After the humiliating defeat of the AV referendum, a system to which no party aspired to before the General Election, and the disastrous rout of elected Lib Dems in Scotland and England, serious questions must be asked about the future direction of the party and its place in the coalition government.
In order to reclaim the trust of the British electorate, we need to be bold and radical, and we must speak up for the aspirations of the British people, particularly the disillusioned young; the Facebook generation, who are the future of our democracy. Despite Nick Clegg’s promise of a ‘New Politics’, the majority of the electorate feel let down and betrayed by our politicians and our political system. AV was not the answer, and never will be. We never should have campaigned for this ‘miserable little compromise’.
The future of politics, not just in the UK but globally, as the ‘Arab Spring’ proves, is in ‘People Power’. Our political system is broken; the Liberal Democrats have argued this for many years. But the debates that were relevant 100 years ago may no longer be relevant. I have said this before, but we need a root and branch review of democracy in this country, which involves everyone, not just the political classes. We must lead the world for democratic development as we have in the past.
Despite losing the AV referendum, the prospect of House of Lords reform is still very much alive, and may go ahead. But would a fully elected House of Lords really inspire the new generation of voters and cure all the ills of our political system? The simple answer is no. More elections for more elected politicians would simply lead to more apathy and more of the same.
We need radical change. When it comes to issues that matter to people, there is no apathy of interest. The apathy lies in the trust of the political classes to do the right thing or truly represent the consensus view of the country. That is why fewer and fewer people vote in each election.
We are proposing to have an elected House of Lords, but I will go one step further. I propose that we scrap it altogether. Instead, the second chamber of our Parliament should be ‘The People’. The House of Commons in its current form has an important role in drafting and debating legislation and the House of Lords provides important scrutiny.
But why do we need unelected Lords, or even elected Lords, to scrutinise legislation? In our new digital age, when Wikipedia has made every other encyclopaedia irrelevant and the likes of Facebook and Twitter are revolutionising how people interact between borders, it would be patronising and insulting to say that ordinary people who take an interest in politics are not as capable as an unelected Lords as scrutinising legislation passed by the commons.
A panel of the People, which would include all those registered to vote, could register to scrutinise and vote on each piece of legislation before it is passed. That would be genuine, 21st century-style democracy. The actual logistics of how this could be implemented would need to be worked out, and it would be no small undertaking, but the result could be a democratic revolution that genuinely hands power to the people.
Suddenly, and in the spirit of the democrat revolutions sweeping the Middle East and North Africa, I don’t feel as enthusiastic about our plans to tweak our existing system. I think we need to go much, much further. If the Lib Dems are to survive, and reclaim our radical edge, we need to think outside the box, and think the unthinkable.
Matt Wood was the PPC for Ynys Mon in 2010.
33 Comments
I have objections to this.
I fear if ‘the people’ were allowed to vote on each bill before it becomes law we could see us taking up right-wing policies on Immigration, International AID etc.
“I fear if ‘the people’ were allowed to vote on each bill before it becomes law we could see us taking up right-wing policies on Immigration, International AID etc.”
Why do you hate freedom?
“The actual logistics of how this could be implemented would need to be worked out”
Yes.
When you’ve done this, and have a proposal, come back so we can take a look at it.
Until then, I don’t really see anything I can have an actual opinion on.
The Conservative Party has absolutely zero reason to give the Liberal Democrats anything but crumbs from their table. There is no commitment anywhere in the coalition agreement to implement any Lords reform, radical or not, only to bring forward proposals. Even the currently planned reforms are unlikely to make any headway in this parliament. This stuff – which isn’t yet an idea so much as a back of the envelope, how do I reach my word count scrawl – is going nowhere.
This is an interesting proposal, and something that has been tried in New Zealand, with a rather resounding failure. In New Zealand they have a unicameral Parliament, and an MMP electoral system, meaning their Parliament is much more diverse than ours, in terms of political representation at least. However, there is a shockingly bad record of legislative scrutiny, with the Government getting its way a vast majority of the time. There is a concern with the failure of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act (a precursor to our Human Rights Act 1998) to hold the Government to account, as the combination of unicameral Parliament and Parliamentary sovereignty means that what the Government wants, the Government gets. For a clear example, see the Hansen case and the denial of the presumption of innocence, arguably a foundational right to any liberal democratic society.
