Quote:
Originally Posted by DiegoArmando
There are 93 remaining hereditary peers.
The point I was making was that the remaining HP's are the last ones. Peerages are no longer bequeathed.
I rather liked the idea of having non-partisan, free thinkers scrutinising bills and disrupting the machine. Perhaps I have an idealised, unrealistic vision of barmy, eccentric hereditary peers or sanctimonious, bible-bashing Spirit Lords sticking it to the man.
I still believe a bicameral system is necessary to revise or filter out bad bills. First past the post tends to bring in single party majorities without a true democratic mandate. We don't have a separation of powers in the UK. Parliament is both the legislature and the de-facto executive. The role of the Lord's ought to be to keep the excesses of self-serving single party governments in check. For this to work, the makeup of the Lords needs to be fundamentally different to the Commons. There are multiple ways to achieve this, but turning the Lords into a carbon copy of the Commons by direct elections clearly isn't one of them.
The only way it could work would be to elect the Lords by proportional representation, but obviously no Tory or Labour government will ever allow this. They're too attached to first past the post for obvious reasons.
Last edited by Private_Snowball; 09-30-2014 at 11:23 AM.