MPs aren’t the elite – faceless bureaucrats are

I see that the most boring conversation in the nation is back. The one even worse than people in the country telling you that the only real difficulty in getting to their part of Gloucestershire/Norfolk/the Orkneys is the drive out of London. I refer to, of course, the reform of the House of Lords.

The debate is perennial because there is no good answer to it. The ‘cash for peerages’ scandal comes around every few years because it is unsolvable. If you don’t offer inducements for political donations then what sane person would give millions of pounds to a political party? Besides which, all the constitutional alternatives are worse. The only sensible argument I ever heard of for reform of the Upper House was the one Roger Scruton came up with while defending the presence of the hereditary peers. Roger’s rather ingenious argument was that the hereditaries were in some ways the most representative parliamentarians of the lot. For the average politician in both Houses is — as I have observed before — unlike the rest of our species. They tend to be thrusting, ambitious folk, full of plans, if not vision. Such people do not remotely represent the breadth of us, the general public. For example, only by having a hereditary element in our democracy can we ensure that there is representation in parliament for people who are not especially interested in politics, would like to have as little as possible to do with it or who would prefer to pursue other quixotic interests.

By the logic of this argument, it would make sense for both chambers to be entirely hereditary. But I digress. Lords reform is one of the world’s least interesting debates, not just because it is insoluble but because it keeps missing the deeper point. Which is that nobody in either House has very much power anyway.