The increase in democratic legitimacy and power of the House of Lords means there will be better legislations. The House of Lords will be set free from the restrictions due to lack of legitimacy and be able to exercise greater power legislative scrutiny and oversight. They do not have to back down from the House of Commons and the government enabling them to do their job more efficiently. However, there is a down side to this argument as the increase in the power of House of Lords will lead to a gridlocked government. If both chambers are equal then it can weaken the government severely which will mostly result in nothing being actually done or very little progress as it will be easier for the Parliament to just reject government bills and stop them. A prime example of gridlock occurring currently would be in USA where government bills keeps on being rejected by the congress, so Obama is not able to pass most of his bills which means nothing is getting done. If this occurs in Britain, then the government won’t be effective and there will be very little progress.
The election of four-fifth of the House of Lords means a definite vast improvement in the representation of the public, we could say that the Parliament truly represents the public. This will vastly improve the democracy in the UK which is a major plus point. But can we be really sure that the public really care about this? Over the years we have seen almost no concerns over the House of Lords democratic legitimacy and any concerns seen are by politicians. Representation is for the public, so if the public are not bothered by the lack of it, then what is the point of going through a whole lot of trouble to improve it? It is a waste of time and money which could be spent on another area such as education. We can see through the police commissioner’s elections turnout which was only 14% that the public are not greatly bothered about representation or democratic legitimacy as long as the job gets done. It can be seen that the House of Lord does a good job of its function- they blocked extending terror suspect detention from 28 days to 42 days in 2008, prevented plans to limit trial by jury in 2001 and 2003. As seen by the police commissioner’s election, if the job gets done then the public do not particularly care about democratic legitimacy or representation. Plus the voters fatigue is prominent to occur as we can see from the growing apathy and decline in turnouts over the years.
Will the House of Lords truly represent the public or the society if it is elected? We can observe from the House of Commons which is elected that they do not possess descriptive representation as majority of the MPs are white, middle-class and middle aged men while only 22% are female and 4% are ethnic minorities. This is in no way proportional to the population figures of women and ethnic minorities, so the House of Lords will not truly represent the public despite their popular consent. However it will end the tyranny of the executive in the House of Commons which currently dominates the Parliament. Too powerful government is not always a positive aspect as the government is not always right; an example would be the decision to go to war with Iraq despite the protest of millions. So the House of Lords need some power to keep
In conclusion, it can be said that the Coalitions proposal of House of Lords reform is not of a strong advantage. While it does improve representation, give more independence to members of the House of Lords, give a wider representation and gives the House of Lords great democratic legitimacy. As mentioned above in my essay there will be a terrible loss of valuable experts, most likely result in a gridlock government meaning very little progress and ineffective government, it does not truly represent the members of the society and finally the public just appear to simply not care. Despite its major advantages, it brings major disadvantages along with it meaning that there is no great improvement for the British democracy and it can be believed that it is just a waste of time and effort for no real improvement.
by
christela_dewan (student)
