House of Lords Reform

I agree. What happens is extraordinary; I have watched many people, including some members of my own party, go native very rapidly. There is a practical point in this—it is one of the reasons why I believe in introducing rolling elections. I would get rid of none of the appointed life peers. I would let them just quietly die off. Let me turn briefly to the unicameral system, which several Members have mentioned. For a unicameral system to work it has to be able to take a decision that goes against the Government—the Executive—and to be able to take that decision without bringing that Government down. That might work in small countries, but I do not think that it can work in large countries. Even with proportional representation and modernisation, it would not be possible to arrive at a situation where that could be made to work. In parenthesis, I should say that in my judgment the experience of the Scottish Parliament highlights that, because what happens there is that the elections under PR result in a negotiation at the beginning and there is then created through partnership the same sort of elected dictatorship that we get in this place with the first-past-the-post system.