Sunday 22 April 2007

The dilemma of the House of Lords

Our illustriuos leader (Blair) wishes to change the House of Lords. His motive appears to be to make them more compliant in that they have this annoying habit of disagreeing with the House of Commons.... and thank God that they do! Our current breed of politicians are too dominated by people from the legal profession. They lack the ability to develop practical solutions to anything. Just look at the orchestrated chaos in the health service, IT projects that waste vast sums of money, the mess of our transport system - we need practical people in government.

The dilemma for us is that the House of Lords is at its best, not when it opposes for the sake of opposition but when it seeks to amend and modify for the sake of making proposals workable, fair and practical, even when the House of Commons gets upset by that. It is at its best when it has the authority to make the House of Commons think again.

Nobody in the country - anywhere - ever votes in favour of the whole manifesto of the winning party. The concept that the House of Lords should not be able to oppose the more stupid ideas from the manifesto is untennable.

Thus any replacement House of Lords will work best if the main political parties are effectively excluded. It will be at its worst if it becomes just another elected House with the same political parties vying for our votes.

We have a population of around 60 milion people. Only 3 million of them actually belong to any political party. It may be surprisingly possible to make it a requirement for the House of Lords that those who are considered do not, and have never, belonged to any political party.

I wonder what effect that would have?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'd vote for you :)