Bullies don’t deserve high office – so why give peerages to John Bercow and Karie Murphy, both of whom have been accused of as much?

The nomination for peerages of Karie Murphy and John Bercow is a symptom of a system that prioritises nepotism over the health of our democracy, writes Frances Weetman

Speaker John Bercow speaking in the House of Commons in London, 21 October, 2019. (PA)

Democracies are tested in periods of chaos. It isn’t hard to make the case that western liberal democracy is facing a period of unprecedented unrest. In the last week alone, the US has seen impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump thrown out by a Republican-controlled Senate, while the UK’s departure from the European Union has raised many questions about the country’s future. In both cases, the infrastructure of our democracies – their processes, conventions, shortfalls – have become exposed, and tested to their limits.

The last five years have seen the British political landscape shift so dramatically that our parliament is barely recognisable as one that belongs to one of the west’s oldest democracies. Sure, British MPs work in a building that has existed in part since 1097, but the last year of parliamentary chaos has many thinking (rightly or wrongly) our elected representatives are barely distinguishable from a rabble being forced out of a pub after last orders.

It is with this backdrop that our democracy’s shortcomings are laid bare. Conventions and unwritten norms are tested to their limits. And in no arena has this been so grotesquely transparent as in the House of Lords nominations, published in January.