When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte,
As every child can tell,
The House of Peers, throughout the war,
Did nothing in particular,
And did it very well;
Yet Britain set the world ablaze
In good King George's glorious days!
(from Iolanthe by Gilbert and Sullivan)
Gather a group of the most powerful people in the land; give them ermine robes and manifold privileges; require of them nothing other than that they meet regularly to converse and debate in a prestigious and historical chamber. Allow them only the power to veto or delay legislation.
Gilbert and Sullivan were satirising but I think their point stands. It is possible to do nothing and to do it very well. While they're busy doing nothing they're not interfering or messing everything else up, even though they probably could outside the chamber.
The fact that heriditary peers are being ejected means nothing beyond the fact that these nobles have lost their inherent power.
The nobles were the land owners, the business owners, the OG entrepreneurs, they were educated, and their children would grow up to be the same.
Historically the system made sense. But the last 150 years or so have basically taken their power away.
A couple of years ago an estate - that included a 9 bedroom country house, plus an entire village with a population of 100 people, and a church - was sold by noblety near where I grew up. The price was in the low tens of millions, not that much.
Some people argue that the difficulty of passing laws in the United States is "a feature not a bug" b/c it prevents the US from creating laws too quickly.
You could argue the House of Lords did the same: by vetoing bills, it acted as a "speed bump" to laws that might cause too much change too quickly.
The Lords doesn’t actually have the power to veto bills thanks to the Parliament act. They also have a principle of ultimate legislative priority under which they defer to the commons in matters where the commons puts its foot down. They generally act as a revising body rather than outright attempting to defy the commons.
> Under the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 it is possible for a bill to be presented for Royal Assent without the agreement of the House of Lords, provided that certain conditions are met. This change was seen by some as a departure from Dicey’s notion of sovereignty conferred upon a tripartite body.
It doesn't really help the United States create good law. You could argue that it worsen the quality of laws by forcing kludges to be built on top of kludges.
A sortition panel collecting random people from all walks of life to give feedback on law would probably improve the quality of law more than any amount of procedure and paperwork ever will.
We mistaken paperwork with deliberation and quality control.
I’d go further. To bypass the deadlocked congress, obama used executive orders in new and expansive ways. That ratcheted things up. Now trump is using executive orders even MORE expansively, to do things that are patently undemocratic and unconstitutional (federalizing who can vote, ilegal tariffs). The kludges and hacks are causing a crumbling of democracy, not just mediocre law.
> To bypass the deadlocked congress, obama used executive orders in new and expansive ways. That ratcheted things up.
While I agree - this has been an issue long before Obama.
Any reasonable country should be able to decide on the legality of abortion through the normal political process - the public deliberates, they elect representatives, the representatives hammer out the fine print and pass legislation.
But in the American system, the legality of abortion is decided at random, based on the deaths of a handful of lawyers born in the 1930s. If that person dies between ages 68-75, 84-87 or 91-95 abortion is illegal, if they die aged 76-83, or 88-91 it's legal.
Why doesn't America deal with political questions using their political process?
> Why doesn't America deal with political questions using their political process?
Since 2022 we do. But it’s through the political process of the States. This has made a lot of people very angry because a bunch of States have got it all wrong, and the exact way they got it wrong depends on your point of view on the subject, but no matter which side of the debate you’re on, some on your side most assuredly want to preempt all the States that got it all wrong with Federal law.
That Congress hasn’t come to a political consensus is the Federal political consensus.
> Since 2022 we do. But it’s through the political process of the States.
Which is exactly as it should be. There's nothing in the Constitution which gives the federal government power to act on this issue, therefore it should be decided on a state by state basis. Government works best when it is done based on the values and needs of the local population, not one solution for an entire heterogeneous nation.
Because that requires compromise and Americans are raging absolutists that need immediate results.
In 1791, abolitionists tried to end slavery in the British Empire but couldn't get it passed by the House of Commons. Henry Dundas changed the bill so it would be phased-in. Existing slaves wouldn't be emancipated but their children would be. That bill did pass. Slavery naturally ended over the following decades until the much smaller slave population was bought by the government and freed in 1833.
In the USA, nobody budged until a Civil War happened and then the slaves were freed by force in the 1850s without monetary compensation. But that time, emancipation happened immediately after they got full power, there was no need to give money to racists, and no moral compromises were required.
> But that time, emancipation happened immediately after they got full power, there was no need to give money to racists, and no moral compromises were required.
I really hope you were being sarcastic here... Emancipating the slaves during/after the Civil War was not an orderly, immediate process. And even once all slaves were freed, they continued to live second-class lives due to the laws of the time.
Yes, it's sarcasm. I'm contrasting how Britain made their legal process gradual enough to match reality with the USA's demand that legal processes create reality.
For reference, fully elective abortion legally doesn't exist in most of the UK. It's just that a fetus being dangerous to the mental health of the mother has progressively been interpreted more and more broadly...
It’s more like Americans did decide, that it was illegal and judges decided they could use legal tricks to make it legal (which in turn meant as soon as they didn’t have the majority the opposite could occur.)
The problem here isn't the temptation to bypass a system intended to require consensus before action can be taken. That temptation is present with any system that provides any checks on autocratic tyranny.
The problem is that something like executive orders are being used to bypass that system instead of being prevented from doing so.
The problem is that the US constitution was written before people realized that the natural consequence of that type of constitution is a two party system. You cannot have a viable third party in the long run because it will necessarily weaken one or the other existing party and that party will then absorb it.
So no you have a situation where the government can have split brain: some parts of the legislative branch can be party A and other parts can be party B and the president isn’t tied to either.
From what I understand when the US “brings democracy” to another country we set up a parliamentary system and that system is widely seen as better. You cannot form an ineffective government by definition, though you can have a non-functioning government that is trying to form a coalition. These types of systems tend to find center because forming a coalition always requires some level of compromise. Our system oscillates between three states: party A does what they want, party B does what they want, and split brain and president does what he wants because Congress has no will to keep him accountable.
What I would like to try is a combination of parliamentary system, approval voting, and possibly major legislation passed by randomly selecting a jury of citizens and showing the the pros and cons of a bill. If you cannot convince 1000 random citizens that we should go to war, maybe it’s not a good idea.
> The problem is that the US constitution was written before people realized that the natural consequence of that type of constitution is a two party system.
The two party system is a consequence of using first past the post voting, which the US constitution doesn't even require. Use score voting instead, which can be done by ordinary legislation without any constitutional amendment, and you don't have a two party system anymore.
The point is that if you can't do the thing the democratic way (because the system is so biased against change as to make it impossible) then people will look for workarounds.
The workarounds are accepted since otherwise nothing would get done at all, and then people are surprised when the workaround gets used in ways they no longer like.
When people say "nothing gets done" they mean "we can't do things that a substantial plurality of the public doesn't want done" -- which is exactly what's supposed to happen.
If you break the mechanisms ensuring that stays the case, what do you honestly expect to happen the next time it's you in the minority?
Yes, and, Bush-Cheney were the modern forefathers of pushing the unitary executive theory, building on the work of Reagan after a 90’s shaped lull. Reagan took ideas from The Heritage Foundation, who returned in the ‘24 elections pushing Project 2025. A natural endgame and roadmap for the movement of power to the president, that is being followed as approximately as any political roadmap ever is.
Remember that each time you’re tempted to crack a Coors light!
Unitary executive is popular and doesn’t have to mean an imperial presidency. Actually the most popular version, albeit not the one you hear about the most, is the libertarian idea that the executive should have little power at all and almost no bureaucracy to command.
Note that this change is not getting rid of the Lords; it's just getting rid of Hereditary piers - i.e. those passed down through generations. We'll still have Lords who have been selected by previous governments within their lifetime; so they still provide that speed bump; but do it in a way that means they were at some point chosen by an elected body.
Not sure how you think this will improve things. None of these people are elected. They likely got these positions by doing political favors. They are likely even more out of touch with the electorate. They are even more likely to make decisions based upon ideology instead of practical quality of life considerations. Seems to me this just centralizes power even more in the hands of a few. And that's the last thing the UK needs right now.
> They are likely even more out of touch with the electorate.
Not compared to the hereditary peers.
In theory these people have proved themselves useful in some way and bring expertise to the upper chamber, rather than just being born in the right family. In practice there is some of that and some political cronyism.
> Seems to me this just centralizes power even more in the hands of a few.
That is exactly what hereditary peerage is. The few, by definition. The aristocracy.
It can still do the same thing without hereditary peers. A slow-moving, conservative (in the classical sense) upper chamber is a classic in bicameral systems, it is not specific to the House of Lords.
And for many years now, even the remaining minority of hereditary peers in the chamber are elected to that job, albeit not by the general public. My guess is that all those who are actually useful will get "grandfathered in" by this legislation making them life peers so that they can keep doing the exact same job. Many life peers (who are all entitled to be there) rarely attend, so it would be kinda silly if Lord Snootington, the fifteenth Earl of Whatever is kicked out for being a hereditary peer despite also being the linchpin of an important committee and one of the top 100 attendees in the Lords, while they keep Bill Smith, a business tycoon who got his peerage for giving a politician a sack of cash and hasn't been in London, never mind the House of Lords, since 2014...
> My guess is that all those who are actually useful will get "grandfathered in" by this legislation making them life peers
The government made a political deal with the hereditary peers-drop their fight against this bill, and in exchange the government will grant a subset of them life peerages
But that political deal is just an informal extralegal “understanding”, it isn’t actually in the text of the bill-having the bill text grant someone a life peerage would upset the status of peerages as a royal prerogative, and they don’t want to do that
> The government made a political deal with the hereditary peers-drop their fight against this bill, and in exchange the government will grant a subset of them life peerages
Wouldn't a "deal" theoretically benefit both sides? That one doesn't offer the hereditary peers anything they don't already have.
> Wouldn't a "deal" theoretically benefit both sides? That one doesn't offer the hereditary peers anything they don't already have.
They don't have any expectation against losing their seats entirely when hereditary peers are ejected from the House, and, even with a sufficient number of life peers voting with them, they couldn't actually prevent such a bill from passing, only delay it. Securing a commitment of life seats is getting something they didn't have.
Only 92 of the 842 peers are hereditary currently, so it’s not really necessary to convince them to agree; the deal only needs to be seen as fair enough by the other peers. Or really, it only needs to be seen as fair enough to the House of Commons.
> Only 92 of the 842 peers are hereditary currently, so it’s not really necessary to convince them to agree;
As I understand it, it was necessary (in order to pass the bill without the delay the Lords can impose) to secure a deal on the hereditary peers (not with them), because the Conservatives (the largest Lords faction) and many of the cross-benchers among the life peers, a sufficient number in total to delay the bill (the Lords can't actually block it permanently) oppose the bill, not just a group among the existing hereditary peers.
By a larger pool of hereditary peers. Previously several hundred members of the aristocracy were all entitled to a seat in there by virtue of their birth and title alone. After reforms in 1999 this group had to nominate from within themselves a subset of 92 hereditary peers who would be allowed to participate in the chamber.
If by "the voters" you mean the general public, then no, they had no say at all.
Just in case someone gets the wrong end of the stick, the UK isn’t getting rid of the House of Lords, just the hereditary members (of which there aren’t many).
But almost all the remainder are political appointees.
It's disappointing that they didn't replace the hereditary peers with some other non-politically-appointed folks. There is a very great need to have people in the House of Lords who are not beholden to any of the political parties.
I personally favour a lottery system where random people get given the opportunity to join the House of Lords for the rest of their working lives.
That view is a leftover from a bygone era, when others could look at the US with often grudging admiration. Today? The US itself doesn't think much of itself, and to the rest of us it is a cautionary tale.
If you ever find yourself wondering why US voters elected someone like Trump...if you ever wondered why institutions in the US are crumbling and experts don't have much credibility, this is why. I assure you, most Americans think very highly of the US compared to the rest of the world (especially if they have traveled). Only the out of touch don't and the reasons why most US voters don't give them much credibility is the absolutely crazy amount of twisting of facts to align to that POV.
As people like that are slowly removed/aged out from those institutions, the institutions will magically start working well again and regain public trust. In case you wondered how a potted plant like Trump can somehow perform better than those experts, that's how. Because people who believe things like that have to twist around their worldview to such an extreme that its impossible for them to be competent no matter how smart or how much education they have. Its also how people who claim to be for peace and democracy somehow end up supporting a religious oligarchy that funds terrorism across an entire region. Ideology makes you dumb to the degree that you are smart.
PS Europe is the cautionary tale here. Again, your leaders are far smarter than Trump. Does that seem to matter? Nope, because ideology destroys the effectiveness they (you) should have.
> Because people who believe things like that have to twist around their worldview to such an extreme that its impossible for them to be competent no matter how smart or how much education they have.
yes. just because it is unfashionable to argue in favor of aristocracy does not mean that it doesn’t have its own intrinsic set of benefits and drawbacks… the drawbacks of ultra democracy (populism, etc.) are all cast aside as the innocent folly of people yearning to be free but not knowing whereof to yearn (“it’s not a system problem, it’s a people problem, but we must no matter what condemn ourselves to people problems because anything else is anathema to “liberty”, or whatever”). but dare utter one word in favor of conservatism in the original, true sense, and it is as though democracy is an unalloyed good with absolutely no downside. like, clearly we should have a direct democracy with no senate and no house, no? anything else is just allowing the Powers That Be to patriarchy everything!
Ah yes, the country whose supreme court struck down its global tariffs and then forced the federal government into refunding all the money back is truly no longer bound by its own laws.
I think a good revising chamber is critical to good democracy, though the Lords recently have been playing silly buggers around the Employment Rights Act and ignoring the Salisbury Convention (which is that they shouldn’t block manifesto commitments).
