Proposals for a revised, 80% elected House of Lords will be debated at the Labour policy forum in Warwick University next week. Since 1999, when Tony Blair’s government removed the majority of hereditary peers from the House, in line with his 1997 manifesto commitment, it has remained in a state of compromise and constitutional instability that might have been cooked up at Dayton, Ohio. Nevertheless, there’s no chance that any conclusions – good or bad – will come of next week’s gathering, in which the governing party is itself divided over which way to go.

Quite apart from widely held reservations (even among politicians) about law-making powers being bounced between two elected chambers, both claiming democratic legitimacy (the more so by a House of Lords elected by PR), how wise can it be to attempt to sell the public an upper chamber filled by elected politicians, at a time when elected politicians are about as low as they’ve ever been in the public’s trustworthiness scale. Not that this perception is justified; politicians are no more or less trustworthy than they were 20, 50 or 100 years ago, given the characteristics required of those prepared to put themselves through the essentially duplicitous process of trying to appeal to as many people as possible at (and between) election times.

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