Voters are disillusioned with party politics, but care as deeply about political issues as they ever did, leading to widespread contempt and further disillusionment for elected poltiicians. This is not controversial.

And the sort of peple who rise to the top in modern politics are pretty much the sort of people so convinced of their own abilities and views that they view opposition (from political opponents and public alike) is evidence of, at best, ignorance or, at worst, outright malice. Nothing outlandish here, either.

Witness Tony Blair's revealing comment in his recent John Humphrys interview that he has enormous respect for the British public and it has "been an honour to lead them". LEAD them? Does he not realise that the British public does not want the Prime Minister to LEAD us, but to SERVE us? Clearly not. I would greatly like to think other politicians think differently, but I fear they don't.

So from this perspective, it's not hard to see how ideas such as the half-arsed Lords Reform proposals or satellite-tracked, Big Brother-evoking (the Orwellian kind, not the crap TV kind) road pricing. Or the Iraq War, or before that, rail privatisation, the Poll Tax, or pretty much anything else you'd care to mention - it's a function of modern government politics, not of NuLab, especially. Hence the disillusionment I referred to.

So, if representative democracy is out of favour with the public, but the public do not want their views to be ignored, the only sensible reform to the Lords is to abolish it and replace it with a chamber that is not representatively democratic (i.e. elected through voting) but directly democratic (i.e. populated from the general public through random selection, just as juries are).

Deliberative polls have developed to the point where they can cope with complex and sensitive matters with at least as much dexterity as parliamentary or government committees. The expertise and experience of "the great and the good" which the peerage system supposedly preserves could continue, since it would be in the interests of the parties (both political, and interested) to send their best experts to present evidence and attempt to persuade each "legislative jury" (for want of a better phrase) to their point of view.

One such jury per parliamentary Bill would be about right; ending up with probably about the same number of people sitting at any one time as there are entitled to sit in the Lords or Commons.

A root-and-branch revision of all forms of jury service (the current judicial, as well as this new legislative type) would be needed. For example, make it sensibly rewarded (for those in employment, daily fees to match their current salary, some sort of locum professional support for the self-employed to keep their businesses running in their absence, a crackdown on employers who discourage their staff from serving, etc.), and stiffen the penalties for evading one's public duty

Security concerns are no concern - sensitive matters get looked at in closed committee by parliamentarians already, and they aren't a special type of person with an enhanced ability to keep secrets. They just sign the Official Secrets Act and know they'll be thrown in jail if they talk or write about things outside the closed session.

Add to this the forced removal of the whipping system from the existing Commons, and the redrafting of the Parliament Act (so the Commons has to defer to the "House of Juries", rather than having primacy as they do now) and you've got about the best possible solution for improving our system of government without completely tearing down the whole apparatus of state and starting again from anarchy.

How hard is that? It clears the Augean stables of the donations/honours system, it by-passes the party system the public say they don't trust, and it forces the general population to take some responsibility for their own government