Whilst politicians wrangle about how to reform the House of Lords, nothing exposes the urgency of reforms to the House of Commons more than the Murdoch report by the Commons Select Committee on Culture Media and Sport. 

One of the most hard hitting reports of recent times, resulting from one of the intensive investigations will result in almost no Parliamentary action. Not because, on essential elements, there was a split on the Committee, but because even where there was no dissent – in finding that the Committee had in effect been lied to – there is no current consequence of worth.

MPs can open the window on wrongdoing, but they can do all but nothing when they find it. Exposing it has little direct effect. Indeed the share price of the Murdoch entity – News Corp’s share price reflected this, closing up 0.9 per cent at $19.79 in the immediate aftermath of the Committee’s report. Publish and be exonerated seems to be the mantra that flows from what happened in the Commons yesterday.

So far, Commons reforms have centered on reducing the absurdly large number of MPs from 650 to 600 at the next election. Many regard even the latter number as too large. Power is centered in the executive. Most individuals winning election to Parliament aspire to Ministerial careers. Consequently “holding the executive to account” is seen by many as a “second class” activity. 

In the US where the Executive is separated from the Legislature, holding the Executive to account is perceived to be the highest form of politics. Indeed the fear is that MPs hold back in investigating the Executive precisely because they are themselves jockeying to join it.

Powerless MPs probing vast multi-national businesses with a direct access to newspapers have remained eternally vulnerable to lies and worse. It emerged that the very Select Committee that investigated the Murdoch Empire had itself been subjected to attempts to smear the private lives of the MPs carrying out the investigation.

Hence the call by a number of MPs for such investigative bodies to be armed with the power of subpoena and the giving of evidence on oath.

Even now, the legal experts that flank the Speaker in the Commons are trawling the statutes for punishments that are fit for the misdemeanor of “misleading the House”. Will they find a cell in the Tower of London? As of last night the speculation centered on an arcane provision that allows for the detention of offenders “within Parliament”.

The Murdoch Empire operatives have done parliament a favor. They have exposed the antiquity and weakness of our own political system, and its inability to bring miscreants to book. To resort to the word MPs themselves coined of Rupert Murdoch – it is “unfit” for purpose. But don’t hold your breath against anything being done about it.

You can follow Jon on Twitter @jonsnowC4

It’s been a hot news period. Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest and the freedom of Paul and Rachel Chandler from their kidnap ordeal in Somalia. So spare a thought for the future governance of the United Kingdom…or not.

The House of Commons has already effectively rubber stamped the Coalition Government’s plans to reduce the House of Commons by 50 seats, and to subject the electoral system to a referendum.

Tonight it’s the turn of the un-elected House of Lords to pass judgement on the views of the elected House of Commons as to how it should be elected and what it should actually be.

In theory, the House of Commons is supposed to hold the ‘Executive’ to account. But the Executive itself – the happy band of Ministers represents 20 per cent of the entire House of Commons.

In 1900 the Cabinet had 19 members. In 2010 it has 24. But Ministers outside the Cabinet have gone up vastly since 1900 – from 41 to 96 in 2010. What is particularly fascinating is that in the last 10 years, when Westminster is supposed to have devolved power to London, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the number of Ministers at Westminster has gone UP by 20 Ministers! (And don’t begin to mention powers transferred to Brussels!)

So, if you push the number of MPs DOWN by 50 and the number of Ministers stays the same, or even goes on going UP, then the stranglehold the ‘payroll vote’ has on the Commons becomes ever stronger.

No wonder the un-elected are considering pursuing the elected with the prospect of referring the entire reform to a Lords Committee – ergo – no referendum for months, possibly years, to come.

Labour appears to have been discombobulated by the debate. ‘Just say no’, seems to have been the Party’s preferred option. What nobody seems keen to discuss is what sort of reform might actually improve Britain’s governance and the Government’s accountability.

How refreshing if a party would step forward with a coherent plan that would embrace a proper size for the Ministerial ranks, for the Commons, and a role for a reformed House of Lords itself.

Having lived and worked in the United States, I find it hard to imagine a viable Commons that needs to be larger than the 400 seat House of Representatives, nor a functioning House of Lords larger than the Senate’s 100 Senators. As for Ministers, who seriously believes that we need the present 119? What on Earth do they all do? Given devolution, and the need for much more to come – perish the thought – did the Victorians perhaps have it right at 60 Ministers in 1900?

