House of Lords: Why have a House of Lords without a single Lord in it?
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The issue of reform of the House of Lords is back at the top of the political agenda. Clegg’s proposal that the Lord’s be replaced by an ‘elected Senate’ of 300 ‘full time parliamentarians’ has met with criticism from a number of quarters. A joint committee of MPs and peers examining the government’s plans has concluded that the Lords should have around 450 members. They argue the Lords cannot work effectively with just 300 members to do the work of scrutinising legislation. The Libdem lord Tyler said:
Simply cutting it back to 300 and assuming that everybody’s got to be a full time parliamentarian, would make us too much like the House of Commons. ”
In today’s Telegraph Charles Moore has an excellent article Why have a House of Lords if there’s not a single lord left in it?. He asserts:“The last thing we need is a second chamber filled with yet more professional politicos.” The article begins:
Dr Johnson said that “most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things”, and that was 250 years before Nick Clegg tried to reform the British constitution. Last year, Mr Clegg failed to persuade the British people, in a referendum, that the Alternative Vote system was the answer to their political ills. This year, he hopes to persuade both Houses of Parliament to invent a new House of Lords. He thinks the present House is “an affront to the principles of openness which underpin a modern democracy”.
Other recent articles on the issue have been [none of them seemingly in favour of reform]:
BBC - Plans to cut Lords to 300 rejected
Independent: Peers and MPs reject Clegg’s plans to cut size of the Lords by a half
Daily Mail: Don’t make the Lords in your image, Mr Clegg
Spectator: The scale of Clegg’s Lords challenge
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