Compassionate, wise, orderly – if only the Lords were elected

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/2016/apr/04/lords-peers-unelected-peers-debates

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I never thought I’d say this, but here goes: I recommend a visit to the House of Lords. True, there’s pomp. You have to report to Black Rod to be allowed to sit on the narrow, slippy red benches in the gallery and to look around a grand room, attempting to recognise figures prominent in the news 15 years ago by the tops of their heads. And there’s little help from the red TV screens with squint-small type: is that Lord Bowen or Brown? Lord B of what? Something long, three words, begins with E. Still, the pomp is matched by the particular and the homely: a voice quavering with age as well as conviction; Baroness Lawrence keeping warm with a scarf spread across her lap.

And yes, of course the Lords is bloated — the 45 new peers (mostly Conservative) appointed in the most recent dissolution honours list took the membership to 826, a legislative population eclipsed only by the National People’s Congress of China – but the number of attendees in the course of a year is half that.

In the debate I watched, about the immigration bill, it was between 50 and 70. But no one has to yell for order, or struggle to be heard over a pack of baying men, which is refreshing. As is the ever present likelihood that a former justice of the supreme court will give his tuppenceworth on a legal point, or that someone who arrived on the Kindertransport will describe what that meant. Many peers actually seem to know what they’re talking about.

The discussion was sensible and, dare I say it, sometimes even moving

 It took a while, however, to put a finger on the most striking thing of all, which turned out to be the unusual pleasure of watching people argue for what sounded suspiciously like ideals. The discussion was sensible and sometimes even moving. Perhaps it is partly a function of the toxicity of the immigration debate in this country that unelected peers seem the only legislators able to display a thoughtful compassion. And it prompted a thought: clearly the problem with the Lords is that they’re unelected. But if there were a way of electing them and keeping the grown-up tenor of debate? Now, that really would be a win-win.

Emergency empathy

I called 111 the other day – a child’s head bumped in a tumble down stone steps is one way to make the acquaintance of Oxford’s newly refurbished Weston Library, but not recommended. The clinician on the phone made an executive decision to send an ambulance. I was too flustered by the gravity of this reaction to say that the local cab firm frequently turns up early (which is, oddly, nearly as annoying as being late), and often within minutes of a call. The ambulance crew, employed by a private medical company based in Milton Keynes, were cheery and kind and, knowing nothing about other more serious calls on their time, I draw no conclusions. Except to say that the ambulance was surprisingly small and comforting – and that it took half an hour to arrive.

Rat and Ratty are voles apart

Most of Oxford is not far from some water system or other, and one can criss-cross the city on towpaths and river banks instead of roads. But there is, as always, a price to be paid for the picturesque and calming, and with waterways it’s flooding and rats. One came up to our back window the other day, and I watched it snuffling around the roots of a tree, trying to detach the fact of a small brown rodent from its fearsome reputation (A Journal of the Plague Year, read decades ago, and especially James Herbert’s The Rats still being vivid memories). What about Ratty in The Wind in the Willows? He isn’t scary. Hello Ratty – but of course, Ratty is not a rat at all, but a water vole, an altogether cuddlier proposition, occasioning less prejudice.

@AidaE