‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is generally a sound rule for democratic institutions, as with most things in life. So why on earth the mantra is applied to our second chamber I do not know.

The House of Lords used to encapsulate everything odious about Britain, especially its entrenched elites. Gone mercifully are the days when aristocrats could dictate policy in taxation and spending. Yet work is still to be done. There remains a rut of about 90 hereditary peers and offensively, in one of the most irreligious societies on earth, 26 Church of England bishops — placing us comfortably amongst Burkina Faso, Turkmenistan and Saudi Arabia in the democratic premier league. Though I confess to a soft spot for Archbishop Rowan Williams (his voice is ready-made for audiobooks, no?) the good nature of these men (exclusively men, of course) is not a price worth paying for our inclusion with Iran as the only other country to let unelected clerics make the laws we must obey.

In 1997 most inherited seats were rescinded in favour of appointed peerages. This prerogative has been used and abused by Prime Ministers for blatant patronage, packing it full of dodgy donors and personal cronies, exerting a massive corrupting influence throughout the highest echelons of business and politics. The ‘Cash for Honours’ scandal that dogged Blair’s last days in office poisoned his legacy almost as much as Iraq. The reforms merely changed the Lords from an aristocratic institution to one predominantly inhabited by the nouveau riche. As it is constituted today its members are either born into it, or they have bought into it. It remains a tool of the privileged, ‘perhaps the most potent symbol of a closed society’ says our Deputy PM. Quite so. The Lords is a ridiculous anachronism that cannot be made good. It has long been indefensible in theory; it is also defunct in practice.

Cue Nick Clegg’s proposal to transform the Lords into an 80% elected Senate of 300 strong. There are clear merits to such a plan. In austerity-ridden times, not the least of these is cost; last year the 800 peers billed us £150 million for their upkeep. By more than halving its size, we’d be able to return a big chunk of that to the taxpayer. But why stop there? Do we really want a bicameral legislature; that is a divided legislature where the upper house reviews and competes with the lower one. A second elected chamber would inject into Westminster the kind of deadlock and sluggishness that characterises America’s imperfect democracy. Such a dispersal of power between two bodies of equal legitimacy would lead to a paralysis of much the same fashion that confronted Lloyd George a century ago when he tried to pass the ‘People’s Budget’. Two chambers. Two mandates. Twice the carnage.

Many sincere liberals contend that we need the Lords in some form due to its role revising, improving and challenging legislation from the Commons that would otherwise pass unimpeded. The concern is understandable, but surely we can dismiss it? We have a strong, independent judiciary — ensuring the government can’t do anything illegal. We have a free press that is hardly deferential to those in power. And we have a strong civil society; experts and interest groups are unafraid to petition those in power and the electorate, if necessary, can boot them out when the time comes. New Zealand, Sweden and several US states all manage just fine without a second chamber. So can we.

Abolition of the House of Lords would complete the centuries-old business of bringing unelected parliamentary interests to heel. The current upper house is simply an embarrassment and proposals to augment it would undermine the efficient, unitary nature of our system. Ministers should not overlook the simple, yet radical, solution at hand.

So it’s done, it’s over, it’s passed. Well, almost. After a year and a bit of vehement opposition from doctors, nurses and the public, not to mention plenty of wrangling between the Lib Dems and Tories, Andrew Lansley’s controversial NHS reforms have made it through the Lords. The cabinet is said to have celebrated with traditional tabletop fist-banging, and the act will come into force shortly before Easter, once it is given royal assent.

We find ourselves in a situation where far-reaching reforms that were unmentioned in the Conservative campaign, and even implicitly rejected in the coalition agreement, will be passed without even a nod to widespread public opposition. To add further offence, the party pushing the bill failed to gain even a parliamentary majority. What, then, does this say about Britain as a democracy?

For their five-year term, the party we elect holds legislative power that is almost totally free from any formal constraints. Our system of cabinet government, our first-past-the-post electoral system, and in particular the powerful whip rules all serve to further concentrate party power in the cabinet, and even amongst a handful of individuals in the case of certain administrations, such as Thatcher’s or Blair’s. In the absence of any formal checks on power, all we are left with are informal checks. Our entire democracy rests on the flimsy assumption that our elected representatives will voluntarily act in accordance with our wishes. MPs may do so in order to secure re-election, since unpopular reform is likely to hurt them at the polls, though if we are optimistic we might put this down to a noble respect for vague principles of popular sovereignty..

These may well be a strong constraints on government behaviour much of the time, but for the NHS reforms, the resultant decline in popularity has proven an insufficient deterrent. The Conservatives are polling consistently behind Labour, despite the perceived lack of charisma that dogs its wobbly-faced leader, and it is easy to understand how they might think it wise to rush through as much reform as they can now, in case they lose the next election.

The surest way to prevent such failures of democracy would be constitutional reform. However, there is no complete constitutional change that would provide a silver bullet solution.The American system, for example, has a clear separation of powers, a strong emphasis on regionalism, and consequently endless disunity within its political parties. It does curtail the possibility of an elected dictatorship, but with the unfortunate side-effect of leaving the American government embarrassingly impotent.

Perhaps there is a happy medium. Lower caps on campaign spending would leave candidates less reliant on the support of their parties, as would preferential voting, which would place independents at less of a disadvantage. This would serve to weaken party discipline, and so help decentralise power away from the cabinet. An elected second chamber, with long terms and a full veto, could be less partisan and more open to public opinion. More radical would be a constitutional requirement for referenda on controversial reforms that fail to pass with a 2/3 majority.

This is just idle speculation, my point is that we need constitutional change. But while this is not forthcoming there is still a palliative to the problem at hand: outrage. We have grown used to governments abusing their mandates to force through reforms that hardly anyone actually wants; columnists talk of bills being passed ‘in the face of overwhelming public opposition’ as if this were somehow legitimate or even normal. Reactions both in the opposition and the press have tended to stick to grumbling about the reforms themselves; instead, the coalition’s wanton abuse of power should spark outrage in its own right, and above all that outrage has to be carried to the ballot box. If our political system creates elected dictatorships, then we must try as best we can to pressure those elected dictators to act like democrats.