It is not my intention that this becomes a blog about Twitter so I’ll let this be my third and final post on the subject for the time being (the next will be a small rant on a different subject).

But I wanted to draw attention to Twitter’s appearances in Parliament on Thursday, and in particular Jo Swinson’s contribution to the Christmas adjournment debate. As well as being the youngest MP, Jo is one of Parliament’s few twitterers, as she mentions:

I want to talk about the possibility of speeding up Parliament’s entry into the 21st century. I know that the Deputy Leader of the House has taken an interest in online matters. Indeed, I remember that, before his promotion to the Government, he was often seen asking questions in business questions to the Leader of the House about whether we should have more e-tabling of signatures for early-day motions and such like. More and more MPs are now using the internet to connect better with their constituents, and Parliament should also embrace this new technology, whether through social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, or through interactive forums, encouraging comments on websites, podcasts, video logs—known as v-logs, they are small videos that can be uploaded to sites such as YouTube—or, indeed, a new website launched today called tweetminster.co.uk. It aggregates all the mini-blogs or “twitters” of those MPs who twitter regularly. I declare an interest, as one of the five MPs identified as those who use this service. The others are the hon. Members for Loughborough (Mr. Reed), for West Bromwich, East (Mr. Watson) and for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), and my hon. Friend Lynne Featherstone. This is an example of a way of connecting more immediately with our constituents, and I would encourage other hon. Members to make full use of the advantages that the internet offers, particularly in relation to the younger audience, who would not normally declare a huge interest in politics.

Jo went on to mention two other important issues of parliamentary accessibility: the rules which keep footage of Parliament off YouTube and mySociety’s Free Our Bills campaign, which I have plugged before.

Thanks to mySociety, you can watch Jo’s speech in full right here:

In tracking down Jo’s speech on TheyWorkForYou, I stumbled across two further mentions of Twitter. Thursday in the House of Lords saw Lord Norton’s debate about Parliament’s communication with the public. The first mention of Twitter came from crossbencher the Earl of Erroll, who also mentioned YouTube:

An interesting development is putting stuff about the Lords on YouTube. I was interested to see how we are rated. About 10,000 people have looked at the piece by the Lord Speaker, which is interesting and informative; about 12,000 people have looked at the Youth Parliament which took over the Chamber last summer; but 47,000 people looked at a pop group called the House of Lords, which was next on the list. That tells me that people are attracted by entertainment. If we are to try to get our message across, we shall have to make it quite entertaining and short, sharp and snappy so that people become aware of it.
[…]
The Lords of the Blog come along with more serious pieces. I have looked at that and it is heavier stuff to go through, but it is good. We need some short, sharp things. I think Twitter used very short sentences to track the State Opening of Parliament; for example, “The Queen has just entered the House” and so on. I do not know how many people showed interest in that, but all those little things build up more interest and then some people dig deeper. That is important.

The final word, though, to the second mention of Twitter, from the Lord Greaves:

A lot of noble Lords have talked about modern communication. I very much applaud the Lords of the Blog, the most interesting being the noble Lord, Lord Norton, and my noble friend Lord Tyler, but that is because I am interested in the same sort of things, which is why I am taking part in this debate. I do not go on Facebook or YouTube and I hope that I will never need to. I know that Twitter exists, but that can stay where it is. However, I applaud noble Lords who get involved in such things.

I see from the Beeb that Baroness Ashton of Upholland, the Leader of the Lords, is to replace the repatriated Peter Mandelson as the UK’s member of the European Commission.

There was speculation previously that Geoff Hoon could have been the nominee, which would have prompted a by-election in his parliamentary seat because you can’t be an MP and an EU Commissioner.

But can you be a Lord and an EU Commissioner?

Section 1.1.1 of the Commissioners’ Code of Conduct (PDF) states:

Commissioners may not hold any public office of whatever kind.

Now that sounds fairly unambiguous. Being a member of a legislature, however that position is obtained, must surely count?

Baroness Ludford, the Liberal Democrats’ London MEP, has a similar problem: MEPs are no longer allowed to sit in national legislatures, so in order to continue in the post after the European elections in 2009, Sarah Ludford will either need to get the rules changed, or resign her peerage – something the law doesn’t currently allow her to do.

Until now, it’s not been in the Government’s interest to help out by introducing a law that would give “life” peers the ability to give up their peerage – a change similar to that made to hereditary peerages following pressure brought by Tony Benn in the 1960s when he became Viscount Stansgate.

Will Baroness Ashton’s new post prompt Labour to act so that she can avoid a conflict of interest? Or will they try to fudge the issue by claiming that a voluntary “leave of absence” from the upper house – during which she could effectively return to and vote in the Lords whenever she wanted – would be enough to meet the European Commissioners’ Code of Conduct?