As for the electoral system, and the size of individual Parliamentary constituencies? Please God, could I leave that to another blog?

One subject that guarantees a yawn amongst the chattering classes, and that is more or less anything to do with the House of Lords.

Now that its unreceipted expenses system, its appointments ethics and its governance have all been exposed at various moments during the overall parliamentary expenses scandal, its reputation has slipped subtlety into the realm of farce.

The opacity of the appointments procedure and the conditions that were and still are demanded for membership of the Lords is revealed by the fact that it has taken 10 years to discover any of the terms Michael Ashcroft was set for his admission.

Even now we don’t have the precise details. It reveals too that – until the law changes (safely after the next election) – there was no requirement that in order to enter the Lords a member actually had to pay full UK taxes on all income whether at home or abroad.

Ever since the erstwhile chair of the Appointments Commission (who also Chaired HBOS when it hit the wall) declared that there was no place for hairdressers as members of the House of Lords, there has been a question mark over the whole question of who gets in and how.

And yet as we approach the election, the political classes are still desperate to get in.

And why not? As revealed in Snowblog recently, the governance of the House of Lords and the approach to expenses remains lax if not worse.

A significant, albeit undemocratic element of our legislature with nearly 800 members, why does the institution matter so little?

It may be that many people think the place no better than providing free parking, office facilities and somewhere to sleep in the centre of London.

Others may think it is no more important than providing a few old fogeys with airline upgrades and tables at London eateries.

SOME SAY that is DOES matter, that it does indeed contaminate our body politic.

That in addition it sanctifies inheritance (there are still 90+ peers who are there because of who their mother married); it gives the lie to the idea that our ‘mother of parliaments’ is the cradle of democracy; and enshrines privilege and social hierarchy that infect the rest of our society.

Sir Ian Kennedy, the chairman of the Commons standards watchdog is reported today to be in a hurry to fix a new regime for MPs’ expenses before the next election ushers in a new slew of MPs.

There is no such hurry in the House of Lords.

Nor is anyone in the Lords over anxious about speaking publicly about the closed door un-minuted meeting that last week came up with the brilliant scheme whereby their Lordships have only to visit their ‘primary residence’ just once a month to qualify for out-of-town allowances and travel expenses that in many cases run into many tens of thousands of pounds.

So who chaired this hugely important committee in the crucial deliberation that arrived at this bizarre decision? Quite naturally perhaps, it was the Lords Speaker, Baroness Helene Hayman.

But hang on a moment, is this the same Lady Hayman who has claimed some £200,000 for what she describes as her main residence in Norfolk, whilst continuing to live in a London home that she bought and has lived in since 1975?

Lady Hayman is one of nine all-party peers cleared of abusing the out of town allowances totalling tens of thousands of pounds. Times Online conveniently lists them all:

“Lord Colwyn, a Tory peer who claimed £170,000 by designating a Cotswolds property as his main home; Baroness Hayman, the Lord Speaker, who claimed £200,000 over eight years for a property in Norfolk; Baroness Morgan of Drefelin, the children’s minister, who claimed more than £140,000 for a cottage in West Wales; Baroness Northover, a Lib Dem frontbench spokeswoman, who claimed £90,000 on her mother’s home in Sussex; Baroness Thornton, a Labour whip, who claimed £22,000 on her mother’s bungalow in Yorkshire; Lord Morris of Manchester, who claimed on a house in Manchester before flipping his main residence to London; Baroness Whitaker, a Labour peer who claimed £150,000 on a rented cottage in Sussex; and Lord Haworth, the Labour peer, who claimed £100,000 on a property in Scotland.”

Lady Hayman may have set the rules in her committee, but she did not execute them.

This was left to Michael Pownall, the Clerk of the Parliament – a career Lords civil servant who has toiled on their Lordships expenses and welfare for nearly forty years. He was party to the Lords continuing un-receipted expenses system during the period of the controversial expenses payments.

So here we are.

The new expenses system in the House of Lords now allows a peer merely to “visit” a property out of London once a month to claim it as his primary residence. He, or she, does not need to own it nor provide proof of rental payments. The property can be owned by a relative.

Whilst most of the attention has focused on the Commons, and upon police investigations, the House of Lords could appear to some to have been left somewhere adjacent to the Mad Hatter’s tea table, oblivious to the real world spinning beyond.

Are these self made “behind closed door” deals really going to be allowed to prevail? Who’s to stop them? What do they say of this significant limb of our legislative system?

There is something squalid about watching MPs screeching over the immediate decision to prosecute some of their number.

My sources suggest more MPs, and more particularly more peers, will be charged in the coming days and weeks. It’s clear this morning that some MPs are trying to find a way of extracting party advantage from the hysteria.

It will be confusing for many voters, that some politicians have behaved so badly that they require charging, that others have ‘paid back’ much larger sums of money and evaded any contact with the law.

One of the most mysterious aspects of the whole sage is the fact that in both the Lords and the Commons, extraordinarily wealthy people in their own right have felt it worth ‘fiddling’ their expenses to achieve such modest moneys in comparison to their vast worth.

Is this a facet of the human condition? That once you have it, you want still more?

The bits of judgement that seem to me to have been missed from Sir Christopher Kelly and Sir Tom Legg (the investigating authorities) are those that centre on the wholesale preparedness by all MPs to tolerate a system they knew was being abused (either by themselves or others); and the ‘culture of deference in parliament’.

If you go down to Westminster these days, MPs may not want to be seen much outside Parliament, but inside they still swan about the place as if it is theirs and not ours.

The current period of pain and revelation has done nothing to reduce the evidence that the culture, practice, environment, establishment of politics in Parliament require root and branch reform.

From the voting system to the all but unaccountable Executive, the need for reform is great; the chances that it will occur – all but nil.

I continue to find, in talking to people, that it is the disrepute into which parliament has been dragged by the peers and MPs’ expenses scandal that dominates politics over and above party rivalry.

Hence Nick Clegg’s call today to cancel the Queen’s speech this week may have a stronger resonance than at first might appear. Clegg wants to use the last few weeks of this parliament to reform the political system rather than waste time debating a legislative programme that will never be enacted.

History may view with some disdain the failure of the political classes to recognise that the expenses scandal is less about usury than about the implosion of an overall parliamentary system seen by many as “unfit for purpose”.

The continued election of parties who manage to garner perhaps a third of the entire potential national vote and then govern with “absolute power” will surely be regarded as past its sell-by date.

Adversarial politics fought out in a chamber that dictates a sword and a half’s length between speakers from government and opposition may be seen too by historians as beyond the ridiculous.

There are huge constitutional challenges facing Britain, let alone the economic issues that accompany them. The idea that MPs took three months of holiday, then luxuriated in the state opening of parliament with less than six months to go to a general election, beggars belief.

I am depressed by those comments in my Lords Snowblog of last week, that we are in danger of letting in “terrorists” and the rest if we go too far with reform. I believe quite the reverse.

To add to matters, I have learned that the Labour party is now going through its ranks of peers to determine where their “principal residence” is. This after years of wholesale abuse of the system in which lords and ladies of all persuasions have claimed distant holiday homes to enable them to get the accompanying unreceipted travel expenses.

I have also learned that “arrangements” have been made to allow serving ministers in the Lords to claim a residence out of town “for necessary respite”, retrospectively protecting ministers and law officers who may have claimed for such provision.

Maybe Mr Clegg has a point.

I am back on my old hobbyhorse of lords’ expenses.

I have now talked to a committee secretary, who informs me that none of their expenses are receipted.

My contact talks of “knocking back” particularly extreme expense claims from one peer who has already been named in the matter of undue housing claims.

But the central issue is that of paperwork. There is a voluntary scheme in the Lords for peers to draw a business credit card, on which they can charge flights, meals, hotels, taxis and the rest.

I have to hand those for all the Northern Ireland peers. But they are a quite extraordinary bundle of paper, because just about every entry has been redacted.

There is absolutely no knowing what the individual commercial transaction was. At times it is obvious that it was a flight.

Peers claim that their travel arrangements are so uncertain, and their need to get to Westminster fast so urgent, that they invariably have to take the most expensive option going.

So while the rest of us are spending £35 on Easyjet or Ryanair, they go for British Midland or some such. And as for buying tickets in advance, they quite simply don’t seem to do it.

All this only goes to show that if a credit card issued to the peers, funded by the taxpayer, cannot be fully and publicly accounted for, the system isn’t worth the paper it is printed on. Added to which, all this redaction is using up a great deal of printing ink.

