Nothing more betrays the hollowness of New Labour's claim to be 'new' than its attitude towards reforming the state and its equivocation about democracy and the sanctity of the public realm. It just doesn't get it. Beyond a group of disillusioned intellectuals, it thinks, nobody cares about voting, accountability or the shape of the constitution.  The national belly-laugh at the House of Lords' Appointments Commission's announcement of 15 new peers should begin to disabuse it. The patronising view that ordinary people have no interest in the hows and whys of their constitution has been punctured. These aren't people's peers; they are from exactly the same pool of great and good who have been occupying the red benches as life peers for the past 40 years.   It wasn't meant to be like this. The commission is independent. It canvassed the country for applications. It has five criteria for selection for a peerage - independence, commitment to high standards in public life, a record of   achievement, capacity to contribute to debates and the spare time to attend them - that seem reasonable. The peers to be produced by this rational process would be obviously superior either to the old hereditaries or party hacks.   But the ill-judged aside of Lord Stevenson, chairman of the commission, that 'the human being should feel comfortable in the House of Lords', gave the game away. What is at issue, as Tom Paine, writing 200 years ago, saw more clearly than any other critic of the British constitution, is a structure and culture in which our governors still function as a class above the governed.   As Paine put it, the invading Normans constructed a constitution that allowed the new French-speaking barons to deliberate and then do what they wanted to the subject English. That was the way the system essentially operated in 1800. Universal suffrage and the veneer of modern democracy have been bolted on to the same structures, so that much of what Paine inveighed against is still alive.   For excellence and career achievement, along with feeling at home on the red benches, are utterly inadequate criteria for becoming a national legislator. I'm sure that Sir John Browne, chief executive of BP, or Professor Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, will make wise and considered interventions in those debates where their expertise will be welcome. But the Lords could have availed itself of their wisdom without making them full-time legislators. It could easily and simply have asked them to become full-time members of its select committees or to give evidence on legislation.   But the solution that has been adopted means that because the newly appointed peers have a track record of achievement in one area, they have the right of voting and speaking in all areas - from asylum-seekers to fox-hunting - despite the fact they are accountable to nobody for how they vote.   This is an impossible principle to defend. Arguments that elections might be dangerous because turnout could be low, that the intake might be unpredictable, that the Lords will gain a legitimacy to rival the Commons and that party point-scoring will replace the considered tone of the Lords are spurious. They are dangers that have to be guarded against, but they cannot obstruct the basic position. In a democracy, legislators must be accountable to the people.   Indeed, the proposition is even larger than that, a point well understood by Paine and his contemporaries in enlightenment Europe, who were delightedly shrugging off centuries of rule by monarch and church. Any community needs a functioning and efficient public realm where argument can be freely made, political support marshalled and those who make decisions can be held to account by those for whom they are   made. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century constitution builders in Europe and the US did no more than try to construct a political architecture that could permit the expression of an accountable public realm, in which democracy and citizenship were key components.   Britain has never tried self-consciously to build a constitution that entrenched and succoured the public interest. The political class has always taken the view that the constitution, designed by the Normans and amended by successive generations, is pretty much unimprovable. But the consequences of this failure are all around. We may not care much that we have the fewest elected officials per thousand of population of most democracies, but more worrying is our lack of commitment to the principle of voting and, beyond that, to an idea of a public sphere. Our spatchcock constitutional arrangements suffuse our public culture, and that culture itself is compromised by our lack of faith in a conception of 'publicness'.   So it is that 3,166 people filled in the form to become a peer, thinking that nothing could be more normal than becoming a legislator via a university-type admissions system. So it is that we do not have the constitutional template properly to entrench the independence of a public corporation like the BBC. In our constitutional system, the public realm is the Crown in Parliament which controls all it surveys; there can be no true independence for anything within its embrace.   So it is that the Government has constructed Private Finance Initiatives and Public Private Partnerships without ever, until being challenged by Ken Livingstone, thinking carefully what the constitution of such arrangements might be that would entrench and safeguard the public interest.   And even the concession that a PPP might have public-interest 'partnership' directors has been squeezed grudgingly from a disinterested Government. And so it is that even the principle of universal taxation has just been breached, with the Government conceding that business can choose what tax it pays instead of local authorities having the right to charge a supplementary business rate. We are back to pre-Civil War England.   The hope was that when New Labour took office and launched its constitutional reform programme that it understood this was the means to the greater end, renewing and so reclaiming Britain's battered public realm.   We were wrong. New Labour had no such ambition. But as the laughter over people's peers reverberates, maybe it will learn. If it wants fewer such cock-ups, it should understand the spirit of the times.