Lords reform

ON the first of April this year, the Independent treated its readers to a spoof about the House of Lords, which claimed that Labour was considering selecting the upper House by lot. On the first of June we find a new tract from the relentlessly right-on think tank, Demos, proposing just that.

The sublime to the ridiculous is frequently a short journey in British politics, but it's not often you get the chance to travel so swiftly from the ridiculous to the purportedly serious. And this proposal deserves to be taken seriously: less for its chances of adoption, which I imagine to be slender, than for the implicit impulse. It is part of a growing body of recent political thought which assumes that representative democracy is no longer the equal of our needs.

Certainly, the authors are serious people. Anthony Barnett was founding director of Charter 88. Peter Carty is a frequent contributor to heavyweight newspapers. They've picked their moment well. Reforming the Lords is now palpably on the political agenda, to a greater extent than at any time since the Asquith Government promised ''a second chamber constituted on a popular instead of a hereditary basis'' in 1911.

Even so, the Blair Government, having initiated what it acknowledges is merely the first stage of reform by confiscating the voting rights of hereditary peers, has very little evident idea of what the second and subsequent stages might be. A Cabinet committee is pondering options, while Lord Irvine, whose colourful behaviour has made its own far-from-negligible contribution to the impetus for reform, thinks the present powers ''about right''. The scene could hardly be better set for the sort of ''experimentation'' which Barnett and Carty propose.

In fairness to the Government, it has crossed a Rubicon to get this far. One of the amazing things about the resilience of Westminster's embalmed second chamber has been Labour's timidity towards it. As recently as 1979, James Callaghan threatened to resign the leadership if the party insisted on putting abolition of the Lords in its manifesto. The belief that voters would avenge any disturbance of Britain's constitutional catacombs has worked a powerful dread. It stands to Blair's credit that he has exorcised those fears.

Yet the superstition somehow persists that the Lords cannot be replaced with anything so vulgar as democracy. Rational people make elaborate excuses for it. In 1996, Lord Cranborne, Tory Leader of the Lords, affected to believe that selection by heredity produced a sort of random sample of the populace, a thesis which somewhat neglected the fact that almost half his colleagues had been to Eton. Others point admiringly to

the archive of expertise which

life peerages have brought to

the place.

Walter Bagehot wrote that the best cure for admiring the Lords was to go and see it. Yet, when I was a parliamentary correspondent, I used to find occasional outings to the museum faintly soothing after the rant at the other end of Central Lobby. There was a courteous, reflective, occasionally erudite tone that could be rather pleasing - until you remembered that these amiable windbags were presuming to influence public policy.

Two slightly contradictory myths have extended the Lord's longevity: that it does nothing important enough to worry about, and that it does it in a way distinctive enough from the crude manners of elective democracy to be worth preserving. Barnett and Carty seem to buy both, though they add the valuable postscript to the first that a second chamber could do something useful.

Their idea of appointing some of the membership by rolling jury list proceeds from the second myth. ''We already have enough nationally elected politicians,'' they say. ''The question is how are they to be helped to rule.'' Their answer is a constitutional version of those cheapo media vox pops which pretend that the best way to illuminate a complex issue is to ask four shoppers in Sauchiehall Street what they think.

An elected second chamber, the author agrees, would undermine rather than reinforce the Commons. Their citizen peers would extend the Lord's role to include vetoing legislation which imperilled the ''fundamental values of Britain's constitution'' (whatever those might be), returning Bills that ran against the Government's stated aims, and translating legislative gobbledegook into plain English. ''Ordinary'' people, they say, could scrutinise legislation just as they can decide a verdict in court.

This is a romantic notion, and a very daft one. Juries often get things horribly wrong, even with expert direction, because law is a complicated matter. Legislation needs to be legally watertight, not just a good read. If the second chamber is to exist just to hone the dispensations of the first, then the UK, like Scotland, might do better without it. And many ''fundamental values'' of the British constitution would be none the worse for a good dose of subversion, or at least of rational challenge.

But the bigger problem is this insidious notion that democratic accountability is an optional extra of governance, a choice to be weighed against others, rather than the undiscountable price of authority. It is this same casual devaluation which shuffles powers from elected councils to appointed managers, and which considers a revenue stream to be more important than democratic control.

Politics is about competing subjectivities, not about efficiency. There are no performance targets, except the will of the voters. To depoliticise politics, the recent and continuing trend, is to cut the voters out of the action.

Besides, Commons sovereignty needs effective check-and-balance, not gentle embellishment, and the authority to do that demands people we can choose - and dismiss - rather than an ermined focus group. It's time we stopped apologising for representative democracy. To paraphrase Churchill, it's the

worst possible system, except for all the others.