I do think the USA goes too far, which has led to frustration among the public and contributed to Trump and the resulting behaviour. I’ve said before that I think the US House of Representatives should have a mechanism to override Senate speed bumps, though not without effort. The idea is to encourage the legislature to compromise but maintain the “primacy” of the House if the Senate is being obstinate. Something like the Parliament Act, is what I’d have in mind.
The Senate in the US is the upper house and can override the House. There is no "primacy" of the House in the US system. The only place where anything like that exists is in impeachment (which is for any member of the executive or judicial branch, not just the president) where the House simply has more votes than the Senate (each member gets 1 vote). Those types of hearings are pretty rare (usually).
Senators play a similar role. Their aim is heavily weighted toward oversight and advisory. Gov’t in general is weighted in that direction, because governments govern which is mainly about being a kind of referee, maintaining the social order, and aiding human beings in attaining their end as human beings through legislation.
Without this function, we have activity with little reflection spurred by politicians pandering to the mob.
British democracy and government is cool. It's not enshrined in some document they got together and wrote down like the US constitution, it's this organic thing that they've stumbled towards over the last ~800 years with small changes like this one gradually evolving them into a modern liberal democracy.
If cool means interesting then yes, it is cool because it's archaic and different but it's not effective. It's the equivalent of a verbal contract. It's simply not as clear or coherent as a written one.
Irish democracy in contrast uses STV voting and a written constitution and is modeled between the best of what the UK, the US and France had to offer when it was drafted and is a very representative democracy with many political parties compared to the duopolies in the US and the UK. It's also why Ireland is largely immune to hard shifts to the left or right relative to the UK and US.
I love this about Ireland because they are such a young republic. And democratic systems are a technology. Something that we understand better over time, and somewhere new can pick and choose from what is best, where it is _extremely_ hard to change existing systems in established countries.
Yes, it's in my opinion one of the great tragedies of our time that some of our established countries are so hard to change. I don't mean this as the policy needs change, everyone will differ on those. I just mean the technology of government like you're saying. Efficient and more fair ways of voting on laws and electing representatives do exist.
For example my own (US) has a political system basically frozen in amber from a time before many of the political and policy challenges of our day were not even thought of yet. And they did their best to create a change mechanism, but I think anyone being truly fair of any political persuasion has to admit that while it has prevented nearly every harmful extremist constitutional amendment (I'd say Prohibition is the main one that sneaked in), it has proven to, within the lifetimes of most living Americans, be so hard to attain as to set the status quo in stone.
The framers didn't realize that most changes would be blocked by at least one party, out of fear that it would advantage the other guys. Same reason we stopped admitting states before letting Puerto Rico in, an absolutely absurd situation.
Do you not understand why PR isn't a state? Seems like you don't. Support for PR statehood is only about 50% (on the island). That largely has to do with the fact that their taxes would increase if they became a state. Additionally, they would have to switch to English (along with Spanish) which makes things a lot more complicated. They are already US citizens and can move to anywhere in the US if they want to vote in federal elections (and half of them do but mainly for work). They don't want independence either. So the current limbo state is actually desirable to them.
Even if the citizens of PR wanted statehood, you have to get both parties to agree. This means probably 2 states at the same time (one red, one blue). Since there isn't another potentially red state (Alberta but that's probably never going to happen) to join, that's hard to do. Look at US history, statehood has always worked this way. It has nothing to do with whatever you are implying.
PS The 27th amendment was 1992, probably during your lifetime. You would expect the rate of new amendments to slow overtime so the average of a new amendment about every 15-20 years seems about right.
New and shiny is not always better. Science has spoiled us in the last century, but it has little to say about how a good government should operate.
Many of us have a popular set of ideals that we think are superior and have attempted to overlay those on every aspect of modern life, but they have little to no data behind them and are ultimately just beliefs that make us feel good. As such, there is no reason to expect they are optimal for governing either.
> "The framers didn't realize that most changes would be blocked by at least one party, out of fear that it would advantage the other guys."
Check out some of the founders' essays. This is no accident, or oversight. It's absolutely intentional and for good reason.
The Constitution grants power to all three branches of government, which is the same as granting power to none of them. The more they disagree, the less power they have. In this way power can only be wielded through cooperation (selflessness).
It's worked well as a honeypot, but I don't think it's working well as a device for paralysis. The executive has seized an alarming amount of power (with the tacit approval of the party in control of the legislature), and the constitution isn't doing much of anything to stop it.
Also, one of the reasons for choosing proportional representation with a single transferable vote (PR-STV) was to ensure that the substantial unionist minority (who wanted to maintain the link with the UK/Britain) would still have have their views represented in the new parliament. This system works for other minority views and provides new political parties with a chance to grow in a way that wouldn’t be possible in a first-past-the-post system.
Note that even though the U.S. has a Constitution, the entire U.S. government is still, like the UK, highly reliant on inexplicit norms many of which go back hundreds of years before the U.S. was founded. They’re both still English common law systems.
But it's not that the duopoly is disappearing. It's just that the previous two parties are being eclipsed by two different parities. That's occurred previously in both the UK and US.
The last time it happened in the US was 1856 and its only happened 2x in US history. The US democratic party is the oldest existing political party in the world. For reference, the UK is actually only about 90 years older than the Democratic party.
> It's simply not as clear or coherent as a written one.
No. As you have surely seen, the US written constitution just gets contorted to "clearly" mean whatever it is the partisan Justices decided suits their current purpose. The effect is extremely corrosive - they even decided it means their guy is above the law.
I agree that using a better voting system (STV) is a meaningful benefit and worth replicating elsewhere, but I don't agree that having a written constitution is better. I think Ireland would be in roughly the same place if it had the same arrangement as in Westminster in that respect.
For example when Ireland wrote a constitutional amendment saying abortion is illegal under basically any circumstances, the people the Irish were electing would also have voted against legislation allowing abortion, but by the time the poll was held to amend to say abortion must be legal, the legislators elected were also mostly pro-choice. So if there was no written constitution my guess is that roughly the outcome is the same, in 1975 an Irish woman who needs an abortion has to "go on holiday" abroad and come back not pregnant or order pills and hope they're not traced to her, and in 2025 it's just an ordinary medical practice. Maybe the changes happen a few years earlier, or a few years later.
Edited: Clarify that the abortion prohibition was itself an amendment, as was the removal of that prohibition.
The power of a constitution is in it being the highest law in the land, that legislation can't just override. It's only recently in the US that there is a blatantly corrupt kakistocracy who feels free to ignore it.
> It's not enshrined in some document they got together and wrote down like the US constitution
It’s also very brittle and one charismatic populist away from unraveling like the American government. Too much depends on gentlemen agreements and people trusting other people to do the right thing. It works in a stable environment, but shatters the moment someone with no shame and no scruples shows up.
Most western democracies have exactly the same fault, maybe having unscrupulous, shameless legislators are the end state of the current models of democracy being practiced.
> It’s also very brittle and one charismatic populist away from unraveling
All sufficiently large governments (really all organizations of any kind) are necessarily like this, from the most successful attempts at open societies to the most autocratic. They all require constant vigilance both to perform their intended function and to preserve themselves into the future.
There's really no way around the possibility that whatever you've written down in your constitution will be ignored in the heat of the moment, or become degraded over time.
But you don't need to put the military under the direct command of the civilian president like US does, if parliament can take military action against the civilian president and civilian action against the military leader then they have ways to deal with both.
American president is too powerful to deal with since he controls both the civilian and the military side.
This is the one argument left for monarchy; that the military in the UK (and technically Australia) swear loyatly to the monarch, not the Prime Minister. In the event of an obviously-lunatic elected official ordering the troops into civilian areas to "pacify" civilian populations, the monarch could (in theory) countermand that order.
While no democratic system is completely protected from tyrants, at least the UK (and the Commonwealth nations who inherited their principles) uses the living tree doctrine in its courts, which means that the written text is not sacrosanct and the intention and usage is to be considered. That and unwritten tradition has force of law and can be challenged in court. Look at Boris Johnson's reversal of his prorogation as an example.
Constitution and laws are just pieces of paper. They only matter if the population acts as if they matter. Liberia has the same Constitution as the US.
But they're cycled through much more rapidly, and seem generally more vulnerable than the dictators in the U.S or otherwise. A small concession to be sure.
It seems like a fundamental failure of government that in many cases, there are no consequences for deliberately or accidentally screwing your people. You either get murdered eventually or the country is just left to fix itself later, which disproportionately affects people with little resources.
Strong disagree. It's uncontested that supreme authority lies with parliament, not with the leader of the day. PM can't do shit if parliament doesn't want him to, because they can always simply change the rules on him.
Being able to vote in a strong leader to fix things directly is a feature. Democracy is not always the answer and when it is it can be too slow when time matters.
I go back and forth on this. It's a lot like the palace of Westminster itself: charming, whimsical, historical, connected to the past, hopelessly impractical, postponing repairs until things break, and at significant risk of being burned down.
On the other hand it avoids the illusion that power resides in a text and that you can legal-magic your way past a power structure.
There is something to be said for your written constitution though: having the fundamental principles on which your nation is founded enshrined in that way should, at least in theory, make it a lot easier to settle arguments (though in practice, and particularly recently, that does seem not to be the case). Constitutional wrangling in the UK is always really fraught though because it's all done by precedent and is therefore incredibly hard work to get to a clear understanding of what the situation really is.
The USA's written constitution should not be used as an exemplar of written constitutions in general because the founders didn't even enforce it the day after it was ratified. It took a civil war to even turn towards the words as written. The document itself was more aspirational than a reflection of how the founders intended to live and govern.
As a result of all of that, we have developed a culture of sophistry around simple words. We pretend the Constitution binds us, but in practice the structures that govern the country are much more opaque and therefore more difficult to change.
(This is why every so often we have to ratify a new amendment codifying rights that are clearly enumerated in the articles of the Constitution or in an earlier amendment. At some point, the sophistry tips over and we have to amend it to say what was plainly written in at some earlier point.)
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was established in 1982. We're still in the process of figuring out what it means (and as a living document, the interpretation will change over time).
It's messy. But I'd much rather that than need to ask "What would Pierre Trudeau think of this situation?"
Well, SCOTUS sometimes produces really weird Humpty-Dumpty explanations for very common words.
Such as that growing marijuana plants in your own home for your own consumption influences interstate commerce and is therefore within powers of the Congress to regulate/ban.
I see brits describing it as "Dictatorship with Democratic characteristics" and "3 weasels leading the 4th rabid weasel around by the tail" it doesnt seem "cool" by any stretch, except maybe if it was fictional and the people it hurt were not real.
England's 'democracy' is cool insofar as the freemasons are cool. Old men in goofy hats sound fun until they end up raping some kid on an island somewhere in their old colonial posessions.
>> gradually evolving them into a modern liberal democracy
Yeah, this is the key observation. "a modern liberal democracy", a.k.a. replacing locals with third world, arresting citizens for posting comments online while letting rapists and murderers go with minimum sentences so they can strike again, making gayness and wokeness obligatory or at least the norm, colonizing white people and calling it reparatory justice, importing radical Islam and liberally supporting revolution (like in Iran) so we can all have a wonderful ayatollah regime... all that.
Definitely removing centuries old pure British tradition is a step forward into "modern liberal democracy", I cannot deny that!
What part of hereditary aristocrats and religious and otherwise lifetime appointees being able to send back bills to the parliament an infinite number of times until they are changed as they want them. There are cases in which they sent bills back as many as 60 times until they got them changed.
The government there does not care about you and will promise anything to get another 5 years in power despite causing the issues they promised to solve in the first place.
You are essentially voting in the same party to be in government and progress there moves in the hundreds of years; hence the riddance of the scam that is unelected hereditary nobles which it took more than 700 years to remove them.
In most states a single party will always win statewide elections, so our Senators are what I'd call "marginally elected" since they only have to face a quiet low-turnout primary election and then they sail to an easy re-election. They're nearly always guaranteed to win their primaries as long as The Party supports them, and they'll do so as long as you're loyal to The Party agenda.
> Hereditary
Many of them come from generational wealth, and a few suspiciously just happen to become wildly wealthy while in office, including through their stock trades, which has been decided to be 100% not illegal even when they know things the public does not know.
> nobles
Ours are called "elites," but most things are the same - they tend to all have gone to the top 2-4 colleges, and you can't 'break into' this set unless you were born into old money. Seems close enough from the perspective of those of us who aren't nobles or elites.
So, you can think of the Senate as the House of Lords lite.
No idea why this was down-voted, it's true. It's replacing one hereditary system based on inheritance of titles with another hereditary system based on inheritance of capital.
You need to have a very cynical worldview already to find my comment boring; as in; no information content.
I really don't think most people are there yet.
I think that guideline means that if your own comment gets downvoted, don't reply complaining about it. A "why was this downvoted? it's true" from another user is fine, I think.
The irony is that, on a technicality, the hereditary peers were the only members of the Lords who had to win an election to get their seats.
> Under the reforms of the House of Lords Act 1999, the majority of hereditary peers lost the right to sit as members of the House of Lords, the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Section 2 of the Act, however, provides an exception from this general exclusion of membership for up to 92 hereditary peers: 90 to be elected by the House, as well as the holders of two royal offices, the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain, who sit as ex officio members.
Yeah, the assumption is that the non hereditary peers are somehow more representative, but all they represent is being friends of the PM of the time. It's a historical oddity of questionable usefulness. Meanwhile the house of commons can wipe out any civil liberty with a majority of 50% plus one vote. It is remarkable how a system that seems so unstable and prone to abuses of power has served the longest continuously running democracy for so long.
