Replace it with a “party-based” system - at each general election, each voter votes for one member of the Commons, and then votes for a particular party for the other House; the seats are distributed proportionally (more or less - look up “Alabama Paradox” for one problem) among the parties based on the votes received.
Proposals to abolish the House of Lords entirely are even less popular than proposals to elect it. It’s a non-starter: the Commons alone is simply not trusted to do a good job.
78 (41%) of 189 countries are bicameral; 111 (59%) are unicameral. Almost the entirety of the unicameral lot are smaller than 15 million people, and there tends to be structural pressure for a second chamber in most countries larger than that. So bicameralism tends to be adopted by larger, more populous states, and more common in federations.
I propose that the House of Lords remain entirely unelected but the right to recommend appointments to the Queen be passed to a statutory Appointments Commission which would vet all candidates from longlists set up by the parties and nominated by the public. It would be accountable to both Houses for its work via an annual report.
Oh, and I agree with blindboyard on fixed-term parliaments. One of the worst ideas to come out of this present Coalition government.
Also, this may be of interest to some: the Italian Prime Minister proposes to abolish the elected Senate and replace it with something more akin to the Lords.
Universities held seats (in the Commons) until 1950, so the idea isnt totally foreign.
I would like to point out that there are still 26 Bishops of the Church of England in the House of Lords. So the antidisestablishmentarianists seem to have the upper hand in the Upper House.
Why? The only good reason I can think of for retaining this anachronism is that it provides the opportunity of writing a 29 letter word.
Given that the Lords hold essentially no power anyway, what does it matter how they’re chosen?
So we end up with a patronage system where guilds, clubs, unions, industry organizations, conferences, etc. end up trying to schmooze The Powers That Be ™ in order to get themselves representation in the legislature and get their rivals out. Why do I suspect that deep-pocketed organizations, or organizations backed by deep-pocketed companies or individuals, are going to end up with the upper hand here?
One potential solution coudl be that representation for organizations should be determined strictly based on membership statistics - but then you end up with organizations holding mass membership drives in order to maximize their official membership counts. Let’s sign up the peasants for 4th class country club memberships, because, y’know. Basically Tammany Hall all over again.
If, in the lower house, the one to which the executive is accountable, members are elected in a way which gives more-or-less equal weight to each voter, maybe it’s not necessary for the same to be true of an upper house. (It’s not, after all, true of the US Senate). And if it doesn’t have to be true of the upper house, then there’s no necessary connection between the number of adherents a movement or organisation has, and its representation in the upper house.
You would well argue that the point of an upper house is diversity; to provide a forum for views and perspectives that tend to get eclipsed in a majoritarian lower house. Particularly if the lower house is selected by the US/UK single-member first-past-the-post system, minority views are systematically excluded. Combine this with an electoral system dominated by a small number of political parties, and you have all the ingredients for populist oligarchy. Consequently the point, or one of the points, of an upper house would be to enable views to be represented despite the fact that they don’t have numberous adherents, or that they aren’t organised as political movements.
Now I always was under the impression that you Brits LIKED the House of Lords because it gave stability to the government whereas the house of commons where people are voted in has its ebbs and flows.
That’s certainly one thing I like, that the Lords can routinely defeat and embarrass the government while not endangering its life. It’s called asymmetric bicameralism, and many Commonwealth countries - and other parliamentary states - use this rather than the absolute bicameralism of the US.
This isn’t actually true, the main problem is the American system relies on an ultimate “good faith” on legislative and executive work through compromises when they disagree. When that doesn’t happen, everything breaks down.
While I like a Westminster system and wish we had adopted Hamilton’s plan instead of the compromise plan we did, our system would be fairly fixed if there was a grid-lock busting tool. The simplest, and most reasonable solution given how it has historically been used elsewhere, would simply be giving the President the power to dissolve the legislature when it’s not capable of working with him.
That’s not the only solution but is probably the most workable. I’ve proposed a package of reforms with it in the past, namely neutering the Senate to make it akin to Canada’s Senate and thus not intrinsically important (so you’d only need to dissolve the House of Reps as the Senate would have limited blocking power), increasing House of Rep terms to four years, requiring a House of Rep election to be held anytime the Presidency is up for election and assigning the Presidency for four years to the nominated candidate of whichever party wins a majority of the seats in the House.
Theoretically you could also make a strong legislature and take away Presidential veto, in which case that also solves disagreements between the President/Legislature to some degree. Or water the veto’s power down significantly (make it a delay instead of a negative, or reduce the override threshold.)
The natural cycle of politics in this country is about four years. This foolish idea of fixed-term elections is just spinning out the lifetime of a parliament that has run out of things to do (of course the business of government should be administration, not legislation).
The Unicameral system was the “gift” that Australia gave PNG. And it worked equally corruptly in Queensland.Aus
The obvious answer is that an untrammelled House of Commons, which by its very nature must be controlled by the executive branch or else the government must fall, would give the party in government unlimited power.
Ok what is the problem we are trying to solve here? As an Aussie I really don’t understand what is wrong with the House of Lords besides to principle of non elected people in government.
It’s not just that they’re non-elected; it’s that they’re appointed by the governments of the day, and therefore reflect the priorities and values of the political establishment. Civic society is made up of a lot more organisations, movements and groups that the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats; if there was a diversity of routes into the upper house it might be more diverse, more representative, more creative and a better counterweight to the lower house.
I see your point, UDS, although I think the Lords does a halfway good job of doing those things it has recently become a bit of a packing House for the parties. A more stringent appointments system would be ideal, just as long as nobody tries to elect it again.
I think that a fixed-term parliament has been possibly the best idea. It gave a sense of certainty and stability in a situation that demanded some degree of both.
The markets were rocky in the extreme and a definite 5 year term with a clear commitment to austerity measures were exactly what was needed to calm things.
We can argue about the execution of the policies and their usefulness but the coalition’s commitment to them at least gave certainty where other equally fucked economies thrashed around with political as well as financial issues assailing them.
As for the Lords, I’m inclined to keep it. Judging it on past behaviour we see plenty of examples of it acting out of pragmatism rather than partisan loyalties. Unelected they may be but they tend to act as an effective check and balance to outlandish government behaviours.
I’d tweak it slightly to reduce the number of religious leaders ( we don’t need that many bishops) and extend it further to ensure that more top educators, scientists, engineers etc. are included. The general level of debate regarding matters of scientific interest (and where evidence requires balanced assessment) is poor to say the least. I’d like to raise that standard.
But no election to the house of Lords. The moment you do that you have yet another political, partisan body with all that entails… no thanks.
Of the 779 members of the House of Lords, 26 are bishops - 3%. Altering the number downwards is not going to materially diminish their voting weight, which is already modest.
And in fact their weight is even less than their numbers would suggest. The bishops have fairly time-consuming day jobs, mostly in places other than London, so they are not regular attenders. In fact, they generally organise a rota among themselves, to ensure that there is a bishop attending, speaking and voting on every sitting day. Where more than one bishop participates - and this is quite rare- they sometimes speak and vote on opposite sides.
None of this is to defend the principal of episcopal representation, but if you have it then I think it’s hard to make the case that 26 is too many. If it were much fewer than that, then most of the time there would be no bishop at all available to participate, in which case what is the point of having them there at all?
It’s hard to justify the singling out of the Church of England for this representation, other than as a curious historical anachronism. But in fact if the goal is to diversify the House of Lords and to bring in perspectives and voices normally excluded by the majoritarian electoral system of the House of Commons, then more ex officio members, from a wider range of social, cultural and community organisations would seem to be the way to go, not fewer.