Choose Life, My Lords

We either have a fully elected second chamber, or we have one in which you sit for life. No resignations. No expulsions. None of that. Government wants to be able to force peers out so that it can actually do so, really rather often. Their independence would be gone.

And that, of course, was also the reason for removing the hereditary basis of membership. That basis guaranteed independence. Yes, it threw up a few anomalies and the very occasional outrage. But, manifestly, so does that which has replaced it. And so, of course, would anything which replaced that.

It is a barefaced lie that abolishing the House of Lords, or at least the hereditary peerage, has been a Labour aim from the outset and continuously thereafter. If so, then the first Earl Attlee certainly failed to notice. Back when there was a Labour Party, it was too busy addressing poverty, squalor, ill health, ignorance and indolence to bother too much, if at all, with the embittered envy of the arrivistes, who were and are no more friends of those whom they left behind than of those who will never quite let them in. But nothing could be more arriviste than New Labour.

Oh, well, the genie is out of the bottle. The hereditary peers would have done better if they had foregone any party affiliation. On that basis, and strictly unpaid, some sort of Grand Committee of them might still have a limited role such as the right to require, before Royal Assent, a referendum on any Bill already deemed constitutional for procedural purposes, unless that Bill be passed by a two-thirds majority both of the House of Commons and of an elected Senate.

No, it is going to have to be an elected Senate now. Each of the English ceremonial counties, the Scottish lieutenancy areas, the Welsh preserved counties and the Northern Irish counties – a total of 99 units – should elect six Senators, with each of us voting for one candidate and the six highest scorers elected at the end. A further six Crossbenchers should be elected by the same means on a national basis, giving 600 Senators in all. Thus there would be territorial Senators just as there had been territorial (hereditary) peers, and there would be national Senators just as there had been national (life) peers.

Ministers would appear before both Houses to answer questions, as historically. And parties contesting Commons elections would not be permitted to contest Senate elections or vice versa, thus requiring new formations to emerge. Yes, Dorset would have as many Senators as Greater Manchester, Shetland would have as many as Glasgow, or whatever. But that sort of thing is normal for revising chambers, which very largely exist to protect the interests of us rustics and hoi polloi against those who hated rustics enough to abolish hereditary barons, just as they had hated hoi polloi enough to abolish trade union barons.

In place of 26 bishops, let there be 13 elected representatives (strictly non-party, of course) of moral and spiritual values, and the same of the United Kingdom’s Christian heritage, a more than fair arrangement when one considers that the United Kingdom is seventy-two per cent Christian. These would be elected like the six Crossbenchers, with casual vacancies filled by bringing in number 14. Indeed, bringing in number seven would be a perfectly good way of filling casual vacancies in the Senate itself.

Although not Senators, any three from one list, or two from both, would have the right to refer back any Bill before Royal Assent with the requirement that it be passed by a two-thirds majority of each House, and with the right to appear before each House in order to state their case.

But while there is the dear old House of Lords, then seats in it must be for life. Anything else would destroy the whole reason for having the thing. Independence.