> Yeah, the assumption is that the non hereditary peers are somehow more representative, but all they represent is being friends of the PM of the time
There is an informal understanding that the government gives a certain number of life peerages to the opposition and minor parties, subject to the government being able to veto individual appointments they find objectionable. So it literally isn’t true that everyone gets one by being friends with the PM-although it certainly helps
Some parties reject their entitlement-the only reason why there are no SNP life peers, is the SNP has a longstanding policy to refuse to appoint any. There are currently 76 LibDem peers, 6 DUP, 3 UUP, 2 Green and 2 Plaid Cymru. SNP would very quickly get some too if they ever changed their mind about refusing the offer. The Northern Ireland nationalist parties (Sinn Fein and SDLP) likewise have a policy against nominating life peers.
So the correction is “friends of the PM, and a few other key politicians”. Still a club of people who represent no one. And more problematic, are accountable to no one.
As Walter Bagehot wrote in The English Constitution: "An ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered."
Absent ideological capture, it is perhaps one of the best forms of government ever created due to its pragmatic nature and its Lindyness is proof.
50% + 1 is called democracy. Civil liberties are more liable to be swept away by minorities that come to power. In the US, the republicans often do this because they have minority popular support but a disproportionate representation in government. So the key is to make sure that it's 50% + 1 but also representative of the real population.
The nobility is another example of a minority with disproportionate power. It's important that they are reduced to ensure civil liberties.
All other democracies have safeguards against the tyranny of the majority. Whether it is representativity by state in the US or in the EU, a constitution requiring a large consensus to change in the US, or the senate being elected by the elected officials of small cities in France, it is not true that democracy is just 50% + 1 vote.
If you're not British please don't assume that "ejecting heriditary nobles" from the upper house of parliament is automatically going to increase the quality of governance.
For more than a century the majority of those who sit in the House of Lords have been "Life Peers", appointed by a politician and without any heriditary aspect. They include such towers of statepersonship as : Evgeny Lebedev (Russian businessman, son of a KGB officer); Alexander Lebedev (another Russian businessman, he's actually been in the KGB); Charlotte Owen (junior aide to Boris Johnson for three years) ... the list goes on.
This isn't new (although in recent time the dodginess has risen to new highs) and many of those appointed to Life Peerages meet the goal of having significant life experience they can use to illuminate aspects of legislation that might otherwise be missed. Equally heriditary peers are not all some Wodehousian stereotype of bumbling idiots.
The first sentence of the cited article makes clear the matter at hand is not "elimination of jury trials" but "a plan to abolish some jury trials". The proposal is an attempt to reduce the time which those who are accused must wait for trial.
FWIW the majority of all criminal cases in the UK are dealt with by either a single judge, or three judges[1]. This is hardly surprising as assembling a jury is vastly time consuming and for minor criminal matters is hard to justify.
> The proposals, which return to Parliament on Tuesday, would replace juries in England and Wales with a single judge in cases where a convicted defendant would be jailed for up to three years.
Wow, this is literally the plot of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney video games. I'm sure it will go great with no downsides.
I'm a little torn on this one. On the one hand, people are bad epistemologists and lots of countries manage with similarly limited jury trials. On the other, we're doing it for cost reasons, which I think is the worst basis imaginable for such a move
It's simply a fact that common law jury trials are time-consuming and expensive and cause long delays and bottlenecks in the justice system.
Different common-law countries have addressed this issue in various ways. Restricting jury trials for more serious offenses (in this case for more serious charges - ones that could potentially result in a sentence of more than 3 years) is one way than many common law jurisdictions have taken.
It's not ideal but it's infinitely better in my mind than the practice used in the US to reduce jury trials. To avoid the cost/expense of a jury trial, public prosecutors threatens to press for a large number of charges or some very serious charges - carrying the potential of very long sentences - a sort of Gish-gallop approach.
Even if the chances of successful prosecution is relatively small for any one of the charges, the defendant is forced to take a plea-deal to avoid the risk of spending years or decades behind bars. Thus the defendant ends up with a guilty record and often a custodial sentence without any access to a trial or the chance to present their case at all.
The thing is, the reason for the delays and inefficiencies is not really juries. It's mostly much more mundane things like the prison service not sending defendants to court at the right time, translators not turning up when they are supposed to, buildings which are falling apart, technology not working properly, and court time being double-booked. It's an administrative failure, not a problem with the system.
Alongside removing the right to trial by jury, perhaps more alarmingly the government are also planning to remove appeal rights from "minor" cases (from magistrates to the Crown Court). The current statistics are that more than 40% of those appeals are upheld.
The planned changes won't fix any of these things, but it will cause fundamental damage to trust in the system and result in many miscarriages of justice.
You probably know this - but in most jurisdictions in the US, including federal, charges have to be approved by a grand jury of your peers.
There’s an old adage “a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich”* implying that the grand jury is easily mislead - but in my anecdotal experience of serving on a grand jury - this isn’t really true. We definitely said no to overreaches.
And you can also see this happening in high profile cases with the Trump administration:
Ignoring that, it’s not clear to me why removing jury trials would reduce the likelihood of a prosecutor throwing a larger number of charges at a defendant. Prosecutors want to demonstrate a record of convictions. That career pressure is still going to exist without jury trials - they’re going to throw anything they can and see what sticks.
*Fun Fact - Sol Wachtler, the judge who coined this, was later convicted of multiple felonies, including blackmailing an ex-lover and threatening to kidnap her daughter. A bit more substantial than a ham sandwich.
I'm getting a lot of downvotes for the comment you're responding to so will likely withdraw from this discussion. But to be clear, I deliberately talked of prosecutors threatening charges, not actual indictments.
Conviction through plea-bargaining is almost exclusively a phenomenon in the US. It just doesn't feature in the normal process of public prosecution in countries like Ireland, the UK or Australia. Also as an aside, the grand jury system is exclusively an American feature.
And every common law country (including the US) has a bar in terms of seriousness of the crime, below which you are tried without a jury. Yes the bar is lower in the US (potential sentence of more than 6 months?) but this bar exists nonetheless without sensationalist claims that jury trials have been eliminated - which is what was stated in the comment I originally responded to.
American Bar Associaton agrees. ABA Plea Bargain Task Force Report is sad read. US criminal justice system is horrific and plea bargaining is big reason for it.
“It should never be a gallery of old boys’ networks, nor a place where titles, many of which were handed out centuries ago, hold power over the will of the people.”
Nobody tell these extreme optimists about America. Replace 'titles' with 'generational wealth' and that's precisely what not just our upper house, but most of our government, is. And they're all elected!
The title makes it sound like they’re removing the remains of lost Lords gathering dust on the seats although that’s probably not too far from the truth.
> The case of Peter Mandelson, who resigned from the Lords in February after revelations about his friendship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, drew renewed attention to the upper chamber and the problem of lords behaving badly.
But Mandelson wasn't a hereditary noble. His example is an argument for abolishing the House of Lords entirely (which I agree with in any case) but not specifically for ejecting hereditary nobles.
> Labour remains committed to eventually replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is “more representative of the U.K.” If past experience is anything to go by, change will come slowly.
Why does the House of Lords need to be replaced at all? Most countries are gridlocked enough with one chamber of parliament.
>Why does the House of Lords need to be replaced at all? Most countries are gridlocked enough with one chamber of parliament.
Depends how it is designed. The australian senate, before 2015 or so, used to contain enough fun cooks that legislation had to get broad support to make it through. It was a pretty decent check against the beige dictatorship. But since they updated the voting rules to prevent the cool minor parties from holding the balance, its just been a massive rubber stamp. I loved seeing randos from minor parties getting to grill public servants on whatever their constituents were complaining about, particularly firearm legislation.
> The australian senate, before 2015 or so, used to contain enough fun cooks that legislation had to get broad support to make it through. It was a pretty decent check against the beige dictatorship. But since they updated the voting rules to prevent the cool minor parties from holding the balance, its just been a massive rubber stamp
Current numbers in Australian Senate: Government 29, Opposition 27, Crossbench 20, 39 needed for majority. So if the opposition opposes a government bill, the government needs 10 crossbench senators to vote for it - if the Greens support it, that’s enough; if they oppose it, the government can still pass the bill if they get the votes of the 10 non-Green crossbench senators (4 One Nation; 3 independents; 3 single senator minor parties)
I can’t see how this is by any reasonable definition a “rubber stamp”
The Australian parliament is weird but it kind of works.
Members of the House of Representatives ("lower house") are elected via preferential voting and each member represents a single electorate (there are 150 electorates), all of the electorates are roughly proportional population wise (there is an independent body that draws up the boundaries), however the geographical area covered by each electorate can vary greatly. For example in the State of New South Wales there are dozen of electorates covering the various suburbs of Sydney and one massively sized electorate covering a huge rural portion of the same state where population density is very low.
The Senate (Upper House) is fixed there are 12 members for every state and 1 member per territory. This means that Tasmania which is a fraction of the population of New South Wales has exactly the same number of Senators. There are about half a million people in Tasmania compares to 8 Million+ in NSW. So relatively speaking your upper house vote has way more power if you live in a smaller state.
The senate also uses transferable vote with a quota system. The quota system and "vote transfer" makes it a little weird and it is why minor candidates can percolate up and end up a senator despite relatively small primary vote.
The Greens voted with the LNP to change the senate voting rules, pulling the ladder up behind them. They are just a third leg of the major parties.
Wheres my Australian Motoring Enthusiast? Wheres my Shooters Farmers and Fishers rep? Even the "Libertarian" (formerly Liberal Democrats) party had the occasional flash of brilliance.
Paymen was voted in with the ALP and probably wont rate reelection.
The only halfway decent crazy crossbench we have right now is Lambo, and shes only good like 45% of the time. Lidia thorpe can be good quality but shes like Paymen, and wont be reelected solo.
Heaps of these crossbenchers are only there thanks to Climate 200 funding, which will vanish the second that bloke achieves his goals or gets bored and wanders off.
>I can’t see how this is by any reasonable definition a “rubber stamp”
Labor shops everything to the LNP or Greens, and chooses the one they can more easily bully into compliance. LNP does the same when they are in power.
"Important" is quite a high bar in this case though if the House of Lords is insistent enough to actually vote something down. The cost in terms of parliamentary time for the government these days of using the Parliament Acts is very high (especially for things which government would normally do via secondary legislation), and it also requires at least a one year delay; by extension the potential political cost to the government of using the Parliament Acts to pass something unpopular or controversial is set at a high enough bar that it's an effective veto.
This feels like quite a sensible safety valve to me.
Polybius might have an interesting opinion on this. Generally mixed forms of government are supposed to be more stable. If you make everything purely democratic, the structure weakens a bit.
Democracy had pretty good PR in the 20th century, but having institutional counterweights is never a bad idea.
When I was a kid I was appaled that a country in this age can have a king/queen. Then I understood that they are basically like an animal in a zoo, all for show with no actual power.
The point of the hereditary peerage was the same as the point of having a non-elected Senate. Now both will have been lost in the name of "democracy" - a system of government that constantly fails to do either what is the desire of the people OR what is truly in their interests. From here on out it'll just be whoever manages to connive their way into power through connections, payola, corruption, island meetups, and so on. I strongly suspect this will lead to a worse government, not a better one.
Read/watch this interview [1] with Ada Palmer on her new book about the Renaissance. Florence did this for a time.
> You put names in a bag. You examine all of the merchant members of guilds. You choose which ones are fit to serve, meaning not ill and dying, not insane, not so deeply in debt that they could be manipulated by the people whom they owe money to. Their names go in a bag. You choose nine guys at random. They rule the city. They are put in a palace where they rule the city from that tower.
> They’re actually locked in the tower for the duration of their time in office because if they left the tower, they could be bribed or kidnapped. They rule the city for two or three months. At the end, they are thanked for their service and escorted out, and then a different nine guys share power for the next three months. It’s a power sharing that is designed to be tyrant-proof because you need consensus of nine randomly selected guys to decide to do anything.
Perhaps you're joking, but Athenian democracy had a significant amount of randomness, with candidates being chosen randomly from the top vote winners.
Terms were also only 1 year for most positions.
These, and other systems, helped prevent any one person from monopolizing power.
Not joking, although maybe not terribly serious either. I could envision a random (filtered) selection of citizens being given a veto power over legislation, as another check against abuse.
Not quite the same thing, but in Ireland, it's become more common for Citizens Assemblies, which are randomly selected (this is disputed by some) citizens appointed to help word referenda on constitutional amendments and otherwise gauge public feeling on certain issues.
The assembly then passes it's recommendation to the Parliament who are free to ignore it if they don't like it.
It's interesting how people never even learn about any upsides to that. Even if the balance comes out on the side of elected officials, it's good to at least have some idea of why so many societies have worked like that (other than "they were dumb and evil I guess").
The main thing is long-term stability and limits on backstabbing and ruthless competition. Sure it doesn't bring it to zero, plenty of bloody examples from history. But when someone gets close to power for the first time and might be out of there quite soon, and have to watch out for being replaced quickly, they will behave quite differently than someone who plans ahead in decades and generations (if all things go well). If you have a short time under the sun, you better extract all you can while it lasts.
It's kind of like a lifetime appointment or like tenure, except also across generations. Tenure allows professors to ignore short-term ups and downs and allows them some resilience and slack (though funding is still an issue). Similarly a nobleman can "relax" and take a longer-term view on things. The failure mode is that they stop caring and become lazy and just enjoy their position.
You already get this in the UK, and also in other countries, most of which have royal families and associated aristocrats.
There are also - notoriously - foreign-funded influencer, lobbyist, and donor operations.