This wouldn’t work, would hand too much power to politicians in the Commons and would definitely not “give power to the people”. As much as freedom is a very good thing, pure majoritarianism is not something a society should necessarily value, not without considering the rights of minorities and affected individuals. If “we the people” had a vote on every issue of legislation then the chances are we’d have some very bad legislation.
I don’t know if you’re aware of the work done on popular constitutionalism in the States, but people like Mark Tushnet and Larry Kramer have argued for a system like this for years. It has some theoretical merit, but in practice would be disastrous.
Ummm.
As Mr Ducker above says, you might want to try working out how this would actually function in practice. I presume that what you’re after is some sort of e-Chamber in which people submit amendments to bills that have gone through the Commons. This leads to some obvious questions:
– How do you decide which amendments to accept? Via an online voting system? None of those are incapable of being gamed.
– How do you pay for the thousands of parliamentary draftsmen required to put suggested amendments into appropriate language?
– How do you avoid people putting down amendments that contradict the original thrust of the bill? The point of having multiple readings is to avoid this.
I do think there’s a place for more participative democracy, but I’m not convinced that the second chamber is the place for it.
I was cheering for the headline, and then I found you wanted to replace it with something. Why do we need to have a bicameral system in the first place? Anyhoo…
Actually what I think is a snesible option has been around since at least 1754. Although Hume’s idea suggests this as the main chamber of parliament, I think it could be applied very well to a second chamber instead.
Effectively make (preferably fairly elected) local authorities the members of the second chamber.. They have the right to call in legislation proposed by the Commons, and can introduce legislation if they get a certain proportion of their number to support it.
If they need a plenary session for some reason they can send a proportionate number of representatives each to Westminster, but otherwise under usual circumstances of scrutiny oparliamentary business they would do so in committee in any LA that wanted to do so on any particular bill.
I’d also prefer it if this system replaced the Commmons as Hume was suggesting, but it seems fine for Lords reform if we must have somehing.
A panel of the People, which would include all those registered to vote, could register to scrutinise and vote on each piece of legislation before it is passed. That would be genuine, 21st century-style democracy.
At best this would mean rule by people who have time on their hands. This is what we see in internet discussions – they do tend to be dominated by certain sorts of people, I could use a pejorative name for them, but I won’t, but anyway not a representative sample of the population. That’s unless you mean the “Citizens’ Jury” concept, which is also very problematical – I have seen how those in power can use it to get the answer they wanted in the first place. Essentially, you bring together a few naive people, feed them some propaganda, and they then agree to whatever it is you wanted them to agree to, and you can shut up the opposition with “Look – the people have spoken, who are you to go against what they said?”.
In reality, good politics DOES require a certain sort of wily person who knows the right questions to ask, can see the right stones to turn over, and has the ability to stand up to well-meaning council officers, paid experts etc, who can be very intimidating if you aren’t used to their environment.
The AV referendum is an EXCELLENT example of why rule-by-referendum or similar mechanisms is a bad idea. For most ordinary people this was just too technical an issue to think about, so they were easily conned by the power of money which paid for the horrendous lies and innumerate, illogical and contradictory material put out by the “No” campaign. I feel very strongly that if it were properly explained to all people, there would have been a big majority for “Yes”. I was horrified by how many people I spoke to who didn’t have a clue and were going to vote “No” for the most ridiculous reasons. They were conned, by THE Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, and the other voices of the fat cats.
Admittedly, the rubbish nature of the “Yes” campaign did not help. That is why I did not bother with it, and instead put my efforst into writing letters to the local press etc explaining the “Yes” case. It may be a coincidence, but there is quite a close correlation between the places where I had my letters published in the local press and the places where there was a high “yes” vote.
“At best this would mean rule by people who have time on their hands. This is what we see in internet discussions – they do tend to be dominated by certain sorts of people, I could use a pejorative name for them, but I won’t …”
Yours is the longest comment on this thread so far, by quite a long way …
“For most ordinary people this was just too technical an issue to think about, so they were easily conned by the power of money which paid for the horrendous lies and innumerate, illogical and contradictory material put out by the “No” campaign”
People did not care, that is why they didn’t take the time to understand what AV was in many instances.
Political parties are supposed to represent the will and interests of the people, 58% of people felt that the AV referendum was irrelevant to the will and interests, and a further 29% felt your obsession was in fact antithetical to their will and interests.
