From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Tue Aug 06 2002 - 03:52:03 MDT
On Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 02:41:47PM -0700, Charles Hixson wrote:
> I feel that a random selection process would improve over our current
> lot of candidates. Perhaps random selection of five candidates, and
> then electoral choice between them. The current system selects in favor
> of power-mad psychotics. (That may be a too extreme phraseology, but
> the bias is clearly in that direction from the population mean.)
While not applicable to the US model, I rather like the idea of replacing
the UK's House of Lords (which is in transition from being an unelected
body of hereditary nobility to being an elected upper house) with a jury.
The idea is simple: the House of Lords has traditionally had a remit to
veto or revise legislation, not to initiate it. So: allocate 600 seats,
and a 5-year incumbency per seat. Each year, retire 150 members and select
another 150 by lottery from the electoral register. Apply a filter to
weed out people who are too old, too ill, or clearly too stupid (read:
Forest Gump levels of disability). Allow deferrments of up to 5 years
for those people who can serve but are, for example, running their own
business and would therefore suffer hardship if summoned to a 5-year
jury sitting -- but otherwise, it's compulsory.
Pay them either a Member of Parliament's salary or their previous
salary plus 20%, whichever is higher, so there's no excuse of short-term
hardship, and provide a pension afterwards -- subject to withdrawl (and
criminal proceedings) if they're found to have taken bribes or other
tokens of compensation while in office or after leaving office. (There
should be no revolving door between the upper house and the boardrooms
of the FT100, in other words: under the previous Conservative government
it got to be a standing joke that the pension for a Cabinet Minister
was a non-executive directorship of a company like British Airways.)
This house isn't there to initiate legislation; it's there to say "thus
far and NO further!" to the professional elected politicians in the lower
house. It is not a house of representatives OF the people, it's a house of
representatives DRAWN FROM the people. Strictly at random. With an explicitly
non-political civil service staff to help interpret the legislation, and
maybe a 2-year training/education course in basic British constitutional
law and parliamentary procedure before representatives take their seats,
to give them at least a fighting chance of understanding what they've got
themselves into.
I can't see anything wrong with this idea ... except that it won't happen
because none of the [elected] politicians designing the House of Lords'
replacement body would touch it with a barge-pole, because it would reduce
their own power and freedom of action. Sigh.
-- Charlie
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