Other places, like France and the US, manage their upper house by placing it on a longer, unsynchronised, election schedule. Of course, they are both presidential, so perhaps we should be looking to Ireland, where they have a strange, complicated, and unsatisfying, hybrid system, with both appointed and indirectly elected senators.

Liberalism thinks that heterogeneity is a benefit in government – so you have the separation of powers etc. I would wonder to what extent you could really say that elected members of the Lords, voted for at a general election(?) differ from elected members of the Commons, voted for at a general election. The more localised representatives differ from each other in their scope but you don’t even have that in Westminster. I think you really have just one big house with two rooms and a weird two tier voting system.

Of course, the problem when you start thinking about removing layers is: which layers? Do you really want your bind emptied by fiat of Holyrood? You’re probably too young to remember the disaster tat was Strathclyde, the council that covered half of Scotland, and never did anything on time. Subsidiarity is a fine goal, but it takes some to run it, and it’s better that they be elected, don’t you think? Anyway, local cooncilors are a lot cheaper than MSPs, MPS and MEPs…