Have 300 lords with 1/3 elected every four years.

Also set a time-limit of say, 12 years, until people who have served in the Commons can subsequently run for office in the Lords.

Combine this with an upper age limit of 35 for lords and you have a chamber that consists of older (and hence more experienced) non-career politicians that are not required to respond to every tabloid-editor’s whim or whip’s demand and can use their own moral and intellectual judgement on whether to accept or reject legislation.

Also you need to have separation of the legislature and executive, have independence of tenure of the legislature (i.e. elections every four years), and use the STV PR system to select MPs in the Commons.

And I still want my pony.

The parties can then use it effectively for nominees since their top of the list is bound to get elected – but risk too many placemen and the list won’t get the votes.

Bishops and hereditary peers could put up lists to see who REALLY wants them when it comes to the cold hard cross on a ballot paper. Ditto businessmen etc.

It would give a space for the smaller parties who get squeezed out by STV. Elect a hundred by pure list PR every 5 years, with each having a 15 year term. That gives the long-term independence. 1% quota to get in. So, yes, the BNP etc would get a few seats. This is democracy – if people vote for them so they should.

I wouldn’t want the First Chamber elected on this basis, and a Second chamber elected like this ought to be weakish in terms of final power – I’d say not much more than the current Lords.

Essentially I’m proposing what would probably turn out to be pretty similar to the Lords in terms of membership. But entirely democratically elected.

Seriously, it’s easy to think up better systems. How to get them is the Hard Problem. The major problem is that most better systems are directly oppositional to the various vested interests of the state. It’s hard to get politicians to vote themselves less power, and there is a mass of special interest lobbies pushing for a more activist state, be they progressive lobby groups or business groups or whatever.

I’m just not much excited or convinced by the idea that rearrangements of the current system will achieve much practical change down here at street level. I literally dread looking at the news sites every day for fear of what latest wheeze our rulers have come up with to impose upon us, and really have just reached the stage of wanting some way to stop them. I can only think of one good law brought in by Labour, which was the equalising of the age of consent for gays, and that was just correcting a previous wrongness done by our rulers anyway, and even that wasn’t done in the spirit of liberty, it was pandering to a special interest group.

So the only “ideas” I have are to argue and try to persuade people, which isn’t much use I admit. I just wish I could walk into parliament and say “Stop. Whatever you’re doing right now, stop it. Go home. Fuck off. You’re fired”.

I am unasbashedly a social liberal- and my “libertarianism” is more interested in social liberalism than the economic (I see economic liberalism as a necessary requirement for more general liberty). I am, and always have been, most interested in such issues as censorship, sexual behaviour laws, consumptive laws, freedom from harrassment by the state when one goes about one’s private business and so on. I have thus been endlessly frustrated throughout my life by the obvious fact that our rulers are always intensely social conservative, and interested in why that is the case.

My own experience is that ordinary people tend to be far more socially liberal than our rulers. The problem is that there is the public morality, and the private morality. Politicians are obligated to follow the public morality, which is profoundly conservative and has been since the victorian era. No dickering around with the arrangements of parliament is going to change that.

There is a reason that our elections are secret ballots, and why secret ballots are generally preferred. They allow people to vote as they really believe, rather than being subject to peer pressure. When one’s opinions are in the public domain, one is under enormous pressure to follow hegemonic values. Very few politicians would, for instance, dare to say that drunkenness is a good thing, even if privately they love to sink a dozen pints on a friday night. So parliamentary systems are driven to implement this public morality, e.g. with anti-drinking legislation. The millions of people who like a beer just can’t get a voice in parliament because of this public nature of it. Likewise no politician woud dare to say he rather likes porn movies and loves to sit down with Bra Busters 3 and a box of Kleenex, though again this is a popular behaviour of millions of ordinary citizens.

It doesn’t represent the will of anybody. It doesn’t work. If we are to be free to go about our lives as we wish, then we need to be far more radical than changing chambers around a bit.

No I wouldn’t, I would however say it points to the absolute neccessity of a written constitution to accompany these measures; to sweep away the royal perogrative too which is the chief source of over-mighty executive power in this country vis a vie how the executive dominates Parliament.

Ian B,

Yes but at some point it needs to be determined what day the refuse is collected on to make the system run smoothly so the two are intertwined, unless of course you want people to leave rubbish in the streets when they feel like it and the resultant public health hazard of rubbish rotting in the streets. I think I am in agreement with your main thrust but that merely means that the government should try the how, what, where and when it legislates not that it should lose legislative function totally. To say it should is throwing the bathwater out with the baby somewhat…

I think the potential for it to function is already borne out in the UK via the devolved administrations which have minority executives and assemblies without an overall majority. Yes, the potential for gridlock exists and may even come about on occasions, but I’ve yet to see any evidence that it invariably results in the business of government grinding to a halt.

Ian B, I agree with your point in the main, but that is why I would only support an Upper House in some proportional form, either via a different voting system or sortition, to give a more representative upper house able to offer a check on the lower house.