Billy Bragg is a well-known entertainer and a campaigner. He believed the House of Lords really does need to be reformed. He had his own plan in reforming the House of Lords called the “secondary mandate” system. This plan also says that House of Lords members should be directly elected but in a system he believes is less confusing. This system would mean that there is no place for appointed and hereditary peers in the House of Lords. Tony Blair believed in keeping appointed members but giving them no real decision-making authority in politics.
Charters 88 are a pressure group who believes there is a better way to run this country no matter which government is in power. They strongly believe that House of Lords should be reformed. They campaign for House of Lords to be 100% directly elected and should have powers similar to the House of Commons. So Charter 88 has similar views to Billy Bragg but believe powers of both houses should be similar.
So we can see there are strong arguments for a directly elected House of Lords. However, there are many arguments that are against a directly elected House of Lords. The members of the House of Lords who are independent, not attached to a party, are highly valued by the public as their views can be similar to a majority of the public in some area’s and can influence the government to this if they can show that a majority of the public is behind them.
Electing people is increasing as the government is believing more and more in democracy and how everything should be democratised. This is being met by poor turnouts and can result in a person being in the House of Lords even though they are not right for the position. By having House of Lords being directly elected there is a risk of losing the potential the Lords provides to bring to Parliament the expertise and experience of those who are leaders in a wide range of societies like those who are leaders of education, faith communities, health, armed forces and so on. That kind of experience cannot be replaced very easily.
Also the larger the elected people there are, the greater the number of people chose for a department. This will cause big competition within the department as all those within the department would be legitimised by the fact they were elected by the electorate.
So we can see that there are strong arguments for and against a directly elected House of Lords. I believe a directly elected House of Lords would be good as it has legitimation so their actions would be something of the action of the people. This would mean the idea of democracy is intact. However, by directly electing members of the House of Lords there is a danger that they would abuse the fact they have legitimation for their actions and would make decisions to benefit themselves rather than benefit everyone else. Also it could potentially create anarchy within departments as all members are legitimised. So I do believe that we should not have a fully directly elected House of Lords.
Manish Kerai
