I'd argue that a lot of the problems with the Lords are really a problem with first-past-the-post. Lords reform is really appealing when you're in opposition, but when you're in government it's just too tempting to avoid the difficult task of reform and take advantage of the broken appointments system.

In a PR system where we had four or five major parties rather than two, there's less opportunity to stuff the Lords with your chums and far more motivation to reform the second chamber into something that actually works.

>>97346
>In a PR system where we had four or five major parties rather than two, there's less opportunity to stuff the Lords with your chums

I very much doubt this would have a big impact, under current convention the PM does the stuffing and minority coalition PM will still stuff it in their favour just with perhaps a bit of courtesy towards other parties to temper the picks.

>far more motivation to reform the second chamber into something that actually works.
Arguably it still works pretty well as it is. I lean towards being a republican so I really hate to say this but although the ranks still have loyalty to a particular party, being there for life free of the need to pander to voters or the whips, the Lords in its current form has been highly effective at scrutinising laws and bills, they've held back many of the Tories worst and most archaic laws despite a decade of stuffing it in their favour.

The best first step in reforming laws is putting a cap on numbers and restricting peerages to new people only through dead mans boots or resignations. But this isn't going to happen because a government making this reform would be faced with the choice of either implementing the cap overnight and kicking out hundreds of lords which would be highly contentious, or simply disallowing any new peerages until the number falls to the new limit through deaths which could take decades meaning the government who implemented it wouldnt see their representation in the Lords improve for a generation.
At best we could expect labour to implement such reform only after they've been in power a decade and had some time to restack it in their favour.

A smaller reform I'd like to see is requiring peers to meet a minimum number of hours a week contributing useful work to the Lords, or be forced to surrender their peerage if they fall so far short. This would hopefully have the effect of forcing out those who mostly only attend to vote on party lines.

Maybe life peerages are still too long? Give people ten-year appointments like the Poet Laureate. I really don't want the country to have two elected bodies (they're elected by the same electorate so they'd just be clones of each other in terms of representation) and I don't want us to only have the House of Commons either because look at the retards in that. But the purpose of the House of Lords, really, is to have top experts who are independent of politics, making the clever decisions that thicko voters would never be able to figure out. And you could honestly have a different bunch of university professors every day, for every issue, if you wanted to. I don't think political experience is an important part of the job.

>>97346
Here's a mad proposal: have a first-past-the-post House of Commons, and then an elected House of Lords elected through a different electoral system. I don't necessarily think it's a good idea, but it would be thrilling to try as an experiment.

In theory I like the HoL. Let some people who don't need to worry about elections and appealing to the masses make level headed semi-democratic (there're dozens of them) decisions to stay the hand of the elected government when they go a bit crazy.

The trouble is how the Lords are selected. First kick out the CoE, get rid of the Honours List, and make the entire house be chosen by sortition. Perhaps set an age limit of around 30-40.

Term limits or ther requirement to be re-elected would sort of defeat the object, you'd end up with the same sort of trajectory as the commons career types just at a different time scale.

Fix the number of lords, allow them to step down, nothing is hereditary or tied to religion, new members are chosen by sortition and given a decent salary. Like a Lord's Lottery.

>>97349

That sounds remarkably like a citizen's assembly, just not issue specific and with no term limit other than age.

Randomise it.

Keep the form and function exactly the same as it is now, except every two, three, four or whatever-the-fuck-years, the sitting members are randomly selected. Like a massive jury. It's not as though the current members have any special qualification for being there. Michelle Mone, Peter Mandelson the Bishop of Ely are just idiots like everyone else, yet for no good reason they're allowed the swing the axe on laws the government are trying to pass. That is assuming they bother showing up, which many of them don't, which is why the afore mentioned Lady Mone's "leave of absence" is an irrelevance of sorts, because she was never there to begin with. Making the House of Lords a place people actually have to show up at would elimate this problem, selecting the members randomly would prevent cronyism and it's practically the literal definition of democratic.

I typed this out then realised >>97349 said something very similar, but whatever.

Labour's pledge to scrap the House of Lords is like the worst thing they could do in terms of constitutional reform once they got into government because they aren't saying they'll do anything else as well. Right now the Lords is one of the few checks on a government that shouldn't even be there, but apparently Labour couldn't give a shit about how they got there. There are so many more pressing problems for our democracy than the Lords.

Keep it, but rename it to the House of Ladies, and kick out those not reaching the required level of camp.

The best constitution you can have is something like New Zealand's, where you have a unitary state with a single-chamber parliament elected by proportional representation, in a Westminster system where what parliament says goes, with a monarchy (but not really, just a spokesman who stops you needing a stupid president) and with a bunch of nice democratic window dressing like a bill of rights which makes you feel safe and progressive but which isn't really enforceable, so you don't ever get into the tedious judicial-vs-legislative battles and constitutional debates that define the US, and you don't get the stupid upper house games you see here or in Australia.
It's the gold standard, it's as close to perfect in every single way as you can get... except that it would fall apart the moment you took the nice agreeable New Zealand politicians out and put our coterie of Daily Mail pandering aspiring human rights abusers in.

This could perhaps be a sneaky tactic by Labour to invoke Brexit without actually bringing it up. Rather than risking infuriating everyone by going all Daily Express about the B-word, Keir Starmer can plant the seeds in the same people's minds by talking about the Enemies of the People. I don't know of anything else the House of Lords is famous for, certainly among people who don't follow politics.

Also, if you pass a law in the House of Commons to abolish the House of Lords, surely that will need to go into that self-same House of Lords for approval. I don't think they will approve. So K-Starmz can really say whatever the fuck he wants.

>>97352 Keir used to be an effective lawyer for free speech (in so much as it actually exists in our Sceptic Isle) and ever since he got a peerage got really shit. It reflects so many Labour voters as well. I mean it's fun to call the Tories The Fash but I'll believe it for real when Labour types who call them Fash for a pandemic safety bill that stops protests don't do an immediate U-turn and cheer for an online 'safety' bill by the same people, just because Keir likes it.

>>97365

British governments in general tend to lean authoritarian to appease the hand-wringing Chealsea Tractor school run Mumsnet arsehole brigade.

That said, remember the twilight years of Blair/Brown's Labour, where we were all worried about the privacy invasion of CCTV cameras and ID cards? It all seems quite quaint in retrospect considering what has transpired over the last decade.

>>97370 You talkin' about the right wing Farmer Palmers or the left wing Malcolm and Cressida types?