And the traditional industries - fossil fuels, property, finance, arms - also have a huge say.
The reality is most decisions aren't made in Westminster. Parliament is a device for packaging and legitimising decisions made by the oligarchy. And the House of Lords is largely ceremonial.
It's not there to shape policy, it's there to provide a reward for loyal service to the country's real rulers.
Being in the Lords is a very nice deal. You get up to £371 a day just for turning up, with the option to claim expenses on top of that.
You get access to high quality heavily subsidised food and drink. And you get the status of being a lord, which opens doors if you happen to be someone for whom they weren't already open.
It provides an additional check. Much like a monarch, a noble's interests are tied to the welfare of the country itself. Without the country, they're just a toff with some money and an overinflated sense of self-importance.
The Senate is, while not the whole story, a significant part of the reason the government constantly fails to do what is either the desire of the people or what's in their interests. I wouldn't lament losing the Senate.
The US Senate is designed to check and balance the House of Representatives. But that often puts the Congress as a whole in deadlock, meaning it can no longer balance the other two branches.
When they could get anything done they delegated a lot of power to the Executive. Which worked ok, but eventually a "unitary executive" appropriated even more power, and the Legislature is powerless to prevent it.
Unpopular opinion: deadlock is fine. Most legislation is bad. What really matters is the budget. And the rule that failing to pass a budget can automatically force an election avoids the absurd US "shutdown" that isn't a shutdown.
This is now my second favorite idea, after a nationwide ban of first past the post voting schemes.
My third (previously second) is outlawing political parties. The problem with that one is it would be really difficult to implement in a way that doesn't run afoul of freedom of association and freedom of speech. Probably worth figuring out though.
Voting system reform would probably mitigate the worst aspects of political parties.
Egypt after ousting Mubarak held an election where a third of seats were reserved for independents. Most winning candidates were just Muslim Brotherhood affiliated. I suspect the military interim government did that deliberately to justify their later coup.
On the other hand, voting needs to mean something. If voting doesn't mean anything, because the whole system is held in a vice grip by a sclerotic institution playing power games with itself, then the broader system eventually collapses.
My personal opinion is that Mitch McConnell's intransigence and unwillingness to do anything lest Obama get credit for it led directly to an increased desire for a "strongman"
The Senate was fundamentally from the start a compromise in favor of the slave-owning ogliarchy. You just have to look at free and slave states being admitted in pairs to preserve the status quo of slavery to see how that went.
Extraordinary, and disgusting, to see monarchism touted by literate professionals in the 21st century.
The "point" of hereditary peerage is, from the perspective of the nobility, to preserve privileges with only self-interested regard for the welfare of the public—which very obviously resolves into tyrannical despotism at the earliest opportunity!
Utterly unconscionable to carry water for the literally medieval political economy that brought us, eg the calamitous 14th century.
Countless—countless—examples of the hideous cruelties of hereditary nobles abound since the institution's inception. You'd have to be a blind pig to ignore the myriad failure states. My God, man, do you want your children to be slaves??
Directionally the UK gov has arrested more people for speech crimes than the Soviets..
Anything they pass or even look excited for is a negative signal. These people seem inept on every front, and I can’t even generously find something clever about them.
Iraq, Brexit, and Speech Laws.
If a Brit told me the sky was blue, I’d double check myself.
And if an American told me it was blue, I'd have no need to check, I could have confidence it is not, and that their evaluation would change to another false answer in five minutes.
It's rather hard to read because the amendments are written as a diff, but it seems to imply the undisclosed number is 87 peers. I guess they need to decide amongst themselves who the lucky 87 are?
# Exclusion of remaining hereditary peers
Omit section 2 of the House of Lords Act 1999 (exception to exclusion of hereditary peers from membership of House of Lords).
All primary legislation is published. But this needn't be in the primary legislation since there is no need to legislate to make it happen. It's a side deal, the government agrees to do this, the Lords agree not to get in their way.
Much, but not all secondary legislation is also published. A typical means by which Secondary Legislation is brought into existence is that a Law says there shall be some list or reference established by some particular minister, and that document is Secondary Legislation. For example maybe a Law concerning Clown Licensing says there shall be a list of Clown License Offices, and the Secretary of State for Hilarity shall write this list, that list isn't voted on by Parliament, the list gets written by some bureaucrats working for the current Secretary of State for Hilarity. This "undisclosed" list needn't be in secondary legislation either.
The idea is that some of the current hereditary peers will be given new life peerages under existing rules which would enable them to stay in the chamber. Granting new life peerages is mostly within the gift of the Prime Minister (although there are committees which vet appointments and conventions about allowing opposition parties to nominate some), so this is not part of the legislation but a back-room deal by which the votes were secured by the government.
Removal of hereditary privilege is a good thing in principle.
However, given the Labour party just gave children the vote, cancelled local elections in conservative-leaning areas, and now they're removing the (traditionally conservative-leaning) hereditary peers, it's starting to feel a lot like the Left are gerrymandering our democracy.
They gave 16 year olds the vote, and 16 year olds can leave home, marry, join the army, and so on. Why should they not vote?
They didn't run pointless elections by request of the very councils that were due for them, because those areas are being redrawn and would have to have fresh elections almost immediately, making the results meaningless.
They also gave all the conservative hereditary peers lifetime peerages so they will keep their seats.
Your framing of all three of these is obviously intended to mislead.
> 16 year olds can leave home, marry, join the army, and so on. Why should they not vote?
That's a separate argument.
My point is Labour's change to the rules is very politically convenient for themselves. In the most recent polling, 32% of 16-17-year-olds would vote Labour, while only 17% of the overall electorate would vote Labour.
> They didn't run pointless elections by request of the very councils that were due for them, because those areas are being redrawn and would have to have fresh elections almost immediately, making the results meaningless.
They allowed individual incumbent councillors to choose whether elections were cancelled. This was politically convenient for the Labour and Tory parties because the Reform Party is new, and while it's polling well ahead of Labour, it doesn't have many incumbent council seats.
When a court challenge loomed, Labour quickly u-turned on the latest round of cancellations. Funny how something can seem sensible one day, and can then be u-turned at the slightest whiff of legal scrutiny.
> They also gave all the conservative hereditary peers lifetime peerages so they will keep their seats.
Can you name a single Conservative hereditary peer that will be given a lifetime peerage in Starmer's reform plan?
There is no reasonable definition of "the Left" that includes the British Labour party. The only one that fits would be "to the left of the British Conservative party", but that's as arbitrary as redefining it "to the left of Reform UK" and then starting to call the tories "The Left".
> Labour, is one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, along with the Conservative Party. It sits on the centre-left of the left–right political spectrum
Centre-left doesn’t mean the Left. It just means it’s to the left of the other centrist party (Tories). Just because they lean left doesn’t mean they are the Left, Radical Left, Commies etc
Now we're down to just an upper house absolutely stuffed with hundreds of washed up political hacks given a comfortable retirement and party donors. And a few priests.
It's not "I used to have slaves...", it's "My ancestors used to have slaves...".
Having a class of nobles is an embarrassment for a country, and they should have been kicked out of parliament a century ago. But don't attribute to the child the sins of the father; that's the same category of error that the concept of hereditary nobility falls into.
Sure, they are parasites descended from thugs as opposed to thugs descended from thugs. But you don't see them renouncing their unearned wealth built on rapine, slavery and colonial exploitation, which is to this day largely exempted from property taxes.
Has it? By what metric are you using for that? Two Bush presidencies off the power of the senior patriarch. Current president comes from family wealth. Most of the oligarchs come from family wealth. It's not until the recent tech billionaires that became first generation oligarchs.
It's what fills the vacuum that matters, just as POTUS is finding out in Iran. If you don't have a plan for after creating the vacuum, you're probably not going to be happy with how it is filled
Until the UK military pledge allegiance to democracy rather than the king, the royal family is also a risk to democracy.
Thailand is an object lesson in how monarchy is repeatedly used as a lever by military and business elites to overthrow democratic representation "in the name of the king".
It almost happened in the UK once, too, in the same way it happened in Thailand.
The reason the media is so keen on the institution is because it functions as a "break glass in case of emergency" for elites. It's not an organic part of the culture, it is shoved down our throats.
I think the monarchy could have used its power to prevent Brexit, but the monarchy never uses its voice for anything controversial for the most part, that there was a valid referendum and the closeness of the vote and rancor at the time from leavers who held all the reins of power at the time might have made the partial public funding of monarchy untenable, too. Queen Elizabeth seemed particularly neutral even on Brexit, maybe Charles would have done differently?
This is a dark day for the monarchy... and for democracy in the UK.
Remove the only people who actually have a long-term vested non-financial interest in the system and replace them with more revolving-door politicians backed by the big money so that the big money can operate with even less friction than before. Great. Just great.
The problem with our current democratic systems with unlimited government fiat money is that capital is in control. Not voters. Capital. This should be obvious by now. Someone deprived of food will vote for whoever you tell them to vote for.
Oh piss off. It's removing the nobs from the system, people who are there by right of birth alone. There is no reason a modern democracy shoud cow-tow to such people or allow them any power over the rest of us.
Some years ago I, an American citizen and resident, studied abroad briefly and was asked by the House of Lords to speak to them about what GDPR (a UK law!) was, how it worked, and the impact it could have.
Further than ejecting nobles, they really should just overhaul the entire chamber, which is surely doing more harm than good if they need a foreign national to explain their own laws to them.
Did they _need_ you or were they seeking the perspective of someone they considered well informed or valued for some other reason? What's the context here?
You don’t think it’s a strength that they have the courage to seek views from as wide a range of perspectives as possible, including from outside the UK?
Gather a group of the most powerful people in the land; give them ermine robes and manifold privileges; require of them nothing other than that they meet regularly to converse and debate in a prestigious and historical chamber. Allow them only the power to veto or delay legislation.
Gilbert and Sullivan were satirising but I think their point stands. It is possible to do nothing and to do it very well. While they're busy doing nothing they're not interfering or messing everything else up, even though they probably could outside the chamber.
The fact that heriditary peers are being ejected means nothing beyond the fact that these nobles have lost their inherent power.
> these nobles have lost their inherent power
The nobles were the land owners, the business owners, the OG entrepreneurs, they were educated, and their children would grow up to be the same.
Historically the system made sense. But the last 150 years or so have basically taken their power away.
A couple of years ago an estate - that included a 9 bedroom country house, plus an entire village with a population of 100 people, and a church - was sold by noblety near where I grew up. The price was in the low tens of millions, not that much.
To play devil's advocate:
Some people argue that the difficulty of passing laws in the United States is "a feature not a bug" b/c it prevents the US from creating laws too quickly.
You could argue the House of Lords did the same: by vetoing bills, it acted as a "speed bump" to laws that might cause too much change too quickly.
The Lords doesn’t actually have the power to veto bills thanks to the Parliament act. They also have a principle of ultimate legislative priority under which they defer to the commons in matters where the commons puts its foot down. They generally act as a revising body rather than outright attempting to defy the commons.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...It doesn't really help the United States create good law. You could argue that it worsen the quality of laws by forcing kludges to be built on top of kludges.
A sortition panel collecting random people from all walks of life to give feedback on law would probably improve the quality of law more than any amount of procedure and paperwork ever will.
We mistaken paperwork with deliberation and quality control.
I’d go further. To bypass the deadlocked congress, obama used executive orders in new and expansive ways. That ratcheted things up. Now trump is using executive orders even MORE expansively, to do things that are patently undemocratic and unconstitutional (federalizing who can vote, ilegal tariffs). The kludges and hacks are causing a crumbling of democracy, not just mediocre law.
> To bypass the deadlocked congress, obama used executive orders in new and expansive ways. That ratcheted things up.
While I agree - this has been an issue long before Obama.
Any reasonable country should be able to decide on the legality of abortion through the normal political process - the public deliberates, they elect representatives, the representatives hammer out the fine print and pass legislation.
But in the American system, the legality of abortion is decided at random, based on the deaths of a handful of lawyers born in the 1930s. If that person dies between ages 68-75, 84-87 or 91-95 abortion is illegal, if they die aged 76-83, or 88-91 it's legal.
Why doesn't America deal with political questions using their political process?
> Why doesn't America deal with political questions using their political process?
Since 2022 we do. But it’s through the political process of the States. This has made a lot of people very angry because a bunch of States have got it all wrong, and the exact way they got it wrong depends on your point of view on the subject, but no matter which side of the debate you’re on, some on your side most assuredly want to preempt all the States that got it all wrong with Federal law.
That Congress hasn’t come to a political consensus is the Federal political consensus.
> Since 2022 we do. But it’s through the political process of the States.
Which is exactly as it should be. There's nothing in the Constitution which gives the federal government power to act on this issue, therefore it should be decided on a state by state basis. Government works best when it is done based on the values and needs of the local population, not one solution for an entire heterogeneous nation.
Because that requires compromise and Americans are raging absolutists that need immediate results.
In 1791, abolitionists tried to end slavery in the British Empire but couldn't get it passed by the House of Commons. Henry Dundas changed the bill so it would be phased-in. Existing slaves wouldn't be emancipated but their children would be. That bill did pass. Slavery naturally ended over the following decades until the much smaller slave population was bought by the government and freed in 1833.
In the USA, nobody budged until a Civil War happened and then the slaves were freed by force in the 1850s without monetary compensation. But that time, emancipation happened immediately after they got full power, there was no need to give money to racists, and no moral compromises were required.
> But that time, emancipation happened immediately after they got full power, there was no need to give money to racists, and no moral compromises were required.
