More than one way to skin a Lord

This article from The Independent asks the obvious question of what, if anything, should replace the House of Lords if it were scrapped. It starts off a bit odd, noting that the Lords is "almost impossible to justify on any grounds other than their utility". Come again ? You can only justify its existence because it is in fact very useful ? I should have thought that would be more than enough to justify pretty much anything, really.

Anyway I'm just going to very briefly set down my own proposal here as a go-to reference. I will also note that Labour's plan isn't quite non-existent, but the idea of an elected "council of nations" is so vague as to be meaningless. Scrapping the upper House altogether would be ridiculous : it would make Parliament into a tyranny, as Oliver Cromwell already discovered. There's absolutely no point going down that road.

But I don't believe it's that difficult to come up with an alternative. What I would do would be :

• Restrict the number of voting peers to the same as the number of MPs.
• Immediately following each general election, peers eligible to sit and vote in the Lords would be chosen by lot from all existing peers, whose numbers would be drawn in accordance with proportional representation based on the election.
• Peers would be in some way affiliated with the major political parties but much more loosely than in the Commons, with no whipping system instructing them which way to vote on any issue whatsoever.
• Peers would not necessarily be appointed by political parties directly. Their total number would be unlimited (honours being handed out on some general merit-based principle each year), only the number allowed to sit and vote would be restricted.
• Nominations would be subject to an independent panel and not just at the behest of any one party. It would be possible to nominate for political service, but not for political donations alone : would-be peers would have to some sort of relevant experience of actually doing something.
• Powers for the Lords to delay or even block legislation might be increased, with the Commons only able to override with a two-thirds majority free vote and possibly requiring MPs from multiple parties.

This would give us a political system that uses representation and appointment, sortition and proportional representation all at once. It also utterly avoids any attempt by any government to pack the Lords in its favour.

A big problem with any alternative elected chamber is of course, "why wouldn't it just be the same as the Commons", and thus not acting as any sort of check at all. So let's just not bother with that. No, it's a good thing to have the proposed laws checked by a body formed on a different basis. As I noted at some length previously, democracy is best protected by non-democratic processes. As a general principle, I consider diversity key here. The more people of different ideologies in different backgrounds in bodies formed from different processes agree on something, the more likely this is to be correct. Hence a deliberate blending of democracy with other selection mechanisms.

Of course I haven't fleshed out any details because that's not the point. I'm not wedded to this either; it just seems like the most obvious solution to me. I'm perfectly open to alternatives. Show me a system of choosing an upper chamber that will at least given some degree of tension with the Commons and I'm listening.