Yesterday, the Prime Minister announced yet more appointments to the Lords. The Liberal Democrat peers were appointed on the pledge ‘to abolish themselves’.
The Lords has two functions. To revise and to hold the Executive to account. The first it does quite well, the second it does not at all – how can it when it is a creature of the Executive; when it is deliberately overloaded with new Peers to give the Government of the day a hand me down majority whose job is not to challenge them, but to push through what they want.
The Lords is wholly undemocratic and will never have the legitimacy it needs for a healthy democracy until this is changed .
Every party in their manifestos hints at reform or abolition of the second chamber, but the Liberal Democrats are the only party committed to it. So today we recommit our party – and its new Peers – to working actively for the reform of the House of Lords and ideally its abolition in favour of an elected second chamber. We urge the other parties to join us in this effort.
There is a simple reason for this and it is called democracy; the people’s laws should only be made by those whom the people have elected. They should not be made by cronies appointed by the Prime Minister.
We Lib Dems wanted reform in the last parliament. But, in the Lords, Tory backwoodsmen helped by labour deadbeats scuppered it. The argument was that there was no public call for reform then. Well there is now!
Now is the time to try again.This time, we call on them to join us and make our second chamber fit for purpose as part of a modern democratic system, not a medieval relic from a bygone age. The Liberal Democrats stand ready to work with anyone, in any party, to create a wholly, or at the very least, mainly elected second chamber. Our new Peers in the Lords will add weight to our voice and our ability to make this happen.
The Lords was already the largest legislative assembly in the world outside of China and costs taxpayers around £100million a year to run – even before yesterday’s announcement. There are 56 two-chamber Parliaments in the world. The overwhelming majority are properly elected. Britain, in the dubious company of Belize, Burkina Faso, Fiji and Trinidad and Tobago, is one of the disgraceful exceptions.
We send our soldiers abroad to fight (and sometimes die) for democracy. But we do not yet even have it fully in our own Parliament.
The time to put this right is now. To delay further in the face of recent abuses would be an affront to our democracy and to our country.