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.
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.
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.
Exactly! What the Constitution /says/ and how it is interpreted... The Tenth Amendment is written (IMO) incredibly short to underscore its importance AND breadth:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
But I've very seldom heard the phrase "states rights" uttered by anyone who isn't pro-gun and anti-abortion. I doubt they'd feel any freer if their state came down like a ton of politically-angered bricks on unfettered gun ownerships and anti-abortionists.
While the American left has largely ceded the term “states rights” to the American right (and was/is well on the way to ceding the term “Free Speech”) they have their own share of “states rights” issues. Medical and recreational marijuana is a “states rights” issue. “Sanctuary cities” are a “states rights” issues. The fact that the Trump administration can’t (yet) force California schools to drop teaching certain things is a “states rights” issue. California deciding they’re goin to just gerrymander the heck out of everything in response to the current administration is a “states rights” issue. In fact basically every state level opposition to the current administration is a form of a “states rights” issue.
It’s immensely frustrating to me that what should be a huge lesson in the importance of limited government power and diffusion of that power across multiple governmental levels isn’t likely to result in that lesson being learned. I have a real fear that in history Trump will have been an inflection point on the road to an ever more powerful federal government in general and executive branch in particular, rather than a historical anomaly at the high end of that same power dynamic.
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...
In the American system as originally founded, black people were property.
It should be expected that the American system is not eternally bound to the will and scope of vision of the founding fathers, that it can and should evolve over time as the needs and nature of society evolves. Otherwise, it isn't a republic, it's a cult.
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.)
There's a long political tradition which doesn't acknowledge that there are political questions. In their world, there's only good policy and bad policy, and making the first is only a question of competence. Conflicts of interests they won't talk about. These people fight a constant battle to take political power away from people (not just regular people, elected representatives as well), and give it to their preferred "experts".
Or a USian who has no idea which lawyers you are referring to obliquely, so as to look "cool" and "knowledgeable", while avoiding communication with the sullied masses?
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.
A party is a thing where multiple elected officials band together in a persistent coalition. The section you're quoting from only applies to a single elected office in the whole country. Are only two parties are going to run candidates for President when there are five or more parties in the legislature?
On top of that, that section applies to how the votes of the electoral college delegates are counted. It doesn't specify how the electoral college delegates are chosen, which it leaves up to the states. There are plenty of interesting ways of choosing them that don't result in a structural incentive for a two-party race.
> The section you're quoting from only applies to a single elected office in the whole country. Are only two parties are going to run candidates for President when there are five or more parties in the legislature?
I don't think it's a coincidence that every US state is structured as a smaller mirror of the federal government.
It's not a coincidence because they adopted their initial constitutions at around the same time or based them on the existing states that had. But we're talking about the electoral college and none of the states use something equivalent to that to choose their governor.
Using score voting instead of FPTP for state-level offices would be a straightforward legislative change in many states and still not require any change to the US Constitution even in the states where it would require a change to the state constitution, which is generally a much lower bar to overcome than a federal constitutional amendment.
US "parties" are giant coalitions compared to the "parties" in parliamentary democracies. You're solving a problem that doesn't exist.
Change the American voting system tomorrow and legislators will belong to different nominal parties that end up forming precisely the same coalitions.
Love him or hate him, Trump is a great example of this - in 2016, Trump effectively formed a new party focused on anti-immigration and protectionism, which rapidly grew to dominate the "conservative" coalition. But those other parties, ranging from libertarians to the Chamber of Commerce (highly pro immigration and highly pro free trade) parties are still there in the coalition.
> Change the American voting system tomorrow and legislators will belong to different nominal parties that end up forming precisely the same coalitions.
The US is extremely partisan right now and the partisanship is strongly aligned with the two major parties, not the individual coalitions that make them up. And with two parties you get polarization, because then it's all about getting 51% for a single party rather than forming temporary coalitions between various parties none of which can do anything unilaterally.
A different voting system allows you to have more than two viable parties, which changes the dynamic considerably.
Coalitions are pretty static in most parliamentary democracies except sometimes when forming governments post-election.
The 51% is for the coalition, not the party. That’s what you’re missing. CoC Republicans for example have temporarily sacrificed their immigration policies to retain legislative influence - and they are a check on the Trumpist wing passing whatever anti-immigrant legislation they want, because they too cannot act without at least tacit support from the CoC wing.
The “major party” is from a systems perspective no different than a European parliamentary governing coalition.
> Coalitions are pretty static in most parliamentary democracies except sometimes when forming governments post-election.
The "except when forming governments post-election" is a major difference. It also presumes that a coalition in the legislature is required to persist for an entire election cycle rather than being formed around any given individual piece of legislation. You don't have to use a system where an individual legislator or party can prevent any other from introducing a bill and taking a vote on it.
In less partisan periods in US history, bills would often pass with the partial support of both major parties.
Moreover, the US coalitions being tied to the major parties makes them too sticky. For example, the people who want lower taxes aren't necessarily the people who want subsidies for oil companies, or increased military spending, but they've been stuck in the same "coalition" together for decades.
Suppose you want to do a carbon tax. People who don't like taxes are going to be a major opponent, so an obvious compromise would be to pass it as part of a net reduction in total taxes, e.g. reduce the federal payroll tax by more than the amount of the carbon tax. But that doesn't happen because the coalition that wants lower taxes never overlaps with the coalition that wants to do something about climate change. Meanwhile the coalition that wants lower taxes wouldn't propose a carbon tax on their own, and the coalition that wants a carbon tax to increase overall government revenue gets shot down because that would be extremely unpopular, so instead it never happens.
