Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms "That TV Program"

Read Nevil Shute's book "In the Wet". The Queen appointed a Governor General to run the UK and moved to Australia and Canada because of the collapse or democracy in the UK.
Shute didn't believe in "One Man, One Vote", instead he proposed that every person could increase their say in the Government of the Country from 1 vote to 8 votes as a result of the contribution they made to society. The Commonwealth took this policy, the UK didn't, and sank into obscurity.
Hmm.

Interesting concept, it would be interesting to see what criteria would determine contribution they made to society, would it encompass works of compassion or possibly the other end of the spectrum generation of wealth/GDP for the UK,

But some form of upper house is still necessary to eradicate some of the daft ideas proposed in the lower...

Richard, by my limited sense of judgement, the Queen did a grand job in representing our country and culture for decades in a way that has seemingly been trashed by politicians in a short period of time.

I have zero interest in the royal family below the monarch in terms of the way they represent out culture, though I appreciate for some it seems the the Royals along with the Kardashians provide a diversion from reality. Politicians seem to operate on a similar level of late courting populism as opposed to anything that might actually represent reality..?

I imagine myself to be A political, and the link I posted was to the thinking of a well travelled academic on the subject of current world order, with suggestions as to that which the future might hold. Brexit perhaps making a cameo appearance in respect that it does seem to have some sort of affect on world order as we in the UK might experience it in time..?

Whatever.. it matters not a jot if there is no interest, after all this is a friendly forum and greatly valued by me as such, discussions on politics perhaps risks muddying the water..... Though perhaps not as much as mentioning Porsche

So it's about checks and balances?

1. Put in an App to allows us to vote on specific situations rather than sit behind a whimp and a whip.
2. Take the output of this vote and relate it to other matters in hand
3. Allow review in the house and make it single vote. Combine the two houses and remove the lifer privilege. If you serve the public then you should not have a concern about this or somewhere to hide.

Money saved every year will be easily absorbed in things like child care, mental care and pensions, mostly where it is going now?

(Sorry feeling a bit bitchy this morning looking at some of the team suffering in this difficult fiscal climate. Not all of which is down to the Government but enough)

Perhaps the upper house could be modelled on the US Senate, where each County would ellect two "Lords", The US Constitution prescribes that the Senate be composed of two senators from each State (therefore, the Senate currently has 100 Members) and that a senator must be at least thirty years of age, have been a citizen of the United States for nine years, and, when elected, be a resident of the State from which he or she is chosen. A senator's term of office is six years and approximately one-third of the total membership of the Senate is elected every two years.

The UK has 48 English, 32 Scottish and 22 Welsh Counties, so 102, giving an upper house of 204, which would seem to be sufficient.

204 working members would be spot on.

And the election cycle being disconnected from the lower house would be good. 6 years is a good term. We might consider making it 8 so that there is some medium term thinking rather than "just getting to the next election".

Sounds about the right number, but if you didn't balance the representation with population you'd rightly have an outcry against England being under represented :-)

We nearly had proportional representation in the lower house, but lost it to the 1st World War, after which the Liberal party wasn't strong enough to see it through.

The 1918 Representation of the people Act offered 190 seats by proportional representation, which proposal wasn't adopted.

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-...esentation-1#S5CV0106P0_19180513_HOC_267

The Act did extend suffrage though, so belatedly a good thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representation_of_the_People_Act_1918

The House of Lords has become too big as a result of each successive Government appointing further peers to change the balance of voting power in the Lords. We don't need an second elected house as that will question the supremacy of the Commons to set the direction and policy of the Houses of Parliament.

The Lords does serve a very good purpose in recent times, in its detailed examination of legislation passing thru Parliament, which used to be part of the Committee stage in the Commons. Using it's massive store of experience and knowledge of many of its members to refine often quite crude bills passed from the Commons.

What we need is a smaller House of Lords with a neutral balanced political direction/agenda with the time and expertise to examine in detail proposed legislation and refine it.

I think that's not too dissimilar from Labour's plan, although they intend basing it on regional assemblies rather than historic counties. I think you'd need to take account of population distributions too, otherwise (as with the US system) you'd be giving disproportionate weight to low-density areas.

Personally I think the existing system would be ok if it wasn't so open to being padded by blatant cronyism.

A few simple tweaks would sort a lot of the issues out:

1. Differentiate between fixed-term 'Voting Peers' (active members of the Lords who get to vote on legislation) and 'Life Peers' (people awarded as recognition, can speak, but can't vote)
2. Set a fixed number of a few hundred voting peers based on attendance over the last 5 years split roughly Tory/Labour/Independent
3. Allowing the crown, the government, and the opposition to nominate new voting peers on the basis of one in one out.
4. Voting peers become Life peers at the end of their term