Party lists?  Oh great, like we haven't had enough of political parties and their jobs for the boys mentality.

How about the 'House of Free Citizens' to evoke its civic, representative, class-less and non-partisan character . . . supposedly? A member of the House would then be called and addressed as Citizen so-and-so.

In a similar vein, there's always 'House of Equals'; members addressing themselves, accordingly, as 'peers' (. . . ) or as 'my Equal' - that's quite neat, even if I do say so myself.

'Senator', at root, means 'wise old man'. So we could also call them 'Elders', I suppose. Though not 'sages'!

David, aka Britology Watch

Or, I suppose you could just call them the House of Peers - partly, also, because it would be their job to 'peer into' legislation from the other place.

David, aka Britology Watch

The government is already committed to a partially open list system (ref. Lords reform white paper last year). It remains to be seen how open the system will be (there has been cross-party support for fully open lists or STV), but they certainly won't be closed as they are for European elections.

James Graham
Quaequam Blog!

From Keith McBurney

If, as you say, they appear to be selected before elected, then 'The Peerless 400' because that is what their parties will expect from them in return - peering into less. 'The Unscrutable 400' is in similar watered down vein.
Aye Ours,
Keith

Peer less, or can the blind lead the blind?

I care less what they're called and more how they are elected and what their purpose is. They should serve 6 year terms, so they can uphold the law without being venerable to public opinion which would prevent them removing our civil liberties in the aftermath of a terror attack.

However, there should be different classes of senators (or whatever else you want them to be called), like in the US, so they are elected in two year intervals ever six years, i.e. the first class elected in 2009, the second in 2011, the third in 2013, and then the first again in 2015.

They should be able to be recalled by the public, but, unlike the governments proposals, they should be senior to MP's (and paid accordingly) because their six year terms would shelter them from the short term whips of public opinion, but make them more venerable to long term public opinion.

Of-course that will never happen, the MoJ will do whatever is in the best interests of the broken Westminster system.

Hang on, if recalls are triggered by 1/3 of the electorate who originally voted for a Senator supporting one, that implies we’ll need to know who those voters are. I know in practice votes can already be matched back up afterwards, but I think there’s a difference between the theoretical capability in the event of fraud allegations and writing the use of it into the democratic process.  Assuming recalls are not only implemented but used on occasion, that’s a lot of votes that would have to be checked, I just can’t see a way to use recalls in multi member systems without severely harming the idea of a secret ballot.  Recalls seem like interesting ideas for executives (but perhaps hard to adapt from the US strong two party culture) but don’t seem to make a lot of sense in legislatures.

Best I can come up name-wise for a sortition house is is ‘Guard (or Watcher) of Parliament’ to sum up their role not as legislating members but as keeping MPs honest and guarding against Parliament becoming too disconnected from the public. Maybe a tad literal but hey.