Like a falcon from a cliff, today the Gledhill Plan for Electoral Reform gracefully but lethally swept atop the sea gull’s back of a great British political conundrum and devoured the unsuspecting creature mid-flight.  (Or, in marginally less dramatic terms, I wrote a blogpost for Scribo Ergo Sum.  But the point remains: I have solved the crisis of electoral reform once and for all.)

In previous years, I have tried to grapple with the issues of House of Lords reform and proportional representation for the House of Commons.  In both cases, I have found the status quo intolerable.  The House of Lords, as I see it, should be a revising chamber, designed to make legislation better.  It should be full of experts in a variety of fields (…hopefully including law…) and it should be apolitical.  We have a political chamber for Punch and Judy politics - for soundbites and grandstanding - but we desperately require a chamber than can effectively fine-tune the inexpert Bills sent up from the Commons.

The electoral system for the Commons is flawed.  At current levels, Labour can receive the same percentage of the vote as the Conservatives and find themselves with a parliamentary majority: the Tories need a 10-point lead over Labour to gain a wafer-thin majority.  This is why Brown is safe (for now): he would probably still win a majority if there was an election tomorrow.  It is also why the SDP/Alliance managed to poll one percent fewer votes than Labour in 1983 and yet receive a tenth of the number of seats in the Commons.  The First Past the Post system is flawed in that it favours regional support over national support.  One can tweak constituency boundaries (and we must, with urgency!) but the fundamental fact remains that it is an imperfect system that can never be successfully resolved.

The alternatives to the First Past the Post system all have one common flaw, stemming ultimately from a flaw in the FPTP system: FPTP delivers strong majorities.  By default, then, those who advocate more representation are effectively calling for weaker government.  They are calling for the end to a kind of politics where total power is swapped every few years in favour of a system where nobody has very much power for very long.  As the Jenkins Report suggested, the best of an imperfect bunch of voting systems is a hybrid which retains a constituency element and supplants “top-up” MPs from a party list into Parliament in order to make up numbers.  This would give more reasonable results; would keep governments on their toes a lot more, and would test the will of the electorate.  Very soon we would either return to a two party scenario, fearful of weak coalitions, or we would experiment with many parties, despite weak coalitions.  Time would tell.

The hybrid system has benefits beyond its auspicious start as the “least worst” alternative.  The party list element could be hugely beneficial for British politics, with two very good reasons.  Firstly (for the sake of structure, not importance), it would allow good politicians to be selected by parties instead of constituencies.  This sounds terribly undemocratic, and I suppose it is, but some people are essentially unelectable: the list system gains their talent without sacrificing a safe seat for the cause.  Politicians not interested in maintaining constituency links, or those who prefer to stay in London full time, might be better placed on a list system than in constituencies.  Voters would be better served by them.

Secondly, it would remove the need for appointing potential ministers to the Lords as a bypass for elections.  Gordon Brown’s Government of all the Talents fell rather flat both because of the GOATs’ lack of support for him and the whole government’s eminent talentlessness.  Cameron’s pushing for Sayeeda Warsi to become Baroness Warsi also demonstrates the need to redefine who should go in which chamber: she is a party political appointee, seeking a cabinet post.  The list system would get her in the correct chamber, and would remind everyone that she failed in her attempts at getting elected.

Now that we have fixed elections to the Commons and have ensured by the list system that people who should be in the Commons manage to get there, we turn our attention to the Lords.  As I have stated, the House of Lords should be a revising chamber.  It should be free of party-political point-scoring: its role is to receive what it is given from the elected Commons and make it better.  I have reservations about the Parliament Act, but its existence ensures that the elected chamber is superior.  The Lords, therefore, should not need party affiliation or whipping.  The lush red rows should be filled with various experts who wish to make better law - there must surely be more than a few hundred of them around!

I propose, therefore, a fully appointed House of Lords.  There should be an independent vetting process, and Peers should be reassessed for suitability every few years.  If a member attends just a handful of debates in a year, they should be deselected in favour of someone engaged with the job.  The Lords would have to pay a salary, but require some work in response (a degree of committee work, perhaps) while leaving enough time in the week free for members to pursue outside interests.  A standards board would ensure money was not changing hands illegitimately, and limits would be set on exactly what outside interests members could engage in; any illicit behaviour would probably be preferable to party influence and whipping at any rate.  The Lords, therefore, would operate as the revising chamber it should be, and current politically-motivated appointees who are too inept to get elected would have a home in the Commons through a list system.

As with any electoral reform, this has its drawbacks.  But they are much less in number than the current system - and the mess the Lords is currently in does not need elaboration.  By combining electoral reform of the Commons and total reform of the Lords, this proposal would deliver a joined-up package of government that would work far better than the one we have today.  Crucially, there would be greater democracy and also better law-making rolled into one neat little package.  Find me any proposal that would come close to being as lovely as this, and I will lay off the wildlife metaphors for a week.  Until then, though, I present to you the Gledhill Falcon Plan for Electoral Reform.