The AV referendum is an EXCELLENT example of why rule-by-referendum or similar mechanisms is a bad idea. For most ordinary people this was just too technical an issue to think about, so they were easily conned by the power of money which paid for the horrendous lies and innumerate, illogical and contradictory material put out by the “No” campaign
Oh dear oh dear…. Blaming the voters again for being foolish. Get the result you don’t want and blaming the electorate is becoming rather tiresome and quite rightly at least some posters on this forum are realising what a big mistake it is.
As has been said above, the people who would participate in an online chamber would be a self-selecting population of people with an axe to grind – think a cross between CiF and the comments pages on the Daily Mail. 🙂 And anyone else who participated would be as susceptible to influence by The Sun or Daily Mail, local lobbyists and any politician with the gift of the gab as indeed voters are today. In any case, look at what happened to Nick Clegg’s exercise in purging the statute books last year.
However, I agree that the trouble with electing people is that they tend to be a self-selecting brand of individual too, and they need certain otherwise undesirable skills in order to convince the general public to vote for them. This is my personal main reservation about an elected House of Lords; it would be filled with the same people as the House of Commons (unless rules were enforced to ensure that all candidates have the same amount of money at their disposal and can’t be backed by political parties… hah 🙂
But maybe your idea of true public scrutiny could be achieved by introducing a second chamber of randomly-selected people, a sort of democratic jury service where people have to give a few weeks of their time to scrutinise bills (with the correct amount of impartial legal advice). Though again the logistics of explaining government bills to them would probably make the system unworkable in the long term. Still, it’s food for thought.
IMO, referenda and direct democracy are not only stupid ways of making law but are actively dangerous. Legislation should be made by people who have at least a general idea what the issues are.
Am I saying people are stupid? No. People aren’t stupid, but they are ignorant of 99% of all areas of policy. I’m both better educated (through luck and fortunate birth, not my own talents) and far more interested in politics that the majority of the population, but I wouldn’t feel remotely qualified to make a decision – or even to officially ‘scrutinise’ a single one of the bills that have come before parliament this session. There have been perhaps two bills in the past 10 years dealing with issues about which I have sufficient knowledge to hold an informed opinion.
Good government requires expertise, and people with jobs / hobbies / social lives are unlikely to give any issue more than 30 seconds attention. It’s only saddos like us that spend time on this cr*p 🙂
And even apart from the problem of expertise, the people taking the decisions should be accountable for them – which is impossible in a referendum where a) votes are cast anonymously and b) no one will feel accountable when they’re one voter amongest a possible 45 million.
Forget the AV vote – you only need to look at Iceland for a recent example of the idiotic decisions that can result from referenda!
Matthew: “For most ordinary people this was just too technical an issue to think about, so they were easily conned”
I take it then you weren’t one of those Yes campaigners who were outraged when the No campaign suggested that AV was too complicated for the proverbial ordinary voter??
“we must speak up for the aspirations of the British people, particularly the disillusioned young”
If you seriously want to re-engage our young people in the political process, the best way to start would be to throw out every single Lib Dem MP who broke his or her pledge on tuition fees.
My hunch is that what people (of all ages) want most of all is politicians who inspire and can be trusted – this is far more important than Mickey Mouse political reforms.
A House of Lords elected, or part-elected, by PR would help to keep electoral reform on the agenda and would effectively undermine the legitimacy of an FPTP elected Commons.
So keep the Lords, if for that reason only.
Oh dear. I see @Matthew Huntbach is still blaming the voters and claiming we’re too stupid to analyse the mechanics of AV vs. FPTP. I voted Yes, but I know many good people, principled people, who just thought AV was a crap alternative and would have preferred to keep FPTP. I would’ve preferred PR but saw AV as a start. More people disagreed with me and AV lost. That’s democracy. Why can you not accept that maybe people just don’t agree with you?
Where does this arrogance come from that sees many LDs blaming the electorate for their own failures, or calling us all “irrational” (as Martin Land did in another thread) because you didn’t get what you wanted? I’m reminded of some of the old Stalinists back in the 1960s who would say “if only our message about communism wasn’t distorted by the right, then people would back it.”
You need to accept that most of us get your message. We just don’t like it anymore. Why is that so hard for you to grasp?
