Ed Milliband (he’s the outgoing leader of the Labour party) has put forward proposals that the House of Lords be replaced by a kind of a directly elected Senate.
Radical.
But, I keep thinking that I actually like the idea.
There is something very wrong with the current ‘House of Lords’ concept. Maybe less so its purpose, but definitely the people infesting it.
Apart from it being a magnet for all the millionaire socialists and Christian god botherers who want to fiddle with our country and its laws. Well, what laws the EU allows us to have, of course. Apart from it containing all of them, it doesn’t necessarily have people within it that we need. Mainly, it doesn’t have people within it that we voted to be there. We, the people, have no control over it.
Instead, the House of Lords contains a reminder of the age when we were mere subjects ruled over by people who used the fruits of our labours to keep us as slaves and them as our ‘owners’.
We really don’t need it to be like that anymore.
But I’m also not convinced that what we need is the American ‘Senate’ model. Yes, they need to be elected and, more importantly, we need to be able to remove them when they go rogue, and definitely they shouldn’t be there just because daddy was there before or because they are part of a god-bothering organisation, but do they need to be as overtly political or politicised as they are in America?
We have a pretty good and functional Governmental system in this country, despite it being frustrating and a bit lumbering. Heck, compare it to so many parts of the world and how other countries are ‘ruled’. Reforming the House of Lords is essential, but we have to do it right.
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