Having been a little bit busy I didn’t link to this at the time, but even this late in the day as electoral reform is still such a popular topic, Bella Gerens has an excellent post on How to solve the problem of a hung parliament
“Whenever constitutional reform is mooted here in the UK, the drive seems to be something along the lines of: the executive has too much power, MPs have too little, and oh yeah, unelected Lords have no place in a democratic nation. (Let’s pretend in this discussion, for the sake of simplicity, that the Lisbon Treaty hasn’t made Parliament redundant.)
What kind of reforms would be required, then, to address these perceived problems?
The House of Lords is easy: sweep out all of the old peers and bishops and allow people to stand for election. Presumably the old peers and bishops would be permitted to stand if they wanted to; certainly they would have to have the franchise returned to them.“