I really hope you were being sarcastic here... Emancipating the slaves during/after the Civil War was not an orderly, immediate process. And even once all slaves were freed, they continued to live second-class lives due to the laws of the time.
Yes, it's sarcasm. I'm contrasting how Britain made their legal process gradual enough to match reality with the USA's demand that legal processes create reality.
For reference, fully elective abortion legally doesn't exist in most of the UK. It's just that a fetus being dangerous to the mental health of the mother has progressively been interpreted more and more broadly...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_Kingdom
In the American system as originally founded, most of these things were intended to be decided by the states.
It’s more like Americans did decide, that it was illegal and judges decided they could use legal tricks to make it legal (which in turn meant as soon as they didn’t have the majority the opposite could occur.)
The problem here isn't the temptation to bypass a system intended to require consensus before action can be taken. That temptation is present with any system that provides any checks on autocratic tyranny.
The problem is that something like executive orders are being used to bypass that system instead of being prevented from doing so.
The problem is that the US constitution was written before people realized that the natural consequence of that type of constitution is a two party system. You cannot have a viable third party in the long run because it will necessarily weaken one or the other existing party and that party will then absorb it.
So no you have a situation where the government can have split brain: some parts of the legislative branch can be party A and other parts can be party B and the president isn’t tied to either.
From what I understand when the US “brings democracy” to another country we set up a parliamentary system and that system is widely seen as better. You cannot form an ineffective government by definition, though you can have a non-functioning government that is trying to form a coalition. These types of systems tend to find center because forming a coalition always requires some level of compromise. Our system oscillates between three states: party A does what they want, party B does what they want, and split brain and president does what he wants because Congress has no will to keep him accountable.
What I would like to try is a combination of parliamentary system, approval voting, and possibly major legislation passed by randomly selecting a jury of citizens and showing the the pros and cons of a bill. If you cannot convince 1000 random citizens that we should go to war, maybe it’s not a good idea.
> The problem is that the US constitution was written before people realized that the natural consequence of that type of constitution is a two party system.
The two party system is a consequence of using first past the post voting, which the US constitution doesn't even require. Use score voting instead, which can be done by ordinary legislation without any constitutional amendment, and you don't have a two party system anymore.
The point is that if you can't do the thing the democratic way (because the system is so biased against change as to make it impossible) then people will look for workarounds.
The workarounds are accepted since otherwise nothing would get done at all, and then people are surprised when the workaround gets used in ways they no longer like.
When people say "nothing gets done" they mean "we can't do things that a substantial plurality of the public doesn't want done" -- which is exactly what's supposed to happen.
If you break the mechanisms ensuring that stays the case, what do you honestly expect to happen the next time it's you in the minority?
Yes, and, Bush-Cheney were the modern forefathers of pushing the unitary executive theory, building on the work of Reagan after a 90’s shaped lull. Reagan took ideas from The Heritage Foundation, who returned in the ‘24 elections pushing Project 2025. A natural endgame and roadmap for the movement of power to the president, that is being followed as approximately as any political roadmap ever is.
Remember that each time you’re tempted to crack a Coors light!
So I should remember that… never? Got it. ;)
Unitary executive is popular and doesn’t have to mean an imperial presidency. Actually the most popular version, albeit not the one you hear about the most, is the libertarian idea that the executive should have little power at all and almost no bureaucracy to command.
The argument isn't that it helps the US create good law. It's that it keeps the US from creating too many bad laws.
"The more laws, the less justice." -- Cicero
Government needs to be more Agile.
Government needs to be less.
Government needs to be for all the people, and not just for the 1% with wealth and power. Not more or less.
This seems to go against human nature. Government is always for the 1% and in the rare case it isn’t it simply just creates a new 1%
Note that this change is not getting rid of the Lords; it's just getting rid of Hereditary piers - i.e. those passed down through generations. We'll still have Lords who have been selected by previous governments within their lifetime; so they still provide that speed bump; but do it in a way that means they were at some point chosen by an elected body.
Not sure how you think this will improve things. None of these people are elected. They likely got these positions by doing political favors. They are likely even more out of touch with the electorate. They are even more likely to make decisions based upon ideology instead of practical quality of life considerations. Seems to me this just centralizes power even more in the hands of a few. And that's the last thing the UK needs right now.
You argue that a lot of things are likely. Why don't you take the time to check instead of slander?
> They are likely even more out of touch with the electorate.
Not compared to the hereditary peers.
In theory these people have proved themselves useful in some way and bring expertise to the upper chamber, rather than just being born in the right family. In practice there is some of that and some political cronyism.
> Seems to me this just centralizes power even more in the hands of a few.
That is exactly what hereditary peerage is. The few, by definition. The aristocracy.
> You could argue the House of Lords did the same
It can still do the same thing without hereditary peers. A slow-moving, conservative (in the classical sense) upper chamber is a classic in bicameral systems, it is not specific to the House of Lords.
The House of Lords isn't going anywhere. The majority of the chamber are life peers, functionally identical to Canadian senators.
And for many years now, even the remaining minority of hereditary peers in the chamber are elected to that job, albeit not by the general public. My guess is that all those who are actually useful will get "grandfathered in" by this legislation making them life peers so that they can keep doing the exact same job. Many life peers (who are all entitled to be there) rarely attend, so it would be kinda silly if Lord Snootington, the fifteenth Earl of Whatever is kicked out for being a hereditary peer despite also being the linchpin of an important committee and one of the top 100 attendees in the Lords, while they keep Bill Smith, a business tycoon who got his peerage for giving a politician a sack of cash and hasn't been in London, never mind the House of Lords, since 2014...
> My guess is that all those who are actually useful will get "grandfathered in" by this legislation making them life peers
The government made a political deal with the hereditary peers-drop their fight against this bill, and in exchange the government will grant a subset of them life peerages
But that political deal is just an informal extralegal “understanding”, it isn’t actually in the text of the bill-having the bill text grant someone a life peerage would upset the status of peerages as a royal prerogative, and they don’t want to do that
> The government made a political deal with the hereditary peers-drop their fight against this bill, and in exchange the government will grant a subset of them life peerages
Wouldn't a "deal" theoretically benefit both sides? That one doesn't offer the hereditary peers anything they don't already have.
> Wouldn't a "deal" theoretically benefit both sides? That one doesn't offer the hereditary peers anything they don't already have.
They don't have any expectation against losing their seats entirely when hereditary peers are ejected from the House, and, even with a sufficient number of life peers voting with them, they couldn't actually prevent such a bill from passing, only delay it. Securing a commitment of life seats is getting something they didn't have.
Only 92 of the 842 peers are hereditary currently, so it’s not really necessary to convince them to agree; the deal only needs to be seen as fair enough by the other peers. Or really, it only needs to be seen as fair enough to the House of Commons.
> Only 92 of the 842 peers are hereditary currently, so it’s not really necessary to convince them to agree;
As I understand it, it was necessary (in order to pass the bill without the delay the Lords can impose) to secure a deal on the hereditary peers (not with them), because the Conservatives (the largest Lords faction) and many of the cross-benchers among the life peers, a sufficient number in total to delay the bill (the Lords can't actually block it permanently) oppose the bill, not just a group among the existing hereditary peers.
The hereditary peers were elected and that's what is being discarded? So before at least the voters got some choice and that's going away? Amazing...
> The hereditary peers were elected
By a larger pool of hereditary peers. Previously several hundred members of the aristocracy were all entitled to a seat in there by virtue of their birth and title alone. After reforms in 1999 this group had to nominate from within themselves a subset of 92 hereditary peers who would be allowed to participate in the chamber.
If by "the voters" you mean the general public, then no, they had no say at all.
Just in case someone gets the wrong end of the stick, the UK isn’t getting rid of the House of Lords, just the hereditary members (of which there aren’t many).
But almost all the remainder are political appointees.
It's disappointing that they didn't replace the hereditary peers with some other non-politically-appointed folks. There is a very great need to have people in the House of Lords who are not beholden to any of the political parties.
I personally favour a lottery system where random people get given the opportunity to join the House of Lords for the rest of their working lives.
That view is a leftover from a bygone era, when others could look at the US with often grudging admiration. Today? The US itself doesn't think much of itself, and to the rest of us it is a cautionary tale.
"The US itself doesn't think much of itself"
If you ever find yourself wondering why US voters elected someone like Trump...if you ever wondered why institutions in the US are crumbling and experts don't have much credibility, this is why. I assure you, most Americans think very highly of the US compared to the rest of the world (especially if they have traveled). Only the out of touch don't and the reasons why most US voters don't give them much credibility is the absolutely crazy amount of twisting of facts to align to that POV.
As people like that are slowly removed/aged out from those institutions, the institutions will magically start working well again and regain public trust. In case you wondered how a potted plant like Trump can somehow perform better than those experts, that's how. Because people who believe things like that have to twist around their worldview to such an extreme that its impossible for them to be competent no matter how smart or how much education they have. Its also how people who claim to be for peace and democracy somehow end up supporting a religious oligarchy that funds terrorism across an entire region. Ideology makes you dumb to the degree that you are smart.
PS Europe is the cautionary tale here. Again, your leaders are far smarter than Trump. Does that seem to matter? Nope, because ideology destroys the effectiveness they (you) should have.
> Because people who believe things like that have to twist around their worldview to such an extreme that its impossible for them to be competent no matter how smart or how much education they have.
Extremely well said
yes. just because it is unfashionable to argue in favor of aristocracy does not mean that it doesn’t have its own intrinsic set of benefits and drawbacks… the drawbacks of ultra democracy (populism, etc.) are all cast aside as the innocent folly of people yearning to be free but not knowing whereof to yearn (“it’s not a system problem, it’s a people problem, but we must no matter what condemn ourselves to people problems because anything else is anathema to “liberty”, or whatever”). but dare utter one word in favor of conservatism in the original, true sense, and it is as though democracy is an unalloyed good with absolutely no downside. like, clearly we should have a direct democracy with no senate and no house, no? anything else is just allowing the Powers That Be to patriarchy everything!
It's only a speed bump for progressive laws while the most reactionary garbage gets fast tracked with their approvals.
You get something far worse in the US. Which is a government that no longer feels any need to either pass or be bound by laws.
Ah yes, the country whose supreme court struck down its global tariffs and then forced the federal government into refunding all the money back is truly no longer bound by its own laws.
Hyperbole beyond belief there
I think a good revising chamber is critical to good democracy, though the Lords recently have been playing silly buggers around the Employment Rights Act and ignoring the Salisbury Convention (which is that they shouldn’t block manifesto commitments).
I do think the USA goes too far, which has led to frustration among the public and contributed to Trump and the resulting behaviour. I’ve said before that I think the US House of Representatives should have a mechanism to override Senate speed bumps, though not without effort. The idea is to encourage the legislature to compromise but maintain the “primacy” of the House if the Senate is being obstinate. Something like the Parliament Act, is what I’d have in mind.
The Senate in the US is the upper house and can override the House. There is no "primacy" of the House in the US system. The only place where anything like that exists is in impeachment (which is for any member of the executive or judicial branch, not just the president) where the House simply has more votes than the Senate (each member gets 1 vote). Those types of hearings are pretty rare (usually).
Which manifesto commitments have been blocked in this parliament?
The purpose of an assembly is to reflect the actual distribution of power in society, not what we'd like it to be.
If interest groups do not feel represented by the system, they will destroy it.
> meet regularly to converse and debate
Senators play a similar role. Their aim is heavily weighted toward oversight and advisory. Gov’t in general is weighted in that direction, because governments govern which is mainly about being a kind of referee, maintaining the social order, and aiding human beings in attaining their end as human beings through legislation.
Without this function, we have activity with little reflection spurred by politicians pandering to the mob.
British democracy and government is cool. It's not enshrined in some document they got together and wrote down like the US constitution, it's this organic thing that they've stumbled towards over the last ~800 years with small changes like this one gradually evolving them into a modern liberal democracy.
If cool means interesting then yes, it is cool because it's archaic and different but it's not effective. It's the equivalent of a verbal contract. It's simply not as clear or coherent as a written one.
Irish democracy in contrast uses STV voting and a written constitution and is modeled between the best of what the UK, the US and France had to offer when it was drafted and is a very representative democracy with many political parties compared to the duopolies in the US and the UK. It's also why Ireland is largely immune to hard shifts to the left or right relative to the UK and US.
I love this about Ireland because they are such a young republic. And democratic systems are a technology. Something that we understand better over time, and somewhere new can pick and choose from what is best, where it is _extremely_ hard to change existing systems in established countries.
Yes, it's in my opinion one of the great tragedies of our time that some of our established countries are so hard to change. I don't mean this as the policy needs change, everyone will differ on those. I just mean the technology of government like you're saying. Efficient and more fair ways of voting on laws and electing representatives do exist.
For example my own (US) has a political system basically frozen in amber from a time before many of the political and policy challenges of our day were not even thought of yet. And they did their best to create a change mechanism, but I think anyone being truly fair of any political persuasion has to admit that while it has prevented nearly every harmful extremist constitutional amendment (I'd say Prohibition is the main one that sneaked in), it has proven to, within the lifetimes of most living Americans, be so hard to attain as to set the status quo in stone.
The framers didn't realize that most changes would be blocked by at least one party, out of fear that it would advantage the other guys. Same reason we stopped admitting states before letting Puerto Rico in, an absolutely absurd situation.
Do you not understand why PR isn't a state? Seems like you don't. Support for PR statehood is only about 50% (on the island). That largely has to do with the fact that their taxes would increase if they became a state. Additionally, they would have to switch to English (along with Spanish) which makes things a lot more complicated. They are already US citizens and can move to anywhere in the US if they want to vote in federal elections (and half of them do but mainly for work). They don't want independence either. So the current limbo state is actually desirable to them.
