 When it comes to the scandal of cash for peerages, Labour should have a good story to tell. In the 2019 manifesto, the party pledged to abolish the House of Lords and the commitment was retained in Keir Starmer's ten pledges when he stood to be party leader. Part of pledge eight on the devolution of power was the promise to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected chamber of regions and nations. A good policy, a great time to be shouting about it would be now when everyone is talking about the Tories handing out peerages in exchange for money. The pledge came up on the Andrew Marsh show. Let's see how Sakir responds. You have said in the past that you want the abolition of the House of Lords. You want to replace it. Everyone says that in opposition. Nothing ever happens. After what we've been we've been hearing about today is the abolition of the House of Lords now an urgent matter for the Labour Party and it will be big in your manifesto at the next election. We certainly need change in the House of Lords. That's not the same. Do you want to abolish it? What I've done Andrew is I've set up a commission to look at the future of the UK, including the institution such as the House of Lords. Gordon Brown is leading that. In your famous ten pledges you said you were going to abolish the House of Lords. Are you not now going to abolish the House of Lords? I've said we need to change the House of Lords. I stand by that. I've asked Gordon Brown to look into exactly what those changes should be and we'll look at them. But you can't, waking up this morning to see the Sunday Times report of I think 15 of the last 16 mega donors and treasurers of the Conservative Party all trooping in as peers to the laws. Nobody can make the case that we don't need to change. The answer there was a bit garbled as we've become used to with Sikir. What's clear though is that the Labour leader still has no understanding of the meaning of pledge. If you pledge to abolish the House of Lords that doesn't mean you set up a commission which may or may not recommend the abolition of the House of Lords. If that was your plan, your pledge should have been to set up a commission to explore the option, not to say you're going to do it. He should not have made that pledge if he was then just going to trash it. It feels almost like Groundhog Day because we have this conversation so often because Kirsten Armour is just constantly breaking each one of his pledges. Do you think he sees this as a millstone around his neck, those 10 pledges, or do you think he just doesn't mind if he's perceived as a liar? I can't tell if this is Kirsten Armour thinking he's being an expert political maneuverer, if this is the voice of the Labour right who has taken over his office and the senior advisory positions around him, or if he's just a moron. I don't know. Personally, I think that this is an open goal. Everyone hates it when as a politician you're asked a simple yes or no question and you fail to answer yes or no. Andrew Mark would have said, do you want to abolish the House of Lords in Kirsten Armour? What could go yes? Next question. Andy, hit me. That'd be something I think really refreshing about that. Instead, he takes us all around the houses about all the ways in which he's not going to fulfill one of the key promises he made when he was going for the job of Labour leader and squanders this opportunity. One of the things that I will say, like I said last week, is that there is a strong anti-political sensibility within this country. That's why I think Boris Johnson was forced to react to the Owen Patterson outcry. I think that's also why the Conservative Party basically airlifted him out of the debate chamber when they could, shoved him in a hospital by an MRI machine so that he looks like Mr. Nice Boris splashing money towards the NHS and stick poor Stephen Barkley or George Eustace up to front the really difficult questions. Whereas Kirsten Armour can't tap into that. Even when he's offered a clear run at the goal, which is there is a cash for honest scandal, do you want to just abolish that system and have an elected up house? He could have just gone, well, yes, obviously. That's the simplest solution to all of this. Actually, I think maybe he'd alienate one or two, I don't know, enthusiasts out there, but I think most of the country could get behind that. And like I said, I don't know whether it's malevolence or idiocy, which keeps him from seeing that as a viable political strategy. Let's go to a tweet. Someone who has outflanked Kirsten Armour from the left, a surprising source. It is Andrew Neil, founding chair of GB News, who fled once it became incredibly unsuccessful. He tweeted, two propositions for your consideration. Can we not just abolish the lords, not reform it, abolish it? Why should anyone in the 21st century Britain be called Lord if the heredities want to keep it as a title among themselves? Fine. For the rest of us, why not play Mr. Or Ms. So Ash, we've got that Andrew Neil to the left of Kirsten Armour. Or you could say, is this not a left right issue? Is this something where we can unite the left and the right? We sort of get the left-wing populace and the right-wing populace, and it's sort of a kind of Brexit-type thing where Labour could make some gains in unusual quarters? Well, maybe, because look, one of the arguments for Brexit was why should British laws be made by anyone other than elected British representatives? Now, there was a flaw in that argument, which is we obviously sent elected members of the European Parliament off to Brussels, but that seemingly wasn't good enough. And yet, we have a completely unelected upper house, which is stuffed to the gills with cronies and party donors and a dwindling set of hereditary peers who are really just some chindless wonders with an ancestor who was good at sucking up to a monarch back in the day. And that's what we call the upper house. Now, I'm not saying that having an elected upper house is the be-all and end-all. When it comes to dealing with the corrupting influence of money and politics, you only have to look at the American Senate to see that that's not true. But it is the first step. It is the first step towards saying, these are people who should be democratically accountable to us. They should be chosen by us because you know why they are making and scrutinizing our laws. They're obviously not proposing legislation in the same way as the Commons, but they do have a role in shaping it and scrutinizing it, in delaying it or passing it.