Traitor Bliar has told the Commons Select Committee – thankfully the last he will face as Prime Minister – that he supports an appointed House of Lords.

“I think if we want it to be a proper revising chamber it’s best for it to be a different type of chamber,” he said.  How about … I don’t know … a hereditary House of Lords, perhaps?  That’s different.

Electing members of the Upper House, as I have said many times before, will be a disaster for democracy.  You’d think that, as a nation, we’d be grown up enough to realise that the utopian dream of every public official being elected and every decision being taken by a referendum is just that – a dream.  The upper house does not have to be elected to improve democracy.

In a handful of bullet points I can outline my argument for a traditional hereditary upper house:

• An hereditary upper house doesn’t guarantee any party a majority
• Hereditary peers don’t rely on a party for their position of power
• The party whip either doesn’t exist or is useless
• Hereditary peers are more likely to rebel against their party on points of conscience
• Hereditary peers are more likely to make an unpopular decision if they think it’s right because they don’t have to worry about their public image or popularity
• Hereditary peers are part of our culture and heritage and are more likely to defend it than supress it to appease vocal minorities
• Absolute power corrupts absolutely – people who seek power are generally unfit to wield it

When Liebour first “reformed” the House of Lords, the upper house had a Tory majority.  Less than a year later Liebour had appointed itself a majority.  How can the ruling party in the lower house being in charge of appointments to the upper house possibly be more democratic than the traditional hereditary system?  The House of Lords is responsible for keeping the Commons in check, to challenge their bills when they think that they are wrong and to scrutinise their work to ensure that they are acting in the ebst interests of the country.  An appointed upper house is like the lunatics running the asylum, the inmates running the prison, John Prescott running the pork pie factory.

There is the issue of who keeps an eye on the Lords and who makes sure they are acting in the best interests of the country.  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes – who watches the watchers – as Juneval famously said all those centuries ago.  The solution at the moment lies in the Parliament Act which allows the Commons to over-ride the upper house if they reject a bill 3 times in one session of Parliament but this is being systematically abused by this Liebour government who have used it more times to force through legislation against the will of the Lords than every previous government combined since the bill was passed into law at the beginning of the last century.

I offered a solution to this problem back when I debated the issue with Gavin Ayling a good couple of years ago now and I’ve yet to see a reasonable argument against it.  Amend the Parliament Act so that instead of allowing the Commons to over-rule the Lords in cases of dispute, the matter is simply put to a binding public referendum in which both sides submit a brief explanation of their reasons for supporting or opposing the bill in plain English.  No media circus, no spin doctors, just 100 words or less on why the voter should support or oppose the bill.

Combined with restoring the traditional hereditary upper house, this solution would engage the electorate in important decision making, force both the Commons and Lords to consider both public opinion and the value of their proposal and put the people before the party again.  Surely this is the holy grail of political reformists?