Well it used to work that you had to be a Lord (or a Lady). Then they added "life peers" i.e. Lords where the title is not hereditary. These are given out by the government (technically by the monarch but always on behalf of the PM) for... stuff, y'know, like doing good stuff or buying a peerage.

Then the Labour government 'reformed' the Lords by reducing the number of hereditary peers and replacing them with life peers. Which, of course, means that the peers are now chosen by the ruling party in the commons. Which is a great idea of course.

I want it to be how it used to be. I want the House of Lords to be full of hereditary peers. We have a resource in this country in that we have (or used to) a class of people who are financially independent, well educated and with a lot of spare time on their hands. So we have a second chamber full of people with the time and education to come to a considered opinion on a particular subject and then vote their conscience. I am of course idealising the situation massively but I think it's good to state the ideal and then aim for it.

I would be in favour of some form of independent oversight to make sure Lord are putting the hours in and not taking bribes and that sort of thing. In fact I would only let genuinely financially independent Lords sit. I also don't care if the Lords are hereditary or not - that's not the point. I would not object to, say, taking 500 kids from social services every 30-or-whatever years, giving them the best education the country can offer then putting a few hundred million pounds in their bank account and making their job to be a member of the Lords from 18 to retirement. But, y'know, given that we have the remnants of a mechanism which used to do that, we might as well just start that up again. With oversight.

The alternative (and I probably won't idealise this) is another chamber full of career politicians who're more interested in maintaining their own positions with populist fluff and servicing the interests of big business than in actual public service.

They would under electoral reform! (OK, perhaps putting a little too much faith in politicians there...)

But meh. I don't like the idea of a birth-right giving someone the power to sit as a Lord and decide on legislation. And as much as the Lords can protect us from stupid legislation, it also can prevent good legistlation becoming reality, effectively existing to maintain things as close to the status quo as possible.

Do away with the peers, make it elected (perhaps withsome portion of life time appointments in specialist areas), and remove the Parliament Act to prevent tits like Tony Blair can't force through anything they bloody well like because they can rely on the fear within their own ranks of the whip system.

Assuming we're not going for violent revoluion, of course.

Elect 'em for life, then :D

I dunno, it's all fucked.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords?wasRedirected=true

composition wise, labour have nothing like a majority. The Tories have more hereditary peers. Being given the right to govern based on an accident of birth is and always has been a shit idea - those in positions of privilege did bugger all to improve the life of commoners historically.

I'm not digging out bloody names and case studies for you!!! The suffragettes. There. Happy!?

In return, you can now tell me the name of one hereditary peer who did something really substantially good for us commoners without being forced to by the house of commons or the peasants who worked for them!

Which one of the suffragettes was not socially privileged?

I didn't say that the House of Lords ever instigated any particular legislation to improve the lot of the commoners because, well, for one, the House of Lords can't instigate legislation.

I'm saying that the privileged class, which through most of the 20th century has been the upper middle class, always works to improve its own lot, with some trickle down benefits for the classes below.

The Barons and their Magna Carta, for example. The landed 'gentry' of America with their Declaration of Independence. The rich, industrial Northern Americans with their Reconstruction.