“A House of Lords elected, or part-elected, by PR would help to keep electoral reform on the agenda and would effectively undermine the legitimacy of an FPTP elected Commons.”
Don’t count on it.
The idea of fifteen years terms phased in over the course of three parliaments is very clever for it will clearly limit the power of the Lords, and box them into their role as a revising chamber.
Only one third would be elected in any given year and with no single election across all constituencies it will be difficult to claim a mandate from the people with which they can challenge the Commons.
The fifteen year terms, large constituencies, and 20% of appointed Peers will likewise damage their legitimacy as representative agents of the people.
I’m amazed that this has turned into another tit-for-tat about AV. We lost it, deal with it. We never should have accepted an AV referendum as a compromise when it was not our policy to begin with. The Tories played a very clever game, and won.
I put this idea forward to spur debate about the House of Lords issue. I think it helps to be self-critical, and the fact is that as a party, we are still fighting for ideas that were being debated 100 years ago, which the public – like AV – cares little about. The world has changed dramatically in recent decades, and I think it’s important that we have a root and branch review of policy as a party. We are likely to suffer an identity crisis going into the next election, and issues like House of Lords reform aren’t going to inspire the public anymore than they have for the past 100 years, but it’s still important that we discuss it.
Just ask yourselves the question, if everything were destroyed tomorrow, and we all together had to rebuild our institutions and democracy from the ground up, fit for the 21st century, how would we build it? I would use it as an opportunity to redesign our democracy, rather than starting again from the building blocks of the old. I personally don’t think that more elected politicians are going to inspire more confidence in politics.
And on the point that someone made about having expert scrutiny of legislation, the House of Lords (or the House of Commons for that matter) is not filled with the brightest brains in Britain. Let’s not assume that elected, or non-elected, politicians are best suited to create legislation. A wider level of influence and cooperation with people and groups from outside the political class could lead to better, more effective legislation. As Adam Bell said, this could encompass some sort of e-Chamber. It could on the other hand mean making greater use of the thousands of local Councillors and giving them more say over national policy.
As I implied in my post, I do not have all the answers, this is simply an idea, designed to inspire debate about the future shape of our democracy. I just think maybe we need to have a fresh look at things as a party.
I’m afraid I can’t agree with this proposal. I think the principle of representative democracy, whereby we elect representatives to go and spend time properly scrutinising and voting on legislation on our behalf, is the right one. (I just happen to disagree with the mechanism for electing those representatives that we currently have.) The people whose interests need representing most are generally the ones who don’t have the time or the energy to do an MP or a Lord’s job in their spare time – which is pretty much everyone! We elect politicians for a reason – it may not be true of you or me, but most people don’t actually want to have to engage with politics as relentlessly as this would require of participants. If it became a self-selecting group of people with the time and the inclination to get involved, it would become even less representative of “The People” than the current system.
“Just ask yourselves the question, if everything were destroyed tomorrow, and we all together had to rebuild our institutions and democracy from the ground up, fit for the 21st century, how would we build it?”
That is not a valid question for two reasons:
1. We do not live in that world
2. Every civil society is the sum of its social and cultural history, it informs not the just the institutions themselves, but the manner in which those institutions function and how the function is received by the people.
Personally speaking, i find the striving for a more consensual european style politics bizarre as it is at odds with the expectations of the people, resulting from precisely that shared social and cultural history.
Throughout centuries of brutal warfare, from the Thirty Years War, the Napolenic War, the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, the Second World War, and many more, europe has suffered political instability repression and revolution. How many EU countries have not been facist, communist, revolutionary, dictatorships, or repeatedly invaded in the last three hundred and fifty years? Only one. Have many have suffered at least one of the above within living memory? The rest.
Amongst all of this PR must be at least somewhat appealing to peoples who have never been properly protected by their state, whose shifting borders have left pockets of ‘others’ cheek-by-jowl with people whom they share no common history, and people who retain a nascent wariness of whatever catastrophe will next be inflicted upon them by their neighbours.
It is no coincidence that many european states have a political system based on proportional representation, but it isn’t necessarily a British solution.
English Common Law with its roots in the concept of Natural Law has led to a presumption of negative liberty; I am free to do anything that which is not specifically proscribed by the law. Rights are defined as being against interference by the sovereign in the liberty of individual on matters of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets.
