On Tuesday this week, the House of Commons had a debate about the House of Lords. There is no sense in which we can speak-ill of our neighbours behind their backs without them knowing – they have TVs too! We in the House of Commons were debating a law that would remove from the House of Lords those “peers” who are there by accident of birth.

My good friend John Russell is a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords and he is an example. His peerage will be subject to the axe, under the law that we MPs debated on Tuesday. His grandfather was the philosopher Bertrand Russell. His great-great grandfather was an MP – also John Russell, a Whig, who was a Prime Minister in the 1840s.

I have been hugely impressed by the calibre of many of the people who have been appointed to the House of Lords. There is a level of expertise in the Lords drawn from business, science and the Armed Forces, that is sometimes absent from the Commons. Yet I am of the view that anyone who is appointed to the Lords should be ennobled because of what they have done - not because of the family into which they were born.

Charles Courtenay (the Earl of Devon) is another example of a good man, born into a system that really does need an overhaul to make it fit for the 21st century. Representative democracy in the UK needs a clear-out of the hereditary peers, but it needs more than that. A good place to look at changing would be the voting system that we use for elections to Parliament.

At the General Election earlier this year, Labour won 63% of the MPs, in spite of winning only 34% of the of votes across the country. The Green party won only 1% of the MPs, in spite of winning 7% of the votes. Reform UK won only 1% of the MPs, in spite of winning 14% of the votes.

Pretty much the only party at this year’s Election that had a more or less proportionate number of MPs for the number of votes cast was the Liberal Democrats. Yet I maintain that our politics needs serious reform, regardless of what that does for the electoral fortunes of my own party.

The General Election of 1951 saw almost all votes cast for either the Conservatives or for Labour. This year, those two parties together could barely scrape together 57% of the votes cast. This offers a clue to me, and other legislators. Many people who voted on 4 July – and many who did not – agree that our system is fit for change.