The reason for an elected House of Lords

In the current climate of pre-pre-election pledges and faint, vacuous non-promises it is easy to forget the very fundamental problem that faces this country.

No, not the welfare state, or the NHS, nor even anti-social youngsters causing an epidemic of flame engulfed parents. These are all problems, naturally they always are and I am pretty certain they always will be, but something underpins all of this. The House of Commons no longer serving its purpose.

That great British, nay English, institution that has given birth to the democratic systems of most of this planet. It is, without any shadow of a doubt, a monumental achievement that in itself has created the very thing that all voters and peoples crave, accountability.

Cast your minds back all those centuries. There sits the King on his throne, all powerful. He can literally do as he pleases on a whim. And he did. The common misconception is that parliament is there for the people, it is not. Well at least not at this point. The aristocracy are getting very upset at this power, this click of the King's fingers that renders them ruined, or at war, or often both.

A King needs cash, lots of it. Cash comes from tax, tax that is raised by the Lords from their estates. The Lords then supply the men to fight the war funded by their tax. Strangely enough they wanted some control over all of this. In short (this isn't a date by date history lesson) they rose up and gave the King what for. In return they got a parliament.

This is the absolute purpose of any House. It is there to hold the King, the ruler, to account. He wants tax and a war, he has to go to his parliament and ask or it. Over time of course this parliament garnered more and more power to such an extent they lopped off the King's head and took over themselves. People didn't like this and so a happy and very English medium was created.

So fast forward to the modern day. We have a figure head, a constitutional monarch, a symbol of our nation and a useful constant in which to focus all those powers. Under that we have a parliament made up not of Lords, but of common people elected by the common people.

And that is the very problem that we should be focusing on if we wish to resolve any of the other problems we so badly want to rectify.

To clarify, I am not a republican and and I have no real issue with the House of Lords in its current format, although I do advocate a fully elected House. I am not a socialist calling for the downfall of monarchy and the burning of Earls.

Parliament is there to hold a powerful monarch to account, but there is no powerful monarch. In fact such is the electoral system that the ruling party often has such a majority that the Prime Minister is the de facto King. It has reached such a stage where cabinet governance itself no longer exists and only serves to rubber-stamp the Prime Minister's decisions. Parliament does the same.

The Prime Minister wants a war, he goes to parliament to get the money and they give it to him. He spends the money, he has his war, he bats away some angry newspapers.

We have zero accountability. The very point of having a parliament has ceased to be there. The monarch has no power to refuse, the Lords has no mandate to refuse, parliament is rendered pointless due to the majority. We live in an absolutist system that serves merely to rubber stamp the Prime Minister of the days decision.

This is the real reason we now so desperately need an elected upper house.

It is nothing to do with elections, or the right of the people to choose. It is everything to do with every party ever refusing to do it - because it makes them accountable to a mandate backed Lords.

Parliament is now the sovereign, the 12th century King. It needs its own parliament to keep it in check and that parliament is the House of Lords. The method of election is up for debate, I favour proportional representation if the Commons is to stay first by the post in order to give some difference.

But what is not up for debate is that for as long as this parliamentary system stays in its current format, this country will never have the reforms it needs. We have the exact system the Barons of all those centuries ago refused to put up with, except we keep quiet and say nothing. It is the one topic all the main parties are scared stiff of making a commitment on and just like the Barons it is up to us to demand it, because they will never give it to us.