Continental Civil Law with its closer association with Legal Positivism has led to a presumption of positive liberty. It is my right, as codified in the system of laws, to be able to act in this manner. Rights are defined as things you are allowed to do by the sovereign such as freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly. You are enabled to do these things.
An appeal to consensus among the polities of europe does nothing but suppress the best compromise for your polity.
We all have our pointy-headed obsessions which sadly might be irrelevant to the wider electorate, mine is Defence, so when I say I am willing to consider PR for the Lords it is not because I have a particular love for PR, it is because i think there is a role for a revising house and it should lead to congruent bicameralism. Therefore, it might represent a useful solution.
I realise that you are not suggesting PR for the Lords, but many folks are, and while i applaud the free-thinking i worry that Lib-Dem’s will oppose it for the wrong reason, not because of the merits of the idea itself but because they must achieve PR somewhere, at any cost.
I think our bicameral system has historically worked very well, and was quite happy as it was, but given that its reform has been botched by Labour it’s going to need some fixing, and i cannot agree the abolishing it for a citizens venue is the best way forward.
apologies – “i think there is a role for a revising house and it should [not] lead to congruent bicameralism”
“How many EU countries have not been facist [sic], communist, revolutionary, dictatorships, or repeatedly invaded in the last three hundred and fifty years? Only one. ”
I take it you’re referring to Sweden. No? The United Kingdom? Have the English forgotten that it was invaded in 1715 and 1745? I know the Scots have not. And as for “revolutionary”, there’s that little matter of 1688-1689… do they teach history in schools these days?
My instinct remains to abolish the House of Lords and strengthen select committees sufficiently to enable adequate scrutiny of legislation. I recall this was Robin Cook’s position. Though perhaps this should only happen once we have PR for the House of Commons, to reduce the chance of a minority party ramming through unpopular legislation.
While we still have a House of Lords, I would go with Jock’s idea above of making local politicians members of the second chamber. Then we wouldn’t need a separate election for the second chamber. And if we elected councillors by STV, as they do in Scotland and N Ireland, this would provide an additional layer of legitimacy to the second chamber.
I think there is certainly some merit in the idea of sending local Councillors to the second chamber and I would be more in favour of this than having a reconstructed and elected upper chamber by PR as currently proposed.
“I take it you’re referring to Sweden. No? The United Kingdom? Have the English forgotten that it was invaded in 1715 and 1745? I know the Scots have not. And as for “revolutionary”, there’s that little matter of 1688-1689… do they teach history in schools these days?”
The jacobite rebellions were an internal matter after the act of union, and yes, i confess i might have slipped a matter of some twenty years on the claimed 350 with the glorious revolution.
Just thought I’d throw in this idea, for arguments sake. What about a form of Jury service? 100 people selected like Juries are to accept, amend or decline legislation. They would probably need professional politicians to argue for or against, like lawyers, but only the 100 get to vote (speaker acts like Judge?). Like Jury service, it is time or bill limited, the people are compensated for their time and certain occupations are exempted. A form of direct democracy which is also within the traditions of the country?
Ralph, I cannot claim credit for the idea. It is but an adaptation of “The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” by David Hume. He actually proposed the idea for the main chamber, and that a sort of a second chamber would actually be composed of the losers of the elections held by each county council for the parliamentary representative, which also sounds quite interesting. He wrote it as a little idle speculation as to how a better system might look in case some centuries down the line we decided the current system was not working and wanted to dust off some other ideas to try.
100 parishes to a county each elect a county “councillor”. Each county council then elects from its own number one winner for the first chamber and one loser get the second chamber, alongside its ten magistrates (not from within the county councillors). The two unrepresentative parishes elect a new councillor for the county.
The national government is elected from amongst the hundred reps from the hundred counties sent to the first chamber.
He thinks that factions would find it difficult to form. The counties could call in legislation from parliament to consider, could themselves exercise a veto if a certain number of whole county councils took a decision against some proposal, and could initiate new legislation, similarly if a certain number of them sponsored it.
Not too dissimilar from the contemporary idea of “cellular democracy.”
Putting aside the problems of electing the right people, there is a need for a legislative chamber which, unlike the Commons, is not dominated by the Executive. The present Lords, with its cross-bench peers comes close to fulfilling that role.
Matt Wood’s proposal is interesting but, like others, I’m not sure it would work. Some kind of scrutinising and revising body is certainly needed.
