Found this today while chasing a Digg link to photographs of (empty) London on Christmas day – and I sympathise; I rather like the Lords – a bunch of people who don’t have to answer to the electorate but who (sometimes) care about the issues, can be a marvelous brake on “progress”.

IanVisits
Probably one of the better opening sentences to an opinion piece…

It cannot be right that the House of Lords is now more ethnically diverse than the House of Commons, the head of Britain’s equalities watchdog warned yesterday.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/20/house-commons-equality

The House of Lords is one of those problematic aspects of politics.

Whenever they vote down the government on ID cards and the like, we applaud the principle of a non-elected house which is not a slave to opinion polls and the tabloid newspapers.

The minute they do something we don’t like – they are lambasted as unrepresentative out of touch old fogies who don’t understand the real world.

However, it seems that the branch of government which is unrepresentative could in fact be the elected house, not the Lords. Who’d a thought it!