Yesterday Ed Milliband made the most important speech of any leader so far in this long drawn out election campaign. If it leads a government after May 2015, Labour will abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a United Kingdom Senate.
The fact that politics is now such a turn off in England (in Scotland it is now very turned on) is because we have a poor level of competence in an inadequate bunch of professional politicians, who meddle and muddle and are a law unto themselves. They seem out of touch with public opinion, divorced from public need, bereft of sound judgement and interested primarily in their own careers. For all that ails the country they blame the EU, immigration, spongers and the last government, whichever one it happens to be. But never do they accept that most if not all of it is down to them.
It is now beginning to dawn on everybody that at the heart of the problem lies the system of government itself. It is not a well designed structure set up for the purpose, but a piecemeal mixture that has been bodged together by an establishment bent on self interest and with minimalist intention. In the world of advanced democracies there is no more ludicrous an institution than the British House of Lords. Once entirely hereditary and containing only the descendants of the landed aristocracy, it was the anathema of democracy but honourable and patriotic. Now it is filled with appointees voted for by nobody who are themselves either nobodies, bullies, greedy self seekers or well intentioned do gooders in the wrong place at the wrong time. As part of the process of modern government this jostling irrelevance is not fit for purpose and has no place at all.
At the moment Labour is hatching a plan to replace it with a Senate, elected on a regional basis from all over the United Kingdom. It might not even sit in London. Whatever else interests you in politics, this is one very good reason for voting Labour. Get the institutions right and you will get the right people to govern.