Even if the citizens of PR wanted statehood, you have to get both parties to agree. This means probably 2 states at the same time (one red, one blue). Since there isn't another potentially red state (Alberta but that's probably never going to happen) to join, that's hard to do. Look at US history, statehood has always worked this way. It has nothing to do with whatever you are implying.
PS The 27th amendment was 1992, probably during your lifetime. You would expect the rate of new amendments to slow overtime so the average of a new amendment about every 15-20 years seems about right.
New and shiny is not always better. Science has spoiled us in the last century, but it has little to say about how a good government should operate.
Many of us have a popular set of ideals that we think are superior and have attempted to overlay those on every aspect of modern life, but they have little to no data behind them and are ultimately just beliefs that make us feel good. As such, there is no reason to expect they are optimal for governing either.
It’s true. In the long arc of history I have no doubt that our current government systems will be considered childish
> "The framers didn't realize that most changes would be blocked by at least one party, out of fear that it would advantage the other guys."
Check out some of the founders' essays. This is no accident, or oversight. It's absolutely intentional and for good reason.
The Constitution grants power to all three branches of government, which is the same as granting power to none of them. The more they disagree, the less power they have. In this way power can only be wielded through cooperation (selflessness).
It's a honey pot for the power hungry.
Working very well as we can see currently.
It's worked well as a honeypot, but I don't think it's working well as a device for paralysis. The executive has seized an alarming amount of power (with the tacit approval of the party in control of the legislature), and the constitution isn't doing much of anything to stop it.
Also, one of the reasons for choosing proportional representation with a single transferable vote (PR-STV) was to ensure that the substantial unionist minority (who wanted to maintain the link with the UK/Britain) would still have have their views represented in the new parliament. This system works for other minority views and provides new political parties with a chance to grow in a way that wouldn’t be possible in a first-past-the-post system.
Note that even though the U.S. has a Constitution, the entire U.S. government is still, like the UK, highly reliant on inexplicit norms many of which go back hundreds of years before the U.S. was founded. They’re both still English common law systems.
> duopolies in the US and the UK
for better or worse, the duopoly is disappearing in the UK. Both Tories and Labour are getting passed by Reform and the Greens
But it's not that the duopoly is disappearing. It's just that the previous two parties are being eclipsed by two different parities. That's occurred previously in both the UK and US.
The last time it happened in the US was 1856 and its only happened 2x in US history. The US democratic party is the oldest existing political party in the world. For reference, the UK is actually only about 90 years older than the Democratic party.
> It's simply not as clear or coherent as a written one.
No. As you have surely seen, the US written constitution just gets contorted to "clearly" mean whatever it is the partisan Justices decided suits their current purpose. The effect is extremely corrosive - they even decided it means their guy is above the law.
I agree that using a better voting system (STV) is a meaningful benefit and worth replicating elsewhere, but I don't agree that having a written constitution is better. I think Ireland would be in roughly the same place if it had the same arrangement as in Westminster in that respect.
For example when Ireland wrote a constitutional amendment saying abortion is illegal under basically any circumstances, the people the Irish were electing would also have voted against legislation allowing abortion, but by the time the poll was held to amend to say abortion must be legal, the legislators elected were also mostly pro-choice. So if there was no written constitution my guess is that roughly the outcome is the same, in 1975 an Irish woman who needs an abortion has to "go on holiday" abroad and come back not pregnant or order pills and hope they're not traced to her, and in 2025 it's just an ordinary medical practice. Maybe the changes happen a few years earlier, or a few years later.
Edited: Clarify that the abortion prohibition was itself an amendment, as was the removal of that prohibition.
The power of a constitution is in it being the highest law in the land, that legislation can't just override. It's only recently in the US that there is a blatantly corrupt kakistocracy who feels free to ignore it.
> It's not enshrined in some document they got together and wrote down like the US constitution
It’s also very brittle and one charismatic populist away from unraveling like the American government. Too much depends on gentlemen agreements and people trusting other people to do the right thing. It works in a stable environment, but shatters the moment someone with no shame and no scruples shows up.
Most western democracies have exactly the same fault, maybe having unscrupulous, shameless legislators are the end state of the current models of democracy being practiced.
> It’s also very brittle and one charismatic populist away from unraveling
All sufficiently large governments (really all organizations of any kind) are necessarily like this, from the most successful attempts at open societies to the most autocratic. They all require constant vigilance both to perform their intended function and to preserve themselves into the future.
There's really no way around the possibility that whatever you've written down in your constitution will be ignored in the heat of the moment, or become degraded over time.
But you don't need to put the military under the direct command of the civilian president like US does, if parliament can take military action against the civilian president and civilian action against the military leader then they have ways to deal with both.
American president is too powerful to deal with since he controls both the civilian and the military side.
This is the one argument left for monarchy; that the military in the UK (and technically Australia) swear loyatly to the monarch, not the Prime Minister. In the event of an obviously-lunatic elected official ordering the troops into civilian areas to "pacify" civilian populations, the monarch could (in theory) countermand that order.
There's a mechanism by which Congress can remove the president if he gets out of control.
While no democratic system is completely protected from tyrants, at least the UK (and the Commonwealth nations who inherited their principles) uses the living tree doctrine in its courts, which means that the written text is not sacrosanct and the intention and usage is to be considered. That and unwritten tradition has force of law and can be challenged in court. Look at Boris Johnson's reversal of his prorogation as an example.
Constitution and laws are just pieces of paper. They only matter if the population acts as if they matter. Liberia has the same Constitution as the US.
But they're cycled through much more rapidly, and seem generally more vulnerable than the dictators in the U.S or otherwise. A small concession to be sure.
It seems like a fundamental failure of government that in many cases, there are no consequences for deliberately or accidentally screwing your people. You either get murdered eventually or the country is just left to fix itself later, which disproportionately affects people with little resources.
Strong disagree. It's uncontested that supreme authority lies with parliament, not with the leader of the day. PM can't do shit if parliament doesn't want him to, because they can always simply change the rules on him.
Being able to vote in a strong leader to fix things directly is a feature. Democracy is not always the answer and when it is it can be too slow when time matters.
Britain's problems are due to uncharismatic Blairite socialist.
This comment may or may not be wrong but it is quintessentially low effort.
The point of HN is to discuss, not to tweet about your political enemies.
All of them? Hmmm.
I don't know much about UK politics but I definitely know enough to know that there's no such thing as a "Blairite socialist".
I go back and forth on this. It's a lot like the palace of Westminster itself: charming, whimsical, historical, connected to the past, hopelessly impractical, postponing repairs until things break, and at significant risk of being burned down.
On the other hand it avoids the illusion that power resides in a text and that you can legal-magic your way past a power structure.
There is something to be said for your written constitution though: having the fundamental principles on which your nation is founded enshrined in that way should, at least in theory, make it a lot easier to settle arguments (though in practice, and particularly recently, that does seem not to be the case). Constitutional wrangling in the UK is always really fraught though because it's all done by precedent and is therefore incredibly hard work to get to a clear understanding of what the situation really is.
The USA's written constitution should not be used as an exemplar of written constitutions in general because the founders didn't even enforce it the day after it was ratified. It took a civil war to even turn towards the words as written. The document itself was more aspirational than a reflection of how the founders intended to live and govern.
As a result of all of that, we have developed a culture of sophistry around simple words. We pretend the Constitution binds us, but in practice the structures that govern the country are much more opaque and therefore more difficult to change.
(This is why every so often we have to ratify a new amendment codifying rights that are clearly enumerated in the articles of the Constitution or in an earlier amendment. At some point, the sophistry tips over and we have to amend it to say what was plainly written in at some earlier point.)
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was established in 1982. We're still in the process of figuring out what it means (and as a living document, the interpretation will change over time).
It's messy. But I'd much rather that than need to ask "What would Pierre Trudeau think of this situation?"
Well, SCOTUS sometimes produces really weird Humpty-Dumpty explanations for very common words.
Such as that growing marijuana plants in your own home for your own consumption influences interstate commerce and is therefore within powers of the Congress to regulate/ban.
That's ultimately the result of the threats FDR made to pack the court if they didn't do what he wanted.
Well, they used that same logic to force integration… so.. sometimes good sometimes bad?
I see brits describing it as "Dictatorship with Democratic characteristics" and "3 weasels leading the 4th rabid weasel around by the tail" it doesnt seem "cool" by any stretch, except maybe if it was fictional and the people it hurt were not real.
England's 'democracy' is cool insofar as the freemasons are cool. Old men in goofy hats sound fun until they end up raping some kid on an island somewhere in their old colonial posessions.
It's significantly ruined by automated royal assent. The balance that's meant to protect the realm has not functioned for decades.
>> gradually evolving them into a modern liberal democracy
Yeah, this is the key observation. "a modern liberal democracy", a.k.a. replacing locals with third world, arresting citizens for posting comments online while letting rapists and murderers go with minimum sentences so they can strike again, making gayness and wokeness obligatory or at least the norm, colonizing white people and calling it reparatory justice, importing radical Islam and liberally supporting revolution (like in Iran) so we can all have a wonderful ayatollah regime... all that.
Definitely removing centuries old pure British tradition is a step forward into "modern liberal democracy", I cannot deny that!
At least we know this wasn’t written by AI
What part of hereditary aristocrats and religious and otherwise lifetime appointees being able to send back bills to the parliament an infinite number of times until they are changed as they want them. There are cases in which they sent bills back as many as 60 times until they got them changed.
> gradually evolving them into a modern liberal democracy.
And yet, they are still not quite there.
There is something to be said for design over stumbling.
> British democracy and government is cool.
Oh sweet summer child.
The government there does not care about you and will promise anything to get another 5 years in power despite causing the issues they promised to solve in the first place.
You are essentially voting in the same party to be in government and progress there moves in the hundreds of years; hence the riddance of the scam that is unelected hereditary nobles which it took more than 700 years to remove them.
In fairness, this is not unique to Britain. For America read "4" instead of "5".
Are there unelected hereditary nobles somewhere in the US that is entitled to having a seat in congress and can vote against laws being passed?
Nope. I don't think so, not even the length of the term is the same.
In the US our unelected hereditary nobility just buys candidates.
unelected hereditary nobles
Let's break down what Senators are:
> Unelected
In most states a single party will always win statewide elections, so our Senators are what I'd call "marginally elected" since they only have to face a quiet low-turnout primary election and then they sail to an easy re-election. They're nearly always guaranteed to win their primaries as long as The Party supports them, and they'll do so as long as you're loyal to The Party agenda.
> Hereditary
Many of them come from generational wealth, and a few suspiciously just happen to become wildly wealthy while in office, including through their stock trades, which has been decided to be 100% not illegal even when they know things the public does not know.
> nobles
Ours are called "elites," but most things are the same - they tend to all have gone to the top 2-4 colleges, and you can't 'break into' this set unless you were born into old money. Seems close enough from the perspective of those of us who aren't nobles or elites.
So, you can think of the Senate as the House of Lords lite.
And yet all of your objections apply to us in equal measure. Almost as though hereditary nobles don't have much to do with them.
What on earth are you talking about? They were elected in 2024. If anything its the issues caused over the previous 14 years which must be fixed.
No idea why this was down-voted, it's true. It's replacing one hereditary system based on inheritance of titles with another hereditary system based on inheritance of capital.
> No idea why this was down-voted
> Oh sweet summer child.
And Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You need to have a very cynical worldview already to find my comment boring; as in; no information content. I really don't think most people are there yet.
> You need to have a very cynical worldview already to find my comment boring; as in; no information content.
Boring does not mean no information content. But the part of your comment about comment voting was boring and noise.
I think that guideline means that if your own comment gets downvoted, don't reply complaining about it. A "why was this downvoted? it's true" from another user is fine, I think.
The irony is that, on a technicality, the hereditary peers were the only members of the Lords who had to win an election to get their seats.
> Under the reforms of the House of Lords Act 1999, the majority of hereditary peers lost the right to sit as members of the House of Lords, the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Section 2 of the Act, however, provides an exception from this general exclusion of membership for up to 92 hereditary peers: 90 to be elected by the House, as well as the holders of two royal offices, the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain, who sit as ex officio members.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_excepted_hereditary_pe...
Yeah, the assumption is that the non hereditary peers are somehow more representative, but all they represent is being friends of the PM of the time. It's a historical oddity of questionable usefulness. Meanwhile the house of commons can wipe out any civil liberty with a majority of 50% plus one vote. It is remarkable how a system that seems so unstable and prone to abuses of power has served the longest continuously running democracy for so long.
> Yeah, the assumption is that the non hereditary peers are somehow more representative, but all they represent is being friends of the PM of the time
There is an informal understanding that the government gives a certain number of life peerages to the opposition and minor parties, subject to the government being able to veto individual appointments they find objectionable. So it literally isn’t true that everyone gets one by being friends with the PM-although it certainly helps
Some parties reject their entitlement-the only reason why there are no SNP life peers, is the SNP has a longstanding policy to refuse to appoint any. There are currently 76 LibDem peers, 6 DUP, 3 UUP, 2 Green and 2 Plaid Cymru. SNP would very quickly get some too if they ever changed their mind about refusing the offer. The Northern Ireland nationalist parties (Sinn Fein and SDLP) likewise have a policy against nominating life peers.
So the correction is “friends of the PM, and a few other key politicians”. Still a club of people who represent no one. And more problematic, are accountable to no one.
As Walter Bagehot wrote in The English Constitution: "An ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered."
Absent ideological capture, it is perhaps one of the best forms of government ever created due to its pragmatic nature and its Lindyness is proof.
