Dumbing down the House of Lords
Now we have it: New Labour has given us the blueprint for a really boring House of Lords. The reform was needed not only because the place was effective, but also because the Government needs projects which seem both radical and modernising. It always wants class warfare with a progressive feel.. The heart of the function and appeal of the Lords is not that it made obvious sense. It is of a piece with the way the British Constitution is organic, not formulaic, and is best sought in places like the Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations. There one finds Lord Campbell of Eskan saying, rightly: "The only justification of the House of Lords is its irrationality: once you try to make it rational, you satisfy no-one".

The Lords did what all great institutions do. Its ethos and traditions vastly improved the performance of the flawed individuals who composed it. That's why leaving it intact had merit and why a House robbed of elan will find it hard to be effective, however well its members are chosen.

From the off, the Government is lumbered with a contradiction. As Lord Williams, the leader of the House of Lords, told Channel Four News on Wednesday evening: "It's a mistake to believe that every component of a democratic society has to be elected." The Lords, like the judges, the bishops, the SAS and your plumber, are best chosen by some other method.

So we might as well try to understand what was good about the reviled hereditaries, so we can gauge better how to replace them. The aristocrats had only one overwhelming merit. It was that they were politically-incorrect. This feature was the by-product of their very real independence. The best of them had lots of money (so weren't impressed by freebees). They were cultured, ignorant, stupid or clever, but they were by and large not ambitious (when they were in the Lords, they thought about the nation, not their advancement). They were generally country-people (a useful bias in an urban democracy). But above all, they had a certain arrogance. That's to say: they weren't much subject to guarding their words, whether they were talking about buggery, the party Whip system, or rights for the disabled.

So the aristocrats were really the gold standard of the old Upper House. Life peers were useful insofar as they added expertise and experience, and only if they remained true to the spirit of the place, which was giddily, unashamedly elitist.

Nowadays, elitism is a problem, because the excellence it espouses is thought at odds with the democratic spirit. But the British Constitution has known about this dilemma for about four hundred years. The tradition New Labour is trashing enshrined only one big principle. It was this: The British people control everything - everything - through the House of Commons. MPs are chosen because they are clever, tougher, nicer, cannier - somehow bigger - than those who elect them.

Anyway, Parliament is always subject to re-election, but on the whole should be left to get on with things.

The loftiest monarch, the snottiest Lord, had usefulness because their independence and glamour helped the lower house, and they had legitimacy because the Commons said so.

Even so, it is a commonplace that the Lords can only work if it is powerless. It must refine the work of the Commons, but never compete with it. That is one of the reasons why hereditary peers were ideal for the place: the aristocratic members were usually at variance with the Commons (whichever party ruled) at exactly the right moments in history. And even then they were, finally, dismissable as unrepresentative.

We now hear ministers saying that the upper house used to be undemocratic, and anti-Labour. Under that cover the country is sold the enfeeblement of a house which actually was more anti-Presidential than anything else.

So now the race is on. Will sufficient MPs care enough about the strength of parliament to see that it needs a strong House of Lords? And then will they make the further leap and see that the strength of the Commons depends on a strong Lords which can help lessen the effect of the iron grip of party whips in the lower house, and undermine a Presidential command of the executive?

Will they then make the bold realisation that this strengthening of Parliament can better be achieved by a House of Lords which develops a real sense of purpose, and pride? This may need a degree of permanence in its membership. It would certainly need a degree of savviness. Elections won't achieve this: candidates for election to the Lords are likely to be weaker in every way than candidates for the Commons. Selection might do it, but only if it were boldly elitist.

If he wanted to, a Prime Minister as popular as Tony Blair might have devised a system for getting a good, modern House of Lords, and then sell it to the public. Instead he has tried to throw a sop to the class warriors of his party whilst producing a formula which can easily be manipulated to produce a House of Lords dominated by saps. The author is the media fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs and publishes continuously at www.richarddnorth.com