What do you make of the House of Lords defeating the government's proposals of capping benefits at £26,000?

The British Parliamentary system has evolved over hundreds of years and I think it works perfectly well just as it is. About the only change I'd make to it is to finally remove the remaining 92 hereditary peers from the House of Lords. (Oh, and the bishops as well.) At the moment we have an elected House of Commons, which has ultimate power to get its own way in the end thanks to the Parliament Acts, but it rarely has enough time to scrutinise important and complex Bills properly.

The main practical function of the House of Lords is to be able to do that at more leisure, and suggest amendments - which in fact the House of Commons usually accept. They are able to do that better than the House of Commons because not all of them are career politicians. Once upon a time the House of Commons consisted of people who were MPs as a sideline - that's why until recent years it never started sitting each day until 2.30 pm, so MPs could do their "day job" in the morning (it especially suited barristers, as the court day finishes about 3 or 3.30 pm as you know if you've done jury service) - and it's only comparatively recently that MPs started being paid.

But now they're all career politicians, and the House of Lords provides a useful counterbalance to that. The life peers that comprise the majority of it are basically retired Cabinet Ministers plus eminent people and experts from all walks of life, plus people who are useful in government but can't or don't want to be elected. I can't help thinking this is a good thing - without that we wouldn't have Lord Winston there, the pioneering test-tube baby doctor, to speak with real expertise if anything to do with that is going to be debated, or Baroness Gardner of Parkes, a dentist who actually knows all about the NHS from the "sharp end".

If the House of Lords became an elected House we'd lose all that. Also, if it were an elected House, it would have equal democratic legitimacy with the Commons and that would create problems of its own. I think of Australia in 1975.

In Australia, they basically have the "Westminster system" but the upper house is elected, and without anything like our Parliament Acts to restrict the power of their Senate, the Senate, being dominated by the Opposition, was able to block the Budget. The position was only resolved when the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, sacked the Prime Minister and called another election. The Parliament Act 1911 and its provision that the Lords cannot oppose "money Bills" would prevent that happening in the UK, but even so it would create something of a constitutional crisis.

Now and again I watch Lords debates on BBC Parliament. The breadth and depth of knowledge displayed is impressive, and I'd like to keep it. The other thing that comes to mind from a recent one I watched is that while the crossbenchers (who belong to no party) can speak out exactly as they like, so can the backbench Lords who have a party allegiance, safe in the knowledge that they are appointed for life and cannot be sacked, and even vote against their own party when it proposes something stupid.

The house of lords does not work, it is filled by party stooges mainly from both Tory and Labour parties. They get the appointed - there are more Lords than there are MP's. They have the ability to amend or reject bills passed in the house of commons without being elected by the people.

Admittedly it is rare, the normal procedure is to pass it back to the house of commons for further debate. But it does remove democracy from yours and my hands and put it into the hands of 733 people who have not been voted for. I agree that a check should be put in place, however it should be decided by the people and not either because somebody was born to a certain family or has links to a political party.

Currently the tories have 188 Lords, Labour have 211, UKIP have 2 without ever having an MP and 26 of them are bishops elected by the church of England - Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not represented in this way, nor are catholics, nor is any other religion or atheist! OK so the bishops don't normally vote but they have that right and have done in the past and can do again.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.