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Telegraph – We’re teetering on the brink of an elective dictatorship. By Simon Heffer

[The Lord High Chancellor of England and Keeper of the Queen's Conscience, Charlie Falconer], by all accounts stone-cold sober at the time, said: “The right position for the Lords is that it should amend legislation to give the Commons the opportunity to think again but… then it should give way.”… Lord Hailsham’s elective dictatorship, of which that distinguished predecessor of Charlie’s warned 40 years ago, would be here. …

After all, the Lords lost its unconditional power of veto in 1911, when it passed Lloyd George’s People’s Budget rather than suffer the imposition of up to 500 Liberal peers by Asquith. This would have wiped out the Tory majority in the Lords, and would have enabled any measure the government wanted. Parliament Acts in that year and in 1949 ensured the Commons could get its own way if the Lords rejected a Bill twice in successive sessions. In fact, those Acts were hardly ever needed. After the Labour landslide of 1945, something was invented called the Salisbury-Addison Convention – named after the Tory and Labour leaders of their parties in the Lords at the time – which ensured that any government manifesto commitment would not be obstructed by the Tory-dominated Lords.

There are, though, in these arrangements something subtly different from what Charlie is proposing, and something infinitely more constitutional and democratic. The House of Lords has, in the past century or so, always been a far wiser and less partisan body than the House of Commons. In its wisdom, it has always known when to stop obstructing the Commons. It has not only abided by the Salisbury-Addison Convention, it has also only stuck to its guns on other matters when it has sensed that its view, and not that of the House of Commons, was more in tune with the people. …

The Lords wisely decided not to die in the last ditch in 1911: but they might as well die there now, in the cause not of partisan self-interest (as was the case 95 years ago), but of defending liberty and our constitution. Frankly, these plans are so absolutist that one could make a strong case that the Queen should abdicate rather than give her assent to either of them.

To obviate that horror she, Parliament and the British public must demand a straight answer to a straight and vital question: what is so wrong with our democracy that Labour wishes so ruthlessly to end it?

Gulp.