House of Lords Reform

  It is clearly essential, whilst the existing lot try to do a good job and occasionally manage to tweak Tory legislation they fail in their main task of controlling the lower house. What are the main objections to the proposed current legislation. If it were elected it would want more powerl, why is that an objection? Only to the arrogance and importance of MP's. They have not shown themselves very useful. If one looks at this current Parliament we have the disastrous policies on the Health Service, that was certainly not in the manifesto of either the Tory nor the Lib-Dems but both Houses let it through. I know the House of Lords did some tweaks and those members of the House who got them through worked very hard but basically it is a Tory plot to dismantle the health service over a long period of time and the Lords caved in. My view is that we need another chamber which has teeth.

  Some argue that this would lead to deadlock and say look at what happens in the States but that is not a bipartite system but a tripartite system which increases the odds of a mess, especially when their is confusion between the head of State and the political leader. In many ways I see the reform not just to the house of Lords but also to the House of Commons.

 As a supporter of electoral reform the idea of some sort of proportional representation to be good. A lot depends on how the system works, as long as one has a choice of who one votes for and not just a party then it can lead to interesting people getting elected. There is also an argument that you will not get experts elected, surely that is up to the political parties to ask people who are distinguished in their field to stand. If the argument is that they would not be willing to stand for election then I would not want them to represent me. Prima donnas are not going to be very effective in such a chamber.

  An argument being used in a time of economic crisis seems to be that parliament should be doing something more important. I wonder what these more important things are? Passing more legislation, slagging of their opponents, ruining the education system, condemning people to poor housing. Having opted for austerity there is nothing the House of Commons can do to revitalise the British economy,  Much better that they argue about House of Lords reform than many other more silly legislation. The self importance of members of parliament would be sad if the consequences were not so serious.

  So let them get on with the reform of the Hosue of Lords and do it properly and please do not end up with the silly system that Tony Blair imposed on European election which was all about the power of the party machines.