The House of Senators must have all its members elected by the people

Given that this saga has been running since at least 1911, today's meeting of the joint committee of peers and MPs on House of Lords reform, while important, is far from decisive. It is after all no more than a staging post in the long and frequently interrupted retreat from the peculiarly British notion, already hopelessly obsolete in Edwardian times, that a legislative or even revising chamber could reasonably consist of members chosen by accident of birth or because they were appointed by the government of the day. That said, by refining down (to five or seven) the options that will be put, before Christmas, to the Commons and Lords for the composition of the latter, the committee can hardly fail to inject more momentum into the democratic cause.

In doing so it places an obligation on those MPs interested in reform to prepare themselves for a struggle that will indeed be decisive. We'll come back to why it is also a worthwhile one in a moment. But for the struggle to succeed, two traps will have to be avoided. First, those in favour of a substantial – ie more than 50 per cent – elected element in the Upper House will have to agree among themselves what they want, or at least are prepared to live with.

When the Government decided, after considerable heart-searching, earlier this year that having failed in its own proposal for derisorily minimal democratic reform, it would leave the issue to a free vote, it took a big step. This is a rare – all too rare – opportunity for the Commons to take the law into its own hands. Reformers now almost certainly form a majority in all three of the biggest parties in the House of Commons. But if they squander it by disagreeing among themselves on a preferred option, or even worse by failing to turn out on the day for no better reason that it won't actually harm their careers not to do so, they will be handing the Government the perfect, if well-worn, excuse that nothing can be done because nobody can agree on the alternative to the status quo.

Maybe the reformers in the Commons will agree to an 80 per cent option (which is after all now the nominal policy of the Conservative Party), calculating that when the Lords, as they certainly will, favour an elected element much closer to zero, there is room for a compromise at 60 per cent, which can be built on in the future. Maybe they will simply agree on 60 per cent. However, they – or the bulk of them – must agree on something.

But there is a second trap, less immediate but just as dangerous, into which the reformers must make sure they don't fall. Nobody doubts that a principal reason for resistance to further reform in the Lords arises from the fact that many life peers, like the hereditaries before them, are a vested interest bent on self-preservation; or that the Lords is a very amiable place to pass the day; or that a title, however out-dated, still helps when it comes to booking an aeroplane or a hotel room at home or perhaps even more abroad; or that it's nice, particularly for those who aren't former elected politicians, to play a role, however second order, in legislation without having to withstand the vulgarity of the hustings. But none of that should blind the reformers to the fact that a coherent and not baseless argument has taken shape among the cleverest and most substantial figures resistant to reform.

As long ago as three years ago, for example, Lord Howe, a former Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister and a man who, unlike many of his fellow peers, certainly doesn't need to be in the Lords to maintain an outstanding reputation as an elder statesman, much less his place in history, came out strongly in favour of an all-appointed Upper House. Lord Howe followed his fellow Tory peer Lord Norton, a distinguished academic, by arguing that what above all legitimised the Lords was the "experience and expertise" of its members and that these qualities abounded in the Lords precisely because they weren't party hacks elected on the model of MPs. Lord Howe serves on the joint committee, and it's unlikely that he has stopped putting that argument.

What's more, there is evidence at his disposal, if he chooses to use it. It's a peculiar fact – and something of a shaming indictment of the pliability of the Commons, where heavily whipped standing committees tend all too often to be little more than battering rams for complex and sometimes reckless legislation – that it was only in the Lords that David Blunkett's anti-terrorism Bill received proper scrutiny, during seven whole days of debate, and had some of its most illiberal or irrelevant measures removed. It's also true that if you take, say, the Lords' second reading of the Human Reproductive Cloning Bill last year, a quite awe-inspiring battery of the country's most eminent experts, academic, clinical, religious and legal, took part in a way that would be impossible in the Commons.

This is not a case for accepting Lord Howe's conclusion, but it is one for taking his premiss seriously. And that means Lords reformers will have to ensure that an elected Upper House does not simply become, as governments of the day will tend to want it to, a vehicle for second-rate party hacks who can't make it into the Commons.

As it happens, there is a way of dealing with this. Which is to ensure that the senators, as surely they should be called, are elected for long – perhaps three parliaments – and non-renewable terms, so that they have no incentive to ingratiate themselves with the government of the day in order to ensure reselection. We should not get too sentimental about the expertise argument. Turnout among crossbenchers, many of them experts, is often in pitifully low, single-figure percentages. But they have a real value that long-term elections, a truly independent appointments commission for selecting a minority unelected element and perhaps a minimum age should preserve. And is it really so outlandish to expect some of these eminent men and women to stand for election, not necessarily tied to a party label? They might even enjoy it.

If these conditions are met, the Howe argument falls. The Lords is already constrained enough by the fear of further changes to the status quo. What's needed is a new settlement that accepts that in the end true legitimacy, for the limited purposes of revision and delay, lies in the vote of the people. That is the only lesson worth exporting to countries where the vote doesn't even exist. There hasn't been a single extension of the franchise since at least 1832 when opponents haven't complained that people unfit for the task will be elected. Yes, reformers have a duty to resist what will be the second line of governmental defence against further reform, the use of party machines to govern the selection of candidates. But nothing could do more to widen the deepening and much discussed gulf between voters and those who legislate on their behalf than to be seen to deny the former the right to elect the latter.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk