords comes in two parts: the Lords Temporal and the Lords Spiritual. Now that Labour ministers have got round to doing something about the Lords Temporal, could they please cast an eye over the Lords Spiritual? Lurking there is yet another offence to democratic decency: the 26 senior Anglican clergymen who sit in the House of Lords as of right. This is a right that is not shared by any of Britain's other church- folk, including the "established" Church of Scotland.
God's party in the Lords is an all-English affair. It is led by the archbishops of Canterbury and York, who are followed by the bishops of London, Durham and Winchester, plus 21 other "senior diocesan bishops of the Church of England". Nobody elected them, no government minister appointed them, but there they are, entrenched on the red benches, and with the right to sound off about the country's morals while topping up their stipends with House of Lords expenses (£34.50 day subsistence, £78 if they have to do an overnight).
Now this diary has no particular animus against Anglican bishops. They seem decent enough coves. But it does seem a bit rich that they, and only they, have the constitutional right to sit in the legislature. Presbyterians, Jews, Methodists, Baptists, Muslims and all the rest can (and occasionally do) make it on to the red benches by dint of good works and/or ecclesiastical renown. But only the Church of England's top chaps can moonlight as parliamentarians. Which is unfair and should be put right.
In his campaign to keep the NatWest bank out of the clutches of the grasping Caledonians (ie, the Bank of Scotland) that rescuer of Lloyd's of London and example of City probity Sir David Rowland has taken to rubbishing the Men on the Mound. He was particularly rude about their record on acquisitions in New Zealand, Australia and the USA, which he called "pretty miserable", and warned that if they ever got their mitts on NatWest they would slash and burn with William Wallace-like enthusiasm.
"Talk about the pot calling the kettle black," was the opinion of one Edinburgh financier. "Rowland is already boasting about how many branches NatWest have closed down, how they have centralised most of their financial boiler-plate and how he's now going to axe another 1,650 jobs at the NatWest HQ. He's also promising to sell off five billion quid's worth of subsidiaries. But it makes a nice change to see southerners desperately trying to erect a London ring-fence round one of their institutions."
