Thank you for that, and again there's a lot that one could respond to there.
There's no doubt that a bicameral model is fairly common, that is, the two-chamber model. About 75 out of 213 countries have that model of two chambers. Increasingly what you see, though, is that almost every such second chamber in the world has a democratic element to it, whether you go with the American model of a senate that's elected on the same basis, or even in the United Kingdom now, with the House of Lords. There have been dramatic changes, incremental, piecemeal, to the composition of the House of Lords and how it operates. The mother ship has departed. Other Commonwealth countries like Australia have introduced democratic elements.
We appear to be, I guess, the one place in the world where we simply have been resistant to any kind of change or reform or democratization of our second chamber. That is a glaring embarrassment for a country that likes to pride itself on the world stage as a model democracy, that likes to send people to other parts of the world to tell them how to run a democracy, to show them how to be democratic. Yet they look at our model, and our folks are trying to explain away how an unelected, unaccountable, fully appointed body fits into a democracy.
I can tell you that if most emerging democracies chose to come up with a body like that in this day and age, we would probably quickly criticize it as a way of manifesting too much power in the hands of an unaccountable single leader or head of state. If we saw it in, say, a post-Soviet type of country or that kind of situation, we would find it very alarming and we would no doubt criticize it, yet it is exactly what we have here.
That's why I believe democratization is the best route. That being said, there are a lot of countries in the world that are functioning perfectly well with the unicameral system, with only one House, but in either event, the critical thing has to be that it is democratic. That's our core principle. That has to be the fundamental value that we go to in our parliamentary system.
All of us have visitors who come to see us here in the House of Commons, from our constituencies and elsewhere, and you take them around the building and then you try to explain the Senate, and we all have to deal with the jokes. We know that the senators themselves are fairly thin-skinned about it, because they themselves in their own hearts know that regardless of their abilities—and there are some very fine people there who have very strong abilities—they don't have legitimacy in the power that they exercise, in the powers that belong to them. Most people have the good sense to understand, to feel uncomfortable being given that kind of power, without any democratic accountability in what is a democratic country.