But this does not justify covering hundreds of thousands of acres of Herefordshire with hideous, landscape destroying white plastic tunnels, which cost millions in lost tourist business and produce in the end a fruit that is a strawberry shaped ball of cotton wool. It has marginalised most of the surrounding traditional, seasonal (and far more delicious) strawberry growers.
I refuse, for reasons of taste and principle, to buy or eat a plastic nurtured strawberry and those who love the traditional British landscape of Herefordshire should do the same. There’ll always be other jobs for hard-working Poles, Lithuanians or Bulgarians, if that’s what they want. The local under-achieving youth aren’t going to bother with tough physical work when they can draw the dole, draw disability benefits for being too fat, drink cheap Tesco Alcohol and play video games all day, are they?

I expect Richard Uridge will soon be putting the other side of the story – what the tunnels are costing the county to achieve the benefits he was promoting.

Nobody’s suggesting – at least not very loudly – that the BBC should cease to be funded at all, but the Tories have signalled their intention to freeze the Licence fee.

The proposal that the BBC should derive some supplementary revenue from its digital online news dissemination treads on the toes of neither party.

I have argued on http://www.peterburden.net/archives/144 that, if as a nation we want to keep a healthy, independent press, we must create circumstances in which newspapers can earn revenue from their online news services; this can realistically only be achieved if the BBC – a principal source of online news – is also required to charge, thus creating a fair commercial platform for competition between public and private online news services.

No reading of the BBC Charter specifies that it must offer online services for nothing. And to those who would argue that the poor and unwaged would be starved of news to which they are entitled (and some will, you can be sure) I say, listen to Radio 4, which is free, then go to the public library and read the papers there.

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.

Naturally, a number of ideas have been proposed since the old part-hereditary structure was abandoned. Two years ago, for instance, BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme decided to help things along by selecting a “People’s Peer”. It soon emerged that the difficulty in choosing from those nominated by listeners was simply that whoever was selected would still represent only a tiny minority of some interest group and, in any case, as an individual peer, would have effectively no influence on the operation of an upper chamber dominated by party interests.

It was also suggested at one stage that the House of Lords be repopulated by inviting various ‘organisations’ to vote in their own representatives. This had some appeal in the diversity it might have produced, but it would be impossible to establish in a way that could be perceived as fair. Neither would it be truly representative.

However what has emerged is that there is undoubtedly a strong public aversion either to a chamber full of political appointees or to just another tier of elected party faithful. Both groups have patrons to appease. Even the politicians (albeit a little disingenuously) plead the case for ‘true representation’. Other ways of achieving this should be put into the debate and considered.

While it is manifestly not an option to revert to the old hereditary peerage (although profound tradition does have a role in shaping the national psyche) or to the inherent unrepresentativeness of a House full of landowning, or at least for the most part, rich male toffs, that system did have some very useful characteristics that contributed to its surprising objectivity and efficacy in knocking the sharp edges off bills sent up for its consideration.

First, the members were not, as individuals, answerable either to a party that had appointed them, nor to an electorate that had voted for them, which allowed them to react honestly, as their instincts, experience and judgment (such as they were) directed them.

Secondly, the house then contained two groups of people who would have stood no chance now of gaining an appointed or an elected seat – the unambitious and the dim.

In creating a house that truly reflects all the citizens of this nation, the unaspiring and the not-so-bright have just as much right to be directly represented as the smart-arsed and the pushy.

Thirdly, the old system benefited from the sheer randomness (apart from gender) of heredity, in age, ability and personal interests.

For these reasons, it would be reasonable to consider proposals for a random, cyclically renewable Peerage…………….

From the electoral register of each of our parliamentary constituencies, every voter is identified by a unique letter/number combination. Ernie at the National Savings Centre (or his son) could be asked to pluck a random number from each roll, and the voter thus identified would be required by law to become a peer, receiving training, appropriate allowances and generous remuneration for a mandatory minimum number of possible attendances, with incentives for full attendance.

The normal period for membership would be 10 years, but in order to provide continuity and to avoid a wholesale turnaround in membership, terms for the original intake would be staggered, requiring them to attend the House of Lords for between one and ten years. Thus, 10% of members would change every year with initial terms of 1 to 10 years being allotted to each constituency, at random but in equal proportion across the country.

It is likely that having grasped the importance of their function, the great majority of allotted members would take the task seriously, while being part of the only truly proportionate representativeness in the legislative process.

The system reflects and, in terms of electoral compass, goes beyond the original function of democracy as practised in ancient Athens, where every (recognised) citizen had a vote on all major issues.

Random Cyclically Renewable Peerage would provide a formula for a truly unbiased, fully representative second chamber, which would contain a great breadth of experience, specialist knowledge and common sense.

As the electoral register and Ernie are both already in place, the system would be very simple (and cheap) to establish.

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Lunching in the House of Lords in 1978 with the late Lord Kagan, friend, benefactor and appointee of Harold Wilson, he gleefully told me to tuck in, because the dining room there was the “most subsidised eating place in the country.” He also told me that I had no chance ever of becoming a member of this privileged house because I was “too tall and didn’t speak English with a mid-European accent.” Perhaps these were the prevailing criteria at the time; I didn’t care – I had no aspiration to subsidised luncheon.

But reacting to the proposal above, one of the appointed incumbents, observed, “Would you have legislation examined by the crew in your average public house?”, demonstrating how this type of arrogant exclusivity makes an elected/appointed chamber so undesirable. And after all, the criminal justice system frequently relies on the general public for reaching decisions that have far reaching consequences for hundreds of thousands of British lives every year.