Introduction
There are many ways in which you are not doing at all well. For example, your economy has shown itself to be weaker in some important respects than those of other comparable countries, and you now have a very serious budget deficit and huge debts to deal with. You also have too many people leaving school with inadequate qualifications; your transport system leaves much to be desired; and we detect a general dissatisfaction with the way your society is evolving.
It is clear to us that these failures have arisen primarily because your political system is letting you down.
Political Parties
What we find most surprising about the political parties is the amount of power they have over the whole political process.
In particular they have a significant influence over who becomes your Prime Minister. Under your present system the person appointed to this position is normally the leader of the largest party in the House of Commons and it is the party that will have chosen this leader. In our simple way, we would have expected the Prime Minister to have been selected by the people as a whole, or at least by all your elected Members of Parliament.
Members of Parliament
It is clear to us that one of the main weaknesses of your present constitutional arrangements is that, to have a chance of being promoted to a government position, MPs need to demonstrate consistently their loyalty to their party.
The inevitable consequence of this process is that all too often loyalty takes precedence over the exercise of individual judgement, and thus the quality of debate and scrutiny is poorer than it should be.
The Government
There are a number of reasons why your government is less effective than it should be. One, of considerable importance, is that your ministers are selected from a very small group of people, many of whom have only limited experience of the world of work outside politics.
We simply do not believe that only from within this small group was it possible for you to find the people most able to lead the large, important and complex organisations your departments of state have become.
The Prime Minister
Another serious weakness arises from the fact that the person appointed Prime Minister invariably continues to lead his party as well as being in charge of the government. And as party leader he carries on campaigning for his party both in the House of Commons and out in the country in the hope of winning the next election and being re-appointed Prime Minister.
The most obvious example of this is the way the Prime Minister's Questions session is conducted, when both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition appear to be more interested in scoring party political points than in clarifying matters relating to government policy.
The House of Commons
So, do we think that the House of Commons exercises its responsibilities effectively? Regrettably, our view is that in many important respects you are being let down by the body that is supposed to hold the Government to account on your behalf.
One of the main reasons for this is that the House of Commons is dominated by the government. It is easy to see why this is so. The Prime Minister and most of his or her ministers, including senior members of the Cabinet, are themselves MPs. They are, therefore, able to exert a powerful influence on how the other MPs of their party react to their initiatives. As a result the government can usually expect to have the support of a majority of MPs for its proposals, even if the only members supporting them belong to the governing party, and even if the proposals are not soundly based and carefully thought through.
The House of Lords
The House of Lords must be able to consider the issues of the day, as well as proposed new laws, from a more strategic perspective than is usually feasible in the Commons. We believe this will require members to have a wide range of skills and experience gained outside the field of party politics, as many peers do now. And, in the interests of democracy, membership of a revised Second Chamber should be representative of the different geographical areas of the UK.
So, how should the members of a reformed Second Chamber be selected?
Elections
There are many different ways in which representatives can be elected. Even here, in the United Kingdom, a number of different systems are in use. For example, the First Past the Post system is used for the election of MPs to the House of Commons, whereas members of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly are chosen using the Additional Member System.
In Northern Ireland the Single Transferable Vote is used for elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly.
What should you look for in a system used to elect members of the House of Commons?
Conclusions
There remains the key question of how you go about getting the changes we have recommended adopted. One thing is clear to us, and that is that today's politicians are unlikely to introduce the most important ones without a great deal of pressure from large numbers of people. It is all too easy for MPs, once they are elected, to become set in their way of thinking about how politics should be conducted, and they are unlikely to introduce significant changes without a struggle.
The problem is that change can only come about if Parliament passes new laws to bring the reforms into being. So how do you persuade the government to reform the system?