J’accuse: the Labour Party, with the smoking bill, in the House of Commons.

The Salisbury Convention, initiated by Lord Salisbury, is the arrangement that dictates that the House of Lords will not vote down or wreck with amendments measures that appeared in the Government’s manifesto. It dates back to a time when the big Tory majority in the House of Lords – thanks to the hereditary peers – meant they could, theoretically, block the Government’s programme.

The convention has become increasingly disregarded, for good reason. While Labour insist the Lords should stick to it, they have themselves failed to follow through on their promises to make the second chamber more democratic. The Tories and LibDems in the upper house therefore argue that the chamber as it exists now is how the Labour party chose to leave it, with the in-built Tory majority of the past long gone. They also argue that, thanks to the continued use of first-past-the-post in general elections, the party make-up of the House of Lords actually better reflects the views of the public at large than the undeserved majority achieved by Labour in the House of Commons.

In today’s theguardian, Baroness Scotland is quote as insisting the Lords should leave the ID cards bill alone:

“We went to the electorate and said, we want identity cards and it will be a compulsory scheme in the long term.”

Lord Phillips, for the LibDems, points out the exact wording of the Labour manifesto:

We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports.

His position is that this should mean that people renewing their passports could opt to join the voluntary scheme, not be forced into it, as the Government wishes. Semantics aside, the wording of Labour’s manifesto is redundant, and it is their own doing, because on page 66, it said:

We will legislate to ensure that all enclosed public places and workplaces other than licensed premises will be smoke-free. The legislation will ensure that all restaurants will be smoke-free; all pubs and bars preparing and serving food will be smoke-free; and other pubs and bars will be free to choose whether to allow smoking or to be smoke-free. In membership clubs the members will be free to choose whether to allow smoking or to be smoke-free. However, whatever the general status, to protect employees, smoking in the bar area will be prohibited everywhere.

Having made this promise, in the manifesto on which all Labour MPs were elected, the Government then allowed their MPs a free vote and the exemptions for bars and membership clubs were removed.

Why is it OK for Labour MPs to ignore one section of the manifesto, while peers (who were not elected on it) are expected to fall in line with another?

Ninety-four years ago, the Parliament Act 1911 received Royal Assent. The Act was intended to begin the process of replacing the hereditary House of Lords with a democratic second chamber. Nearly a century later, the only elected members of the House of Lords are those hereditary peers elected by and from a small group of other gentry.

The Labour Party’s 1997 manifesto said:

As an initial, self-contained reform, not dependent on further reform in the future, the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords will be ended by statute. This will be the first stage in a process of reform to make the House of Lords more democratic and representative.

While most, but not all, of the hereditary peers have gone, the House of Lords in no more democratic (although ironically it is more representative, the current party balance in the Lords more accurately representing the votes cast in the 2005 General Election than the seats in the House of Commons). The British Government is keen to export the principle of democratic governance, but democracy begins at home.

Why do we need a second chamber at all? Revising legislation to make it better written and less open to loopholes would surely be better done by civil servants qualified in law, employed to check the wording of new bills and reporting to the legislature. In America, the bicameral federal congress consists of the House of Representatives, based on population, and the Senate, where power is divided equally between states. The second chamber should, then, perform a role that requires a democratic basis – be that making substantive changes to laws or holding the executive to account – and either have a role distinct from the Commons or represent the population in a different way.

If the House of Lords is to continue with its current powers and responsibilities, it is the composition which must change. The argument that “It’s not the system you’d invent but it’s the best we’ve got” doesn’t hold water. If we are to preach democracy to others, we must do everything we can to ensure that ours is the best we can have.

As well as being an advocate of Lords reform, Robin Cook was a valued proponent of proportional representation. Yet the single best way the Government could defeat calls for PR for the Commons would be to introduce it for elections to the Lords. Two houses constituted in different ways: one by first-past-the-post, one by the single transferable vote, would complement each other.

But would this make the Lords more legitimate? To advocates of PR (usually ignored by the Labour Government anyway), yes. But would this threaten the primacy of the Commons? No. The relative powers of the two houses should be set down in law – ideally in a formal constitution. If this document, endorsed by the population – who, after all, have never been asked what form of government they would prefer – enshrines the supremacy of the House of Commons, it will be protected from overzealous Lords. Even without a constitution, a law defining the powers of the House of Lords would protect the power of the Commons.

This is not the dark ages and our laws should not be dictated by our tribe elders. An unelected second chamber is as unjustifiable as a benevolent dictatorship: both may produce welcome outcomes but both inhibit the freedom of the people to decide their own destiny. Reform was overdue in 1911; now it’s urgent. It’s time to elect the lords.

(This entry fulfils the Blog for Victory PledgeBank pledge. For more on Lords reform marking his anniversary, see the New Politics Network blog.)