Paul Marks argues for doing away with the House of Lords on the grounds that recent reforms have taken away its heritage and that Wednesday’s inevitable move toward elected membership will make it at best redundant with the Commons and at worse divisive.
Indeed, the Lords have become simultaneously an anachronism and plainly weird. The UK is for all intents and purposes cabinet democracy, so having some odd collection of plutocrats, bishops, and political appointees sitting in an upper chamber is rather absurd. This is especially the case with the Lords Spiritual, which simply have no place in government in a modern society. The only remaining important function of the Lords is that of judicial review, performed by the Law Lords rather than the House as a whole, but that will largely be obviated by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005.
It will be interesting to see what the combination of these wholesale reforms of British political traditions and the encroachment of the EU have on UK politics over time.
