Lord Norton of Louth, a Professor of Government, former Chairman of the House of Lords Committee on the Constitution, and blogger, dismantles the Government's case for an elected House of Lords.
The Government’s White Paper on Lords reform is a sorry affair. It fails completely to advance any principled argument for change. It bandies about terms such as democracy and legitimacy without defining them or seeking to justify them. It has no philosophic base, relying on terms which it naively believes to be self-evident, but which are actually contested concepts.
Electing the second chamber is not necessarily the ‘democratic’ option. At the heart of a representative democracy is the concept of accountability. The British political system has the benefit of core accountability. There is one body – the party in government, chosen through elections to the House of Commons – that is responsible for public policy. If electors do not approve of what it does, it cannot blame others – there is no divided accountability – and, crucially, they can remove it from office at the next election. Electing other bodies that can then claim the mandate of the popular vote undermines that core accountability. In the event of conflict between two elected bodies, who do the electors hold responsible for the outcomes?
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