50% + 1 is called democracy. Civil liberties are more liable to be swept away by minorities that come to power. In the US, the republicans often do this because they have minority popular support but a disproportionate representation in government. So the key is to make sure that it's 50% + 1 but also representative of the real population.
The nobility is another example of a minority with disproportionate power. It's important that they are reduced to ensure civil liberties.
All other democracies have safeguards against the tyranny of the majority. Whether it is representativity by state in the US or in the EU, a constitution requiring a large consensus to change in the US, or the senate being elected by the elected officials of small cities in France, it is not true that democracy is just 50% + 1 vote.
If you're not British please don't assume that "ejecting heriditary nobles" from the upper house of parliament is automatically going to increase the quality of governance.
For more than a century the majority of those who sit in the House of Lords have been "Life Peers", appointed by a politician and without any heriditary aspect. They include such towers of statepersonship as : Evgeny Lebedev (Russian businessman, son of a KGB officer); Alexander Lebedev (another Russian businessman, he's actually been in the KGB); Charlotte Owen (junior aide to Boris Johnson for three years) ... the list goes on.
This isn't new (although in recent time the dodginess has risen to new highs) and many of those appointed to Life Peerages meet the goal of having significant life experience they can use to illuminate aspects of legislation that might otherwise be missed. Equally heriditary peers are not all some Wodehousian stereotype of bumbling idiots.
> many of those appointed to Life Peerages meet the goal of having significant life experience
This is a poor justification for what still amounts to an unelected ruling class.
Honestly, I look around the world and don’t see much, if any, practical difference.
The US has had two presidents that were direct relatives, I can’t believe that’s by pure chance or some kind of genetic skill at being president.
Also in the pipeline: elimination of jury trials
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2x01yne13o
The first sentence of the cited article makes clear the matter at hand is not "elimination of jury trials" but "a plan to abolish some jury trials". The proposal is an attempt to reduce the time which those who are accused must wait for trial.
FWIW the majority of all criminal cases in the UK are dealt with by either a single judge, or three judges[1]. This is hardly surprising as assembling a jury is vastly time consuming and for minor criminal matters is hard to justify.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summary_offence#United_Kingdom
Any charge that can be punished with imprisonment should require a jury trial.
> The proposals, which return to Parliament on Tuesday, would replace juries in England and Wales with a single judge in cases where a convicted defendant would be jailed for up to three years.
Wow, this is literally the plot of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney video games. I'm sure it will go great with no downsides.
I'm a little torn on this one. On the one hand, people are bad epistemologists and lots of countries manage with similarly limited jury trials. On the other, we're doing it for cost reasons, which I think is the worst basis imaginable for such a move
RIP, Magna Carta.
What a horrible idea - your fate should never be decided by a single individual.
In the US it's just called a "bench trial." You can ask for one. It's often advantageous to do so.
It's simply a fact that common law jury trials are time-consuming and expensive and cause long delays and bottlenecks in the justice system.
Different common-law countries have addressed this issue in various ways. Restricting jury trials for more serious offenses (in this case for more serious charges - ones that could potentially result in a sentence of more than 3 years) is one way than many common law jurisdictions have taken.
It's not ideal but it's infinitely better in my mind than the practice used in the US to reduce jury trials. To avoid the cost/expense of a jury trial, public prosecutors threatens to press for a large number of charges or some very serious charges - carrying the potential of very long sentences - a sort of Gish-gallop approach.
Even if the chances of successful prosecution is relatively small for any one of the charges, the defendant is forced to take a plea-deal to avoid the risk of spending years or decades behind bars. Thus the defendant ends up with a guilty record and often a custodial sentence without any access to a trial or the chance to present their case at all.
The thing is, the reason for the delays and inefficiencies is not really juries. It's mostly much more mundane things like the prison service not sending defendants to court at the right time, translators not turning up when they are supposed to, buildings which are falling apart, technology not working properly, and court time being double-booked. It's an administrative failure, not a problem with the system.
Alongside removing the right to trial by jury, perhaps more alarmingly the government are also planning to remove appeal rights from "minor" cases (from magistrates to the Crown Court). The current statistics are that more than 40% of those appeals are upheld.
The planned changes won't fix any of these things, but it will cause fundamental damage to trust in the system and result in many miscarriages of justice.
The plan is not to "remove trial by jury" but to "remove trial by jury for some types of offense".
Yeah, ones that can yield imprisonment. Not OK!
You probably know this - but in most jurisdictions in the US, including federal, charges have to be approved by a grand jury of your peers.
There’s an old adage “a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich”* implying that the grand jury is easily mislead - but in my anecdotal experience of serving on a grand jury - this isn’t really true. We definitely said no to overreaches.
And you can also see this happening in high profile cases with the Trump administration:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/us/politics/trump-sandwic...
Ignoring that, it’s not clear to me why removing jury trials would reduce the likelihood of a prosecutor throwing a larger number of charges at a defendant. Prosecutors want to demonstrate a record of convictions. That career pressure is still going to exist without jury trials - they’re going to throw anything they can and see what sticks.
*Fun Fact - Sol Wachtler, the judge who coined this, was later convicted of multiple felonies, including blackmailing an ex-lover and threatening to kidnap her daughter. A bit more substantial than a ham sandwich.
I'm getting a lot of downvotes for the comment you're responding to so will likely withdraw from this discussion. But to be clear, I deliberately talked of prosecutors threatening charges, not actual indictments.
Conviction through plea-bargaining is almost exclusively a phenomenon in the US. It just doesn't feature in the normal process of public prosecution in countries like Ireland, the UK or Australia. Also as an aside, the grand jury system is exclusively an American feature.
And every common law country (including the US) has a bar in terms of seriousness of the crime, below which you are tried without a jury. Yes the bar is lower in the US (potential sentence of more than 6 months?) but this bar exists nonetheless without sensationalist claims that jury trials have been eliminated - which is what was stated in the comment I originally responded to.
that's not true - it's also common in Canada and Japan
American Bar Associaton agrees. ABA Plea Bargain Task Force Report is sad read. US criminal justice system is horrific and plea bargaining is big reason for it.
“It should never be a gallery of old boys’ networks, nor a place where titles, many of which were handed out centuries ago, hold power over the will of the people.”
Nobody tell these extreme optimists about America. Replace 'titles' with 'generational wealth' and that's precisely what not just our upper house, but most of our government, is. And they're all elected!
Kennedy, Bush, Clinton, Newsom related to Pelosi, etc... This guy might be onto something!
The author of the article is named Lawless. Is that an inverted nominative determinism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
The title makes it sound like they’re removing the remains of lost Lords gathering dust on the seats although that’s probably not too far from the truth.
> The case of Peter Mandelson, who resigned from the Lords in February after revelations about his friendship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, drew renewed attention to the upper chamber and the problem of lords behaving badly.
But Mandelson wasn't a hereditary noble. His example is an argument for abolishing the House of Lords entirely (which I agree with in any case) but not specifically for ejecting hereditary nobles.
> Labour remains committed to eventually replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is “more representative of the U.K.” If past experience is anything to go by, change will come slowly.
Why does the House of Lords need to be replaced at all? Most countries are gridlocked enough with one chamber of parliament.
>Why does the House of Lords need to be replaced at all? Most countries are gridlocked enough with one chamber of parliament.
Depends how it is designed. The australian senate, before 2015 or so, used to contain enough fun cooks that legislation had to get broad support to make it through. It was a pretty decent check against the beige dictatorship. But since they updated the voting rules to prevent the cool minor parties from holding the balance, its just been a massive rubber stamp. I loved seeing randos from minor parties getting to grill public servants on whatever their constituents were complaining about, particularly firearm legislation.
> The australian senate, before 2015 or so, used to contain enough fun cooks that legislation had to get broad support to make it through. It was a pretty decent check against the beige dictatorship. But since they updated the voting rules to prevent the cool minor parties from holding the balance, its just been a massive rubber stamp
Current numbers in Australian Senate: Government 29, Opposition 27, Crossbench 20, 39 needed for majority. So if the opposition opposes a government bill, the government needs 10 crossbench senators to vote for it - if the Greens support it, that’s enough; if they oppose it, the government can still pass the bill if they get the votes of the 10 non-Green crossbench senators (4 One Nation; 3 independents; 3 single senator minor parties)
I can’t see how this is by any reasonable definition a “rubber stamp”
The Australian parliament is weird but it kind of works.
Members of the House of Representatives ("lower house") are elected via preferential voting and each member represents a single electorate (there are 150 electorates), all of the electorates are roughly proportional population wise (there is an independent body that draws up the boundaries), however the geographical area covered by each electorate can vary greatly. For example in the State of New South Wales there are dozen of electorates covering the various suburbs of Sydney and one massively sized electorate covering a huge rural portion of the same state where population density is very low.
The Senate (Upper House) is fixed there are 12 members for every state and 1 member per territory. This means that Tasmania which is a fraction of the population of New South Wales has exactly the same number of Senators. There are about half a million people in Tasmania compares to 8 Million+ in NSW. So relatively speaking your upper house vote has way more power if you live in a smaller state.
The senate also uses transferable vote with a quota system. The quota system and "vote transfer" makes it a little weird and it is why minor candidates can percolate up and end up a senator despite relatively small primary vote.
"Crossbench"
The Greens voted with the LNP to change the senate voting rules, pulling the ladder up behind them. They are just a third leg of the major parties.
Wheres my Australian Motoring Enthusiast? Wheres my Shooters Farmers and Fishers rep? Even the "Libertarian" (formerly Liberal Democrats) party had the occasional flash of brilliance.
Paymen was voted in with the ALP and probably wont rate reelection.
The only halfway decent crazy crossbench we have right now is Lambo, and shes only good like 45% of the time. Lidia thorpe can be good quality but shes like Paymen, and wont be reelected solo.
Heaps of these crossbenchers are only there thanks to Climate 200 funding, which will vanish the second that bloke achieves his goals or gets bored and wanders off.
>I can’t see how this is by any reasonable definition a “rubber stamp”
Labor shops everything to the LNP or Greens, and chooses the one they can more easily bully into compliance. LNP does the same when they are in power.
Does House of Lords have any real power today?
Sort of. They can and do amend bills, but they can't overrule the Commons on anything the latter regards as important.
"Important" is quite a high bar in this case though if the House of Lords is insistent enough to actually vote something down. The cost in terms of parliamentary time for the government these days of using the Parliament Acts is very high (especially for things which government would normally do via secondary legislation), and it also requires at least a one year delay; by extension the potential political cost to the government of using the Parliament Acts to pass something unpopular or controversial is set at a high enough bar that it's an effective veto.
This feels like quite a sensible safety valve to me.
With a very small number of exceptions, including changing the maximum duration of Parliament from 5 years.
When the logic for bicameralism disappears, you should get rid of the second chamber. Not just find some other random thing to do with it.
See, also, US state legislatures post Reynolds v. Sims.
Polybius might have an interesting opinion on this. Generally mixed forms of government are supposed to be more stable. If you make everything purely democratic, the structure weakens a bit.
Democracy had pretty good PR in the 20th century, but having institutional counterweights is never a bad idea.
Anyone else think Britain is going to eject the Royal Family within 100 years?
Will they do the same for hereditary monarchy?
When I was a kid I was appaled that a country in this age can have a king/queen. Then I understood that they are basically like an animal in a zoo, all for show with no actual power.
It's a dreadful fate to be born as a monarch.
The best punishment for thinking they're that important
The point of the hereditary peerage was the same as the point of having a non-elected Senate. Now both will have been lost in the name of "democracy" - a system of government that constantly fails to do either what is the desire of the people OR what is truly in their interests. From here on out it'll just be whoever manages to connive their way into power through connections, payola, corruption, island meetups, and so on. I strongly suspect this will lead to a worse government, not a better one.
How about a chamber populated by random lottery? Like jury duty?
Read/watch this interview [1] with Ada Palmer on her new book about the Renaissance. Florence did this for a time.
> You put names in a bag. You examine all of the merchant members of guilds. You choose which ones are fit to serve, meaning not ill and dying, not insane, not so deeply in debt that they could be manipulated by the people whom they owe money to. Their names go in a bag. You choose nine guys at random. They rule the city. They are put in a palace where they rule the city from that tower.
> They’re actually locked in the tower for the duration of their time in office because if they left the tower, they could be bribed or kidnapped. They rule the city for two or three months. At the end, they are thanked for their service and escorted out, and then a different nine guys share power for the next three months. It’s a power sharing that is designed to be tyrant-proof because you need consensus of nine randomly selected guys to decide to do anything.
[1] https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ada-palmer
Perhaps you're joking, but Athenian democracy had a significant amount of randomness, with candidates being chosen randomly from the top vote winners. Terms were also only 1 year for most positions.
These, and other systems, helped prevent any one person from monopolizing power.
This is a good video on this: https://youtu.be/pIgMTsQXg3Q
Not joking, although maybe not terribly serious either. I could envision a random (filtered) selection of citizens being given a veto power over legislation, as another check against abuse.
Not quite the same thing, but in Ireland, it's become more common for Citizens Assemblies, which are randomly selected (this is disputed by some) citizens appointed to help word referenda on constitutional amendments and otherwise gauge public feeling on certain issues.
The assembly then passes it's recommendation to the Parliament who are free to ignore it if they don't like it.
We could start by something like a randomly appointed commission to investigate, say, very expensive public projects.
I like this idea, much better suited to a "jury duty" style approach.
How about both? A chamber of life peers and a chamber of temporary randomly selected representatives.
Why would a hereditary system work any better? Plenty of monarchies based on heredity ran themselves into the ground.
