If you're happy for our laws to be made by unelected mostly old, white men....

.....then this post is not for you.

If, on the other hand, you want to choose who's in the  House of Lords, and think it's an anachronistic outrage that we don't already, you may be interested in what I have to say.

Nick Clegg announced proposals earlier this year to elect 80% of the 300 members of a new House of Lords for a single 15 year term with the first elections taking place in 2015.

I don't actually agree with these proposals.

For a start, I want to see the entire House of Lords elected, and I certainly don't want to see places reserved for practitioners of any religion, far less solely the Church of England.

And I think it's a nonsense to elect people and just let them do what they like for 15 years and let them waltz off into the sunset. They have to be able to face the electorate again and be accountable for what they've done.

But at least I have the chance to have my say on this as there's an official consultation on this. And those nice people at Unlock Democracy have a special form for people to fill in if they want to take part. They will collate all the responses and send them off to the Joint Committee of both houses of Parliament who is running it.

I filled in mine this morning and it took me no more than 10 minutes. I also said that a transforming a chamber of unelected old white men to a chamber of elected old white men just wouldn't be enough progress for me and we needed to ensure diversity.

So why bother taking part in the consultation? Well, there are plenty people, including some, regrettably, in our own Party who don't feel bound by our long held policy, who don't want reform to take place. If only three people and a cat respond to the consultation, they can use that as ammunition to say that nobody's really interested, therefore we don't need to do anything.

Unlock Democracy need to have responses in by 5th October. That's a week on Wednesday, so you really need to get on with it this week. Please also take the time to encourage others to do so - does your local party have an e-mail list, for example? Are you a Lib Dem MP or councillor? Send it out to your e-mail list of supporters.

Make sure your voice is heard....