I go so far as to suggest that, if anything, the system of expenses in the House of Lords is potentially more dubious than in the House of Commons, specifically because of the lack of receipts.

It’s worth pointing out that there is to be no comprehensive inquiry into what’s been going on in the House of Lords, and the amounts of money involved are very much larger than in the lower house.

Why is there to be no ‘Legg style’ investigation into the expenses of members of the House of Lords?

I have blogged before on the expenses culture in the House of Lords.

The Sunday Times has now looked at some twenty peers whose expenses give rise to concern. The latest concerns those of Baroness Goudie – who has been claiming her first home as a flat in Glasgow. This despite having a London home with her QC husband in Belgravia.

Incidentally, once a ‘first home’ has been accepted, a peer can claim travel expenses (largely un-receipted) to and from that place, and spouses get six First Class rail tickets two and from per year.

Lord Paul has asked the House of Lords authorities to investigate his own £38,000 claim on an Oxfordshire flat in which he admits he has never slept. Lord Paul, a Labour peer of ‘non-dom’ status was allowed to become a member of the Privy Council in June of this year.

As for status – the Tory peer, Michael Ashcroft, is opaque about his status. Over the years there have been claims that he too is of ‘non-dom’ status. Both these peers are million pound plus donors to respectively the Labour and Tory Parties.

The sums of money involved in the Lords’ expenses scandal are very, very much larger than those in the Commons – yet there appears to be a determination not to investigate.

Is this because a number of those so far either named or currently being investigated by the media are, or have been, ministers?

The Telegraph reported yesterday that four peers are under police investigation over their expenses.

Yes another one joins the House of Lords for life. Alan Sugar is yet one more Labour appointed member of the Upper House pushing the number of peers well beyond the 700 mark.

On the very day that Justice Secretary Jack straw announced modest ideas for reform, Sugar’s arrival made no mention and paid no regard to the claim that the House of Lords is about to be reformed.

If it is being reformed why continue to put people in there for life who will have a casting vote on their own removal and will almost certainly cost money to dispose of ahead of any wholesale reform?

Any examination of Labour’s ‘plans’ for the House of Lords reveals almost no desire to produce much beyond a wholly appointed chamber. Indeed the Tory leader in the Lords Lord, Tom Strathclyde has said as much.

Recently the surviving 91 hereditary peers held an election to replace one of their dead members. Old Etonian, Lord Bledisloe was voted out by the grim reaper, Lord Aberdare (5th generation), also an Old Etonian was voted in with a majority of 27. We are not allowed to know how many of the 91 hereditary peers voted.

Jack Straw wants rid of the hereditary peers, not in an overnight coup, but by ending these elections. Some of these men and women are in their thirties and forties, so it could take half a century to get them out.

David Cameron has described Lords reform for the Tory’s as a “third term priority”. For Labour it is not even proving a fourth term priority.

This is UKPLC in the 21st Century. The message from the political classes seems to be that the problems in the House of Commons are bad enough without knocking the hallowed House of Lords about.

Pull one brick out and the whole lot may come down.

Gordon Brown will signal today whether the political classes “get it” when it comes to combating the expenses scandal in parliament.

“Getting it” extends well beyond expenses to full-blown reform of our system of governance, as I have written here before.

He is rumoured to want a change in the voting system – delicate in the light of the BNP’s benefit from the hopeless supposed PR system deployed for Euro elections.

However, there must be a fairer system than first past the post. The alternative vote plus voting system may be one.

But there are even deeper principles to be addressed. The direct election of the post Mr Brown holds. Term limits. My own MP is setting out on yet another run for parliament at the next election. Lovely, straight, dedicated guy. But after three decades?

So term limits? Eight years for a PM? 12 years for an MP? Reduction in size of legislature? Wholesale devolution of all domestic power to the local?

A new meeting place for our elected representative – Westminster wholly unfit for modern business? Separation of powers – no-one in the Commons, which is tasked with holding the executive to account and with vetting appointments TO the executive?

An executive drawn from beyond the Lords and Commons. A small, directly elected Lords to vet legislation in Europe, and a last “court of appeal” for local authorities?

The work on all this has been done many times over. Are the Lib Dems right? Should MPs and peers be kept at Westminster for all but a fortnight’s holiday this summer until they have sorted reform out? What on earth are they doing going off for more than three months hols? Who else amongst us enjoys such largesse at our expense?