A senate must be justified on its own terms This would be elegant, were it not total rubbish. Although many reformers claim that an elected senate would serve much the same function as the present Lords, the idea that a democratic mandate won't change anything is absurd - indeed, if that were the case then the entire case for an elected second chamber collapses. Yet in trying to pretend that little will change, reformers are ducking one of their primary duties: facing up to the realities of a two-mandate legislature and making the case for it. In truth, it is disingenuous to refer to the present proposals as "reforms" at all, for precious little of the present institution would survive them save the red benches and the Woolsack. What we have is a two-part scheme, involving the effective abolition of the House of Lords and its replacement with an elected senate. In the eyes of its defenders, the Lords justifies its place in our constitution by bringing in perspectives from outside the fairly narrow class of people who overwhelmingly get elected to Parliament, in absolutely no doubt of its inferiority to the Commons. It is far from certain that a new chamber would possess such qualities, so it cannot be fairly claimed that we must have a second chamber on the basis that we have one already. In last night's debate the Government confirmed that the bill will not define in writing the powers of the new second chamber or its relationship with the Commons. Without that, it isn't unreasonable to suspect that senators will feel themselves to possess greater legitimacy and current peers and thus be much more willing to challenge the Commons. For the great bloc of Liberal Democrat senators, who would hold a chamber elected by PR to be more legitimate than one elected by First Past the Post, the temptation to assert themselves over a chamber they view as less democratic would be immense. Beyond that immediate political reality, there is always the risk of power creep. Once an institution is vested with a democratic mandate, its members can usually be relied upon to try to expand that mandate in the absence of a compelling ideological reason not to. The growth of the devolved assemblies far beyond the intentions of their New Labour founders makes a mockery of contemporary reassurances that such chambers, once given life, can be confined to constitutional stasis. The idea that once we've abolished the Lords we might as well put something in the big empty room with the throne in it no case for a new second chamber. A senate must be justified positively on its own terms, the scale of the change involved must be faced and honestly discussed, and that case ought to be taken to the public.