 What's the price of a seat in the upper house of the UK Parliament? According to an analysis by the Sunday Times and Open Democracy, there is a precise answer to this question. It's £3 million. How are they able to suggest such an exact figure? Well, the paper found that over the past 20 years, there have been 15 wealthy individuals who've been made peers after becoming Tory party treasurers and donating the party almost exactly £3 million. The 15 ennobled donors include Peter Crudus, he's a billionaire whose peerage was pushed through by Boris Johnson against the recommendation of the Lord's Appointment Committee, so he was very keen to get this guy into the House of Lords. The Sunday Times report that the role of conservative treasurer has become the most ennobled job in Britain, a head of holders of the great offices of state, leaders of the country's institutions and charitable organisations, and even former Prime Ministers. As well as Crudus, they include the city millionaires Lord Spencer, Lord Fraser, Lord Lupton, and Lord Farmer, who were ennobled in the past seven years. The mining mogul Sir Mick Davis turned down the offer of a peerage. Farmer said it had become a tradition for conservative Prime Ministers to hand out a peerage to the holder of the party's top fundraising role. The former Vice-Chairman of the party, Lord Brownlow, was also given a peerage in 2019, shortly after his donations to the party topped the £3 million mark. So as soon as you donate over £3 million, as soon as it gets above that number, that's when you get offered the peerage, and even one of the people who went through this process seems to be admitting it. So Lord Farmer was a Tory treasurer, gave them £3 million, and he said it's a tradition that someone who does that gets a peerage to the House of Lords. This is happening in plain sight. It's clear also from the piece that no one accepts this is a coincidence, as much as the government might like you to believe that, and it is widely understood among Tories that this corrupt practice takes place. One former Tory minister said it was a scandal in plain sight, widely known and accepted in the party. A former party chairman said, the truth is the entire political establishment knows this happens, and they do nothing about it. The most telling line is, once you pay your £3 million, you get your peerage. The party never publicly acknowledges the practice. One former minister says there was a law of a murder forbidding any discussion of the link between donations and seats, so a law of silence as if this was the mafia. On Sunday, Andrew Ma challenged the environment secretary George Eustace on the cash for peerages story. See if you're convinced by his answer. In the past 20 years, all 16 of the Conservative Party's main treasurers, apart from the most recent, have been offered a seat in the House of Lords. Do you understand why many people look at that and say this is a sleazy government? I don't actually. These people will be philanthropists in every case. They're philanthropists who've given £3 million on average each to the Conservative Party. They're not ordinary philanthropists, but they're Conservative Party-supporting philanthropists. Well, they're philanthropists who give huge amounts to charity who would be very successful in business, and therefore on those grounds, ought to be considered for the Lords. And in addition, the fact that they have been engaged with political parties, whether that's Labour or Conservative Party, people like that have an interest in politics. They are philanthropists. They've made a great contribution to public life. And in many cases, they've got a lot of expertise in business that is valuable to the House of Lords. That was George Eustice suggesting it's entirely proper and not at all odd that everyone who gives the Tories exactly £3 million goes on to get a seat in Britain's legislature. Ash, a former Tory minister, called this a scandal in plain sight. Is that a bit of an understatement? Well, it is an understatement, because this is something which has been going on for decades now. We knew this in the Blair years with the Cash for Honours scandal. It was all sorts of sleaze scandals in the 1990s. And still, it seems that not only has nothing changed, the sums of money involved have simply gotten bigger, and the ability to enforce some level of accountability has been weakened because you've got somebody like Boris Johnson who's worked out that an awful lot of our parliamentary system works on simply being a good chum and abiding by the rules in the sense of fair play. And if you simply ignore that, and you see how much you can weather in terms of polling, then you simply won't be subject to the same sanctions, punishments, or rules as anybody else. It's a complete farce. Now, we've had successive governments who could have been able to do something about this. And the reason why they didn't is because it was in their interest to stuff the House of Lords with as many of their big money donors as they could to strengthen the party hand when it comes to scrutinizing legislation and to reward these, I'd called them money pigs, I think, in our show last week because that's exactly what they are. These are people with huge sums of money who want to exert a degree of control over our political life, which far exceeds the average citizen. And they want to be able to do it in a way which makes them part of the establishment. The minute you're a Lord and you wear the ermine, all sorts of other opportunities are opened up for you, financial ones as well. So nobody has taken a step to deal with this when they could because it wouldn't benefit them. And the very simple solution for dealing with this, which is have a fully elected upper house seems to have been abandoned by pretty much everybody in mainstream politics, apart from the Labour Party and the Corbyn, who are the only ones to take that proposition seriously.