It's interesting how people never even learn about any upsides to that. Even if the balance comes out on the side of elected officials, it's good to at least have some idea of why so many societies have worked like that (other than "they were dumb and evil I guess").
The main thing is long-term stability and limits on backstabbing and ruthless competition. Sure it doesn't bring it to zero, plenty of bloody examples from history. But when someone gets close to power for the first time and might be out of there quite soon, and have to watch out for being replaced quickly, they will behave quite differently than someone who plans ahead in decades and generations (if all things go well). If you have a short time under the sun, you better extract all you can while it lasts.
It's kind of like a lifetime appointment or like tenure, except also across generations. Tenure allows professors to ignore short-term ups and downs and allows them some resilience and slack (though funding is still an issue). Similarly a nobleman can "relax" and take a longer-term view on things. The failure mode is that they stop caring and become lazy and just enjoy their position.
You already get this in the UK, and also in other countries, most of which have royal families and associated aristocrats.
There are also - notoriously - foreign-funded influencer, lobbyist, and donor operations.
And the traditional industries - fossil fuels, property, finance, arms - also have a huge say.
The reality is most decisions aren't made in Westminster. Parliament is a device for packaging and legitimising decisions made by the oligarchy. And the House of Lords is largely ceremonial.
It's not there to shape policy, it's there to provide a reward for loyal service to the country's real rulers.
Being in the Lords is a very nice deal. You get up to £371 a day just for turning up, with the option to claim expenses on top of that.
You get access to high quality heavily subsidised food and drink. And you get the status of being a lord, which opens doors if you happen to be someone for whom they weren't already open.
Heredity is only one of many flavours of cronyism.
It provides an additional check. Much like a monarch, a noble's interests are tied to the welfare of the country itself. Without the country, they're just a toff with some money and an overinflated sense of self-importance.
This is the most convincing argument for the house of lords/monarchy that I've ever heard. Going to be thinking about this for a while, thanks.
> a noble's interests are tied to the welfare of the country itself.
I'd argue their interest is tied to the welfare of the country for themselves, not the country itself or the general public.
The usual elitist slop.
Every single citizen has a skin in the game of their country. They live there.
The comparison isn't to the average person off the street but rather the typical elected politician.
The Senate is, while not the whole story, a significant part of the reason the government constantly fails to do what is either the desire of the people or what's in their interests. I wouldn't lament losing the Senate.
The US Senate is designed to check and balance the House of Representatives. But that often puts the Congress as a whole in deadlock, meaning it can no longer balance the other two branches.
When they could get anything done they delegated a lot of power to the Executive. Which worked ok, but eventually a "unitary executive" appropriated even more power, and the Legislature is powerless to prevent it.
Unpopular opinion: deadlock is fine. Most legislation is bad. What really matters is the budget. And the rule that failing to pass a budget can automatically force an election avoids the absurd US "shutdown" that isn't a shutdown.
This is now my second favorite idea, after a nationwide ban of first past the post voting schemes.
My third (previously second) is outlawing political parties. The problem with that one is it would be really difficult to implement in a way that doesn't run afoul of freedom of association and freedom of speech. Probably worth figuring out though.
I don't think it can be figured out. Every democratic country has political parties.
True but I think much could be done to blunt their impact if we collectively put our minds to it.
Voting system reform would probably mitigate the worst aspects of political parties.
Egypt after ousting Mubarak held an election where a third of seats were reserved for independents. Most winning candidates were just Muslim Brotherhood affiliated. I suspect the military interim government did that deliberately to justify their later coup.
People really love to create associations, and if "parties" are banned, "movements" or "clubs" that are "totally-not-parties" will take their place.
We are too gregarious to prevent emergence of political groups. A parliament of cats would probably be more individualistic, but not that of humans.
On the other hand, voting needs to mean something. If voting doesn't mean anything, because the whole system is held in a vice grip by a sclerotic institution playing power games with itself, then the broader system eventually collapses.
My personal opinion is that Mitch McConnell's intransigence and unwillingness to do anything lest Obama get credit for it led directly to an increased desire for a "strongman"
Deadlock would be fine if the other two branches weren't running amuck.
The Senate was fundamentally from the start a compromise in favor of the slave-owning ogliarchy. You just have to look at free and slave states being admitted in pairs to preserve the status quo of slavery to see how that went.
Aren't you supporting parent's point? The senate is elected these days after all ...
Extraordinary, and disgusting, to see monarchism touted by literate professionals in the 21st century.
The "point" of hereditary peerage is, from the perspective of the nobility, to preserve privileges with only self-interested regard for the welfare of the public—which very obviously resolves into tyrannical despotism at the earliest opportunity!
Utterly unconscionable to carry water for the literally medieval political economy that brought us, eg the calamitous 14th century.
Countless—countless—examples of the hideous cruelties of hereditary nobles abound since the institution's inception. You'd have to be a blind pig to ignore the myriad failure states. My God, man, do you want your children to be slaves??
Directionally the UK gov has arrested more people for speech crimes than the Soviets..
Anything they pass or even look excited for is a negative signal. These people seem inept on every front, and I can’t even generously find something clever about them.
Iraq, Brexit, and Speech Laws.
If a Brit told me the sky was blue, I’d double check myself.
And if an American told me it was blue, I'd have no need to check, I could have confidence it is not, and that their evaluation would change to another false answer in five minutes.
“…a compromise that will see an undisclosed number of hereditary members allowed to stay by being ‘recycled’ into life peers.”
What? Are the membership roles and the text of this law confidential?
Odd! I think this is the bill?
https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3755/publications
It's rather hard to read because the amendments are written as a diff, but it seems to imply the undisclosed number is 87 peers. I guess they need to decide amongst themselves who the lucky 87 are?
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/59-01/0295... Bill 295 2024-25 (Lords Amendments)
---Edit: Wow, is this ever hard to pin down. I think section 1 of the lord's amendments were dropped here: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3755/stages/20179/motionsa...
which I guess means that the text remains the same as the original text in HL-49 (https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/56858/documents/533...):
which is a patch onto another law, that is linked to in the PDF but for whatever reason does not resolve for me: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1999/34/contents.> It's rather hard to read because the amendments are written as a diff
That's a feature, not a bug ;).[0]
0: Any episode of "Yes, Minister!"
Doesn't need to be in the text of the law. The Crown can appoint an arbitrary list of life peers - possibly at any time (see Chiltern Hundreds).
As the article points out, the life peers are arguably worse. People like Mandelson.
All primary legislation is published. But this needn't be in the primary legislation since there is no need to legislate to make it happen. It's a side deal, the government agrees to do this, the Lords agree not to get in their way.
Much, but not all secondary legislation is also published. A typical means by which Secondary Legislation is brought into existence is that a Law says there shall be some list or reference established by some particular minister, and that document is Secondary Legislation. For example maybe a Law concerning Clown Licensing says there shall be a list of Clown License Offices, and the Secretary of State for Hilarity shall write this list, that list isn't voted on by Parliament, the list gets written by some bureaucrats working for the current Secretary of State for Hilarity. This "undisclosed" list needn't be in secondary legislation either.
The idea is that some of the current hereditary peers will be given new life peerages under existing rules which would enable them to stay in the chamber. Granting new life peerages is mostly within the gift of the Prime Minister (although there are committees which vet appointments and conventions about allowing opposition parties to nominate some), so this is not part of the legislation but a back-room deal by which the votes were secured by the government.
To make room for something worse no doubt.
Removal of hereditary privilege is a good thing in principle.
However, given the Labour party just gave children the vote, cancelled local elections in conservative-leaning areas, and now they're removing the (traditionally conservative-leaning) hereditary peers, it's starting to feel a lot like the Left are gerrymandering our democracy.
They gave 16 year olds the vote, and 16 year olds can leave home, marry, join the army, and so on. Why should they not vote?
They didn't run pointless elections by request of the very councils that were due for them, because those areas are being redrawn and would have to have fresh elections almost immediately, making the results meaningless.
They also gave all the conservative hereditary peers lifetime peerages so they will keep their seats.
Your framing of all three of these is obviously intended to mislead.
> 16 year olds can leave home, marry, join the army, and so on. Why should they not vote?
That's a separate argument.
My point is Labour's change to the rules is very politically convenient for themselves. In the most recent polling, 32% of 16-17-year-olds would vote Labour, while only 17% of the overall electorate would vote Labour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...
> They didn't run pointless elections by request of the very councils that were due for them, because those areas are being redrawn and would have to have fresh elections almost immediately, making the results meaningless.
They allowed individual incumbent councillors to choose whether elections were cancelled. This was politically convenient for the Labour and Tory parties because the Reform Party is new, and while it's polling well ahead of Labour, it doesn't have many incumbent council seats.
When a court challenge loomed, Labour quickly u-turned on the latest round of cancellations. Funny how something can seem sensible one day, and can then be u-turned at the slightest whiff of legal scrutiny.
> They also gave all the conservative hereditary peers lifetime peerages so they will keep their seats.
Can you name a single Conservative hereditary peer that will be given a lifetime peerage in Starmer's reform plan?
There is no reasonable definition of "the Left" that includes the British Labour party. The only one that fits would be "to the left of the British Conservative party", but that's as arbitrary as redefining it "to the left of Reform UK" and then starting to call the tories "The Left".
> There is no reasonable definition of "the Left" that includes the British Labour party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)
> Labour, is one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, along with the Conservative Party. It sits on the centre-left of the left–right political spectrum
Centre-left doesn’t mean the Left. It just means it’s to the left of the other centrist party (Tories). Just because they lean left doesn’t mean they are the Left, Radical Left, Commies etc
OK but can you wield supreme executive power if a watery tart throws a sword at you?
Now we're down to just an upper house absolutely stuffed with hundreds of washed up political hacks given a comfortable retirement and party donors. And a few priests.
Including rapists like the Bishop of Lincoln.
Win for democracy and fair representation of the working class!
Being Noble is like saying 'i used to have slaves(even if not, then feudalism was the de'facto slave system too!) and made profits from it'
Such people are enemies of humanity and democracy and markets. I hope one day they all just go.
King and his small family is fine btw. Cultural reason:)
It's not "I used to have slaves...", it's "My ancestors used to have slaves...".
Having a class of nobles is an embarrassment for a country, and they should have been kicked out of parliament a century ago. But don't attribute to the child the sins of the father; that's the same category of error that the concept of hereditary nobility falls into.
Sure, they are parasites descended from thugs as opposed to thugs descended from thugs. But you don't see them renouncing their unearned wealth built on rapine, slavery and colonial exploitation, which is to this day largely exempted from property taxes.
>Win for democracy and fair representation of the working class
In Britain? Good luck with that.
Yep, getting rid of nobility is how USSR lived happily ever after.
Getting rid of hereditary nobility has worked out pretty well for the USA.
Has it? By what metric are you using for that? Two Bush presidencies off the power of the senior patriarch. Current president comes from family wealth. Most of the oligarchs come from family wealth. It's not until the recent tech billionaires that became first generation oligarchs.
We've got work to do, but it could be worse. Point is that the problems of the USSR weren't caused by getting rid of the hereditary peerage.
Well, for all USSRs issues, getting rid of their nobility was one of the best things they did.
It's what fills the vacuum that matters, just as POTUS is finding out in Iran. If you don't have a plan for after creating the vacuum, you're probably not going to be happy with how it is filled
Until the UK military pledge allegiance to democracy rather than the king, the royal family is also a risk to democracy.
Thailand is an object lesson in how monarchy is repeatedly used as a lever by military and business elites to overthrow democratic representation "in the name of the king".
It almost happened in the UK once, too, in the same way it happened in Thailand.
The reason the media is so keen on the institution is because it functions as a "break glass in case of emergency" for elites. It's not an organic part of the culture, it is shoved down our throats.
Should have used it to prevent Brexit.
Just look at the US right now to see how civil military control can go off the rails too.
I think the monarchy could have used its power to prevent Brexit, but the monarchy never uses its voice for anything controversial for the most part, that there was a valid referendum and the closeness of the vote and rancor at the time from leavers who held all the reins of power at the time might have made the partial public funding of monarchy untenable, too. Queen Elizabeth seemed particularly neutral even on Brexit, maybe Charles would have done differently?
It happened in Australia in 1975, and Chuck was directly involved in it.
This is a dark day for the monarchy... and for democracy in the UK.
Remove the only people who actually have a long-term vested non-financial interest in the system and replace them with more revolving-door politicians backed by the big money so that the big money can operate with even less friction than before. Great. Just great.
The problem with our current democratic systems with unlimited government fiat money is that capital is in control. Not voters. Capital. This should be obvious by now. Someone deprived of food will vote for whoever you tell them to vote for.
Unlike many progressives I actually think the lords works well as a location for people who are expert in fields other than getting reelected.
But heredity lords, no I don’t get that at all
Oh piss off. It's removing the nobs from the system, people who are there by right of birth alone. There is no reason a modern democracy shoud cow-tow to such people or allow them any power over the rest of us.
It’s not just about the seat they must lose their “lord” title
From hereditary buffoons to patronage pissoir and party hack retirement home, not much better off methinks.
Some years ago I, an American citizen and resident, studied abroad briefly and was asked by the House of Lords to speak to them about what GDPR (a UK law!) was, how it worked, and the impact it could have.
Further than ejecting nobles, they really should just overhaul the entire chamber, which is surely doing more harm than good if they need a foreign national to explain their own laws to them.
Did they _need_ you or were they seeking the perspective of someone they considered well informed or valued for some other reason? What's the context here?
You don’t think it’s a strength that they have the courage to seek views from as wide a range of perspectives as possible, including from outside the UK?
But they still haven't kicked out the Church of England bishops, including the rapist bishop of Lincoln.