Lords of misrule

I just heard Prime Minister David Cameron explaining why he opposed a referendum on Lords reform while supporting referendums on London and other places having mayors – the mayoral referendums because locally entrenched politicians were against them and a referendum was to get past them and find the people’s wishes; whereas for Lords reform the entrenched powers in all three parties are in favour of some cosmetic reform.

Mr Cameron appeared to be unaware that he was thus riding two horses in opposite directions. This commitment to democratic sovereignty, but not when it is against your own entrenched interests, is typical of our political class.

Reforming the Lords is as major a constitutional change as we have seen since women got the vote.

If this is not something on which the people’s wishes are to be made known, then Britain is not a democracy.

We should settle this by referendum.

But it should not be the sort of referendum we had on voting reform, where the most popular option, true proportional representation, was deliberately kept off the ballot because the Tories knew it would easily win.

We need a proper multi- option run-off referendum under which we, the people, get to decide whether we want a fully elected PR chamber, or, as currently, a fully appointed one, some mixture of the two or something else.

No decision from which the people are deliberately excluded will get any lasting respect, and parliamentarians are not overly burdened with popular regard as it is.

Neil Craig

Woodlands Road

Glasgow