Your MP writes (From Worcester News)

Your MP writes

8:30am Thursday 1st March 2007

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NEXT Wednesday the House of Commons will vote on whether members of the House of Lords should be elected or be appointed, as most of them are now.
My own view is that we should leave the present arrangements as they are, although we should consider changing the method of appointment so that the matter is no longer left in the sole hands of the Prime Minister.

There is no pressure from the public for change. Out of the 50 or so letters and e-mails I receive every day, only one in recent days has referred to these ‘reforms’.
In its present form, the Lords is complementary to the Commons, which ultimately rules supreme. The House of Lords initiates, reviews and amends but never has the final word if it is in dispute with the Commons. If the Lords were elected this could change dramatically overnight.
As an elected chamber the Lords would rival the Commons. Our democracy would become confused and the accountability of the government to Parliament would become even more blurred.
The executive would be able to set one House against the other as our system of government moved ever closer to being an ‘elected dictatorship’. One effect could be the paralysis of Parliament if each House took a different view from the other. This would be a strong possibility if the majority party in each House was different.
One characteristic of Parliament today is that the major political parties control the Commons but are relatively weak in the Lords, whose members have a habit of making up their own minds, and where there is a large number of cross-benchers who owe allegiance to no political party.
If members of the House of Lords were elected, the ability of the upper House to rise above party politics, one of its most important present features, would go. Elections for the Lords would inevitably result in the major parties taking control, in the independence and expertise of the members of the Lords being lost and in the checks and balances in our system of government, developed and refined over hundreds of years, being gravely damaged – all with no obvious benefit.