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.

A better voting system

There has been much discussion of voting systems in the past and given the current state of the parties there will be a lot more after the general election. So here is a simplistic proposal.

In each constituency the will be an alternative vote, that is each elector lists the candidates in order and the votes get transferred until one candidate has a majority. This will elect the lower house. The upper house will be chosen by proportional representation based on the first votes of each elector.

To avoid to many small parties there would be a limit that for a party to count towards the upper house they would need at least 10% of the national vote.

To ensure that the constituency MP's were genuinely representative they would need to have been resident in the constituency for at least 5 continuous years before the election. Residency for a year would mean having spent at least 250 nights in the years in the constituency. An almost simple rule but it would stop rich carpetbaggers just buying a house in an area and never living there. It would also mean tha the lower house would have to organise its affairs much more efficiently, it could only meet for 115 days a year! Given that many MP's seem to think it is only a part-time job what would be the problem with that. I am sure some would resent that argument that it is aprt-time but if an MP can be a minister as well as an MP, both jobs must be part-time.

Also ministers would have to come from the upper house or work from home. Wouldn't that set a good example.