Brian Reade: High time we gave Lords their cards.

Byline: Brian Reade

WILL The Queen have to carry one of these ID cards that are going to turn us into a modern, accountable nation fit for the 21st century?

Or if she's stopped by coppers will she simply flash a pounds 50 note and point at her picture? Then be arrested for attempted bribery and go to court for a case called Regina V Regina?

Tricky isn't it? Countries that have had revolutions tend to know their true identity. Take America (motto: we rule, you obey) or France (you work, we sleep).

But this ID lark is difficult for us Brits, who still see ourselves as feudal serfs lucky to be thrown the occasional crust by our divine rulers.

Take the scene in the House of Lords on Tuesday when we were told how the government we'd just elected would rule our lives, ID cards and all, for the next five years.

A man in tights banged his Black Rod against the door and entered with characters called the Fitzalan Pursuivant Extraordinary and the Rouge Dragon Pursuivant to see lords in ermine and their ladies in diamond-encrusted tiaras and evening gowns next to barons and baronesses.

All waiting for a queen and her prince to arrive in a golden carriage attended by ladies-in-waiting and page boys, to sit on a throne and read a speech off a pillow containing phrases like "streamlining regulatory structures" which she didn't write, comprehend or believe in.

In front of her sat hundreds of ermine-clad pensioners, desperate to stay awake until lunch so they could claim their allowance.

Plus a shower of slightly younger cronies fixing their party leaders with oily smiles of servitude.

As for the MPs you elected, they stood cramped at the back, greeted with "shushes" from the peers' wives if they spoke while the Queen cleared her throat. As if the common scum didn't deserve to be in on the opening of their parliament.

For people with brains it was a painful, trashy and gut-wrenching embarrassment. Exactly how a Beckham wedding would have looked in the middle ages.

So what's going on here? Have we really voted in Labour three times only to see a still-unreformed House of Lords with the same power to flout democracy at will?

The future Lord Sedgefield promised a radical overhaul of this unelected obscenity, yet he has just created another 17 life peers, making his party the biggest in the Lords for the first time.

The message being it's OK to have an antiquated, immoral Upper House as long as it's our antiquated, immoral Upper House.

There's still 92 hereditary peers. Men allowed to block laws because somewhere in their families' past a monarch rewarded them with land and titles for keeping the people down.

There's still no time limit on their deliberations on bills, so they can endlessly delay measures approved by the Commons.

There's still no law on convicted criminals being stripped of their peerages, so we still have to refer to felons like Jeffrey Archer as our noble Lord.

If we have an identity problem in Britain it's that we're stuck in the 15th century.

And it won't take a card with our pictures on to sort that out, but a sweep of the House of Lords, their barons and their Pursuivant Extraordinaries.

Into the dustbin of history.