Starmer: I will abolish House of Lords

The House of Lords is made up largely educated people with proven experience in various areas. The problem is that most of them are political appointees and the rest there as a result of a wise choice of parents. We don't need the Lords to be better educated, just as long as there are more of them and that they are elected.

Might not be a bad idea, but any political party that gains a majority in the House of Commons will do so under the old system and then become extremely reluctant to change to a new one, however virtuous that might be.

My concern in putting it to the public is the expectation that they would have enough knowledge of Professor Gerald Jenkins of the royal guild of neurology, to decide if he's better for the job than Professor John Hamilton of the institute of gene research. 

Membership of The House of Lords should be restricted to people who have never held any sort of elected political office. 

I get your point. The largest single voting bloc out there is the idiot bloc and the brutal fact of the matter is that no one can win an election without the support of at least some of it.

Yet limiting democracy because of that is not in my view the way we should be going. Wasn't it Churchill who said something about democracy being a poor system except for everything else that had ever been tried?

There also remains the fact - which you have not addressed - that most other functioning western democracies have a democratically elected second chamber and they seem to serve them fairly well.

A legislator with no democratic mandate and no need to fear an electorate is free to vote for self-interested reasons - as the poll tax vote in the Lords proved all those years ago. We need democratic accountability so that their self-interest can be made to align more with the public interest.

srb7677, your post above was interesting.  

There is no perfect form of government. It is by its nature a human construct and hence will be invariably full of flaws and compromises.  

I agree we do not have to always reinvent the wheel and should look at what other countries do and be prepared to copy the best of them. 

I don't support direct democracy.  The decisions that need to be made are complex ones that interract with other laws etc and need detailed knowledge and consideration to get right. I don't think it would be possible to educate the public in those complexities and I think inevitably complex decisions would instead be boiled down to simplistic soundbites. No basis to run a country IMHO.

I do think for all its flaws, the representatives in the primary legislature, the HoC in our case, have to be elected to achieve the accountability you mention, so agreement there too.

The second chamber, our HoL, has a different function to the HoC. Its role is to review and scrutinize legislation, suggest changes where needed but ultimately to be subservient to the HoC will.  Given those limitations in scope I dont agree with you that this chamber needs to be elected - if it is it has equal status to the HoC - dont think we want that - and inevitably just becomes another referendum on the current popularity of the blues and the reds with little notice being given to the quality of the candidates wearing the rosettes.   The Police Commissioner elections show the downsides of this approach.  I think practically i would prefer a HoL of unelected scrutinising legislation before returning to elected MPs to make the ultimate decision rather than a HoL of more politicians with little expertise no doubt whipped simply replicating the HoC.  If you are going to do that, not sure I see the point of the second chamber at all.