Nick Thornsby and Paddy Ashdown on House of Lords reform

Nick Thornsby writes:

Six examples of Tory support for an elected House of Lords…
Here’s the Prime Minister speaking just weeks before the 2010 general election in the leadership debates, where he couldn’t have been clearer in his support for a mainly or wholly elected chamber, and again criticising Labour for failing to deliver this…

See Cameron and the other five examples here.

Meanwhile, Paddy Ashdown demonstrates that becoming a Lords doesn’t necessarily mean suddenly losing your enthusiasm for Lords reform:

Some write of the ‘amazing expertise’ in the Lords. They are right to do so – we have some eminent, independent figures there. But they are far outnumbered by the retired, the rejected, the defeated and the sometimes dead-beat from the Commons.

My colleague Alex Carlile, who wrote in this paper last Sunday, is not a Lord because he is a great legal eagle (which he undoubtedly is), but because he is a former Lib Dem MP. I should know. It was me who recommended him for a peerage.

Anyway, expertise will not, as he claimed last week, be ‘lost’ in the new Lords. Quite the contrary. The present Lords has 80 active ‘crossbench’ experts among our 800 appointees. The new Lords will have 90 appointed experts out of 450. So the influence of non-party ‘experts’ on Lords decisions will go up!