It’s up to you to decide. The reason that the credit crunch is worldwide is that those responsible for our way of life across the globe, were so busy making their personal fortunes on the stock exchange, with their inside information, that they hadn’t time to read what we, the blog writers or the press were screaming about for more than three years.
Seeing that there is this urge for total change, and the Lords have failed in their duty to protect us from the excesses of Parliament, I decided they would have to go, and also some of the changes that I would make and what I would put in their place. To start with, there would need to be a replacement for the Lords, the members of which should be people from all walks of life, with varied experience and a high qualification in their own field, to act as watchdogs on Parliament. Experience is far more advantageous than purely academic ability. They must have no overt prejudices, and working allegiances with any political party. These people would act as consultants, highly paid because the country would have first call on their services, and they would be controlled by a select committee to look into aspects of government legislation, procedures and controls. Let us just for convenience call the system The Arbiters. But before that happened I would have every Member of Parliament required to write in no more than 300 words their justification for their position individually. I think this exercise alone will be very revealing, especially if they were involved concurrently in other ventures.
The Arbiters once in place, will be required to vet these declarations, and from the 600 or so, select, firstly those that seem surplus to requirements, secondly those constituencies that could be disadvantaged with a reduction in the final number of Members, and thus arrive at a smaller, more economical, and justifiable House. One aspect of this is that to ensure that the Arbiters themselves are behaving responsibly, the current Members, before the change, would have the opportunity to object, to suggests modifications and/or additions to the arbiters proposals -checks and balances, addressed to the inner select committee, as referred to above
There would also be limitations. There is no doubt that experience is the key to quality evaluation, not the talented tunnel vision of an academic genius. With this in mind, the requirement for an Arbiter will be that he was 50 or over, and under 70. His tenure would be for ten years, renewable at the behest of the select committee, during which the last two would be the changeover with his or her successor. Initially the Arbiters would be in two similar groups, one to arbitrate on the work going through Parliament concurrently with the change, and the second group carrying out the change. At the end, the final Arbiters will be selected from the two groups, at which point there would be a staged takeover in all departments, not necessarily concurrently, for the new Membership of the House from the old. One change I would make is that no unelected person could act as adviser or spin doctor, that the MPs would have to stand on their own feet. In this way we would really know the metal of our leaders, not what they want us to believe.