Woke up, fell out of bed, was surprised to see this. Well done, Britain.
But why wait on going right to elections for all members? Seems long past due. The life peers, appointed by government, doesn't seem like a good system either. Speaking as a Yank, we've had our version of life peers, US senators who hold their seats for decades and too often end up as impediments to fresh problem solving, coasting along on past momentum and risk-averse donors who keep bankrolling their reelections. Not always a bad thing, but quite often they pretty much give up their enthusiasm for public service or handling societal change.
It is my firm view that electing the House of Lords would be a major mistake.
One needs to understand the role of the House of Lords. It is a revising chamber and cannot make law. All it can do is comment on proposed legislation and propose changes. It can reject proposed legislation twice but if a bill is presented for the 3rd time, indicating the determination of the House of Commons to pass it into law, the Lords have to let it pass.
The great advantage of having a revising chamber populated by appointment is that it has, at least until relatively recently, been filled with various eminent peple from different walks of life who have something the Commons largely lacks, namely experience and expertise. One has retired military people, industrialists, trade unionists, social workers, medics, academics, lawyers, scientists, artists, religious leaders.... These people are very often able to scrutinise politically charged or badly drafted bills in a very valuable way. I used to listen to the Lords debates on the radio and I can tell you they were for the most part models of careful intelligent discussion, focused on the issues. This is quite unlike the Commons, in which debates are often a bear pit dominated by grandstanding, posturing and pressure to toe the party line. Why is that? It is because MPs are
elected. As such they are as much marketing themselves to their electors and party supporters as they are trying to make good law. The Lords very often makes valuable amendments and by returning bills to the Commons for further scrutiny they often stop lousy or unworkable ideas making it through the system. That's because they
don't need to have an eye on the next election all the time. A bit like (British) judges.
If the Upper House were elected, we would instantly import all the posturing, grandstanding and pressure to toe the line that we have in the Commons. The Upper House would become a useless duplicate of the Commons. Furthermore if elected, it would demand some sort of parity in decision-making with the Commons, on the basis that members had just as much an electoral mandate as MPs in the Commons. No one serious would go through the hassle of competing in elections if all they did was revise legislation drawn up elsewhere. What would be their electoral platform? To promise to revise laws with what in mind?
What we need instead is to stamp out the perversion of the process of appointing to the Lords, which has got worse over recent decades, culminating in Bozo's joke appointments which seem designed to make fun of the whole system and thereby destroy its credibility. I think appointments to the Lords should be put in the hands of an independent appointments committee and no longer be in the gift of the Prime Minister. One can always moan about
quis custodiet ipsos custodes, but it would be far better than the present system.
Elections to the Lords is most definitely a terrible idea.