The argument against a wholly elected second chamber has always been that its composition would be dominated by political parties and might merely mirror the Commons.
Perhaps if we ever get a representative House of Commons elected by PR (yes, old men are allowed to dream) the second chamber could be composed of members nominated by all kinds of organisations – stakeholders in modern parlance. The Lords already has an element of this, with members including representatives of charities, the Church, business, trade unions etc.
Stuart Mitchell
Matthew: “For most ordinary people this was just too technical an issue to think about, so they were easily conned”
I take it then you weren’t one of those Yes campaigners who were outraged when the No campaign suggested that AV was too complicated for the proverbial ordinary voter??
There’s a difference between “technical” and “complicated”. I’m not saying AV was complicated, but like many important issues of principle its immediate relevance isn’t obvious. My experience was that if you could get people to sit down and listen to a careful explanation of AV and in particular what it could achieve by ending the “don’t split the vote” fear, they reacted very positively. But the difficulty was getting them to that point rather than having them switch off at the start saying “boring” before they even knew what it meant.
Squeedle
Where does this arrogance come from that sees many LDs blaming the electorate for their own failures, or calling us all “irrational” (as Martin Land did in another thread) because you didn’t get what you wanted? I’m reminded of some of the old Stalinists back in the 1960s who would say “if only our message about communism wasn’t distorted by the right, then people would back it.”
You need to accept that most of us get your message. We just don’t like it anymore. Why is that so hard for you to grasp?
I saw no sign that most people got the message on AV.
Sorry, I don’t know how to put this without sounding arrogant, but I was offended most as a mathematician rather than as a poltician by the “No to AV” campaign.
I have tried my best to put my arguments everywhere I can. I have no problem in an argument when we reach a point where we “agree to disagree” – that is, we have disocbvered the point of principle where we disagree and each side understands perfectly the position of the other. This hasn’t happened with AV. Rather, I feel Ihave spent hours and hours trying to explain whyt I think a “Yes” vote was the best one, and most of the response I have had from people like you has just been “Lah, lah, lah, I’m not listening, you’re nasty dirty Liberal Democrats and I hate you” rather than something which leaves me feeling you have understoodf thecase and rejected it after that.
It may be bad politics for me to put it that way, you may say I lost so I shoudl jsut shut up. Very well, but if I remain silent, it won’t stop me thinking that way.
@Ariana
As has been said above, the people who would participate in an online chamber would be a self-selecting population of people with an axe to grind think a cross between CiF and the comments pages on the Daily Mail.
Well it’s hardly a surprise that the Daily Mail comments pages attracts the sort of people who read the Daily Mail is it?
While I agree that there is certainly a lot of this sort of people on various internet forums, in my experience there are also a lot of sensible people as well – in fact anyone making a pig-headed, ignorant, “trollish” comment is often shouted down almost immediately.
And anyone else who participated would be as susceptible to influence by The Sun or Daily Mail, local lobbyists and any politician with the gift of the gab as indeed voters are today.
You make it sound like such a forum would only be frequented by far-right lobbyist, policians and pundits – why would liberals and thinkers of all stripes not also be free to influence voters?
In any case, look at what happened to Nick Clegg’s exercise in purging the statute books last year.
I remember reading a number of very insightful proposals and arguments on that site – from my point of view this was an excellent example of how this sort of thing could work – what did you find wrong with it?
I absolutely agree that there are very reasonable concerns about how such a system might work (and whether it can be made to work at all) – but I think the jury is still out on that. For that reason I would have to say that the wholesale replacement of the Lords with this would probably be premature. However I wouldn’t throw the idea of e-democracy entirely out of the window at this stage.
In other news last time I checked (which was a while ago now), the Freedom Bill was more or less ripped apart by the people contributing to the Public Reading Stage trial. This looked to me like a very good initial attempt at adding public participation to the drafting process. The Public Reading Stage is IMHO in the wrong place though – it should be later in the process, not the first stage where the comments can be just ignored in later readings.
So here’s my idea – what if public participation were added as an integral part of the Lords review, rather than replacing it? This would allow the public to be guided by legislative experts rather than being left alone to “talk amongst themselves”. Done correctly it would give the public a real influence over whether a bill gets amended or outright rejected, while offering expert oversite to prevent some of the problems being discussed above.