All countries have these problems which vary by the local political environment and history. Multiple European countries are facing particularly absurd varieties of these dilemmas because of their refusal to form coalitions with the second or third largest party in their country.
Again, it seems like the flaw is in trying to form a long-term coalition instead of just passing the bills that have enough support to pass when you put them up for a vote among all the people who were actually elected. Why should anyone have to give a crap what someone else's position is on immigration when the bill in question is on copyright reform or tax incentives for solar panels?
The coalitions do a pretty good job of representing people’s pre-existing positions. People aren’t not voting for copyright reform because their party said so, but because they agree with their party. Party discipline in the US is not nearly as strong as in most parliamentary systems.
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?
It's not supposed to cause things a significant plurality of the public wants to happen. It's supposed to cause things a significant plurality of the public doesn't want to not happen.
And that national ID has to be free, and available to people who cannot appear at federal offices during business hours without losing what sparse wages they get...
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.
It could be my interpretation, the framing of the above comment feels as if Obama gave Trump the idea to use executive orders in expansive ways. I think Trump would have used executive orders expansive even if no president ever had used executive orders.
Trump is just trying to get away with as much as he can. The tariffs used by Trump and his "jokes" about skippings election and other things he did are quite unprecedented.
The idea of a second chamber is not controversial. The argument is how you populate it.
Elected - you have the problem of two chambers claiming legitimacy and potential deadlock, and also the problem of potentially having the same short term view as the other elected chamber.
Appointed - who gets to appoint, on what criteria, who are they beholden to ( ideally unsackable once appointed - I want them to feel free to say what they really think ).
Inherited - Very unlikely to represent the population. No quality filter. Potentially a culture of service built up - and free to say what they think.
Random. - More likely to represent the population. No quality filter.
You can obviously have a mix of all or any of the above.
In my view, the ideal second chamber would be full of people of experience, who are beholden to nobody (unsackable), that represented a broad range of views, with a culture of service.
I'm against a fully elected second house - as that's not really adding anything different to the first house. Appointed has worked quite well in the past, but it has become more and more abused recently as the elected politicians have two much control.
Abused is probably an understatement. The Tories made some extremely questionable and bizarre appointments in their recent terms. We have the son of Russian oligarch sitting there! Inexplicable advisors whose appointment is a mystery even after FOIA requests. And extreme partisans like Jacob Rees Mogg and Priti Patel.
Imo they should be proposed and voted on by the house. That should at least offer some prevention of peerages as favours, as they quite clearly have been used.
>Imo they should be proposed and voted on by the house.
Then why wouldn’t the house just stuff them with people that will agree with everything they do and remove any checks and balances? You only need one house at that point.
In part because the composition of the commons changes over time - so if the term timescales are different then they won't necessarily agree at any point in time - but I do agree it would potentially become too politicised if you had that kind of vote.
Ultimately in the UK system, the commons has the final say ( ignoring the monarch in the room here ), so most of the time what the Lords do isn't typically a big public issue - it's quiet revision, have you thought of this?, type stuff. Not that common to have a big conflict - though it does happen.
> Imo they should be proposed and voted on by the house. That should at least offer some prevention of peerages as favours, as they quite clearly have been used.
You'd get party political trading - we will vote for your pick if you vote for our pick - but perhaps it will help at the margins - the obviously embarrassing would be harder to squeeze through.
The problem is the current process relied a bit too much on people being trustworthy - as you say that's kinda fallen away recently - and obviously the election of Trump show how dangerous it is for a process to rely on people being decent and not abuse the trust. Which is a shame as trusting people gives people the leeway to do the right thing.
In terms of JRM or Patel - while they are not my cup of tea, I think there is value in senior politicians becoming members of the Lords almost by default ( like senior judges or religious leaders ) - as to some extent it does reflect what people have voted for in the past and they have valuable experience. However perhaps it's too early in their cases.
An age limit has been talked about - but normally in terms of upper age - I wonder if it wouldn't be better as an age threshold - you have to have retired and be no longer 'on the make'. Sure that means no young people in the second chamber - but ultimately being representative is the commons role, the second chamber is for experienced people to tell the commons not to be hasty and do more work.
It's very tricky to balance right that's for sure. Agreed that it opens the door to behind the scenes deals. But marginal improvements are still better than whatever the hell we have now.
In the case of Priti Patel she was fired from government for having secret/undisclosed meetings with Israel to recognise some contested land (IIRC). That should be an instant disqualifier for a lifelong peerage.
> That should be an instant disqualifier for a lifelong peerage.
Again the current process does have an element of that - MI5 et al have a look at the list and say 'reputational risk'. "That's a very brave choice minster.."
However, as with Mandelsons appointment to the Lords and US ambassador, it's clearly being ignored - but then who better than the PM of the day to have the final say - the problem is somebody has to - and if you take it away from the PM - then it potentially becomes undemocratic.
Perhaps one improvement would be the removal of the tradition of exiting PM's creating a nomination list - when they no longer care about what the public think - a bit like Joe Biden outrageously pardoning his son.
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.
On the other hand, the process of having Commons legislation rejected by the Lords, then amended and sent back can take almost a year. A government looking to push its legislative programme in a single parliament may choose to remove the most controversial elements in return for an easier passage through the Lords. In this way, just the threat of Lords scrutiny can be enough to moderate the output of the Commons.
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.
They're there because someone a long time ago was wealthy and probably had ties to one or more monarchs.
This is not a basis for holding power in any country that calls itself democratic. This idea that they are somehow above everyday concerns and that's a good thing is some sort of weird retcon, and if we're going to use unmitigated cynicism to impugn the validity of action of other office holders who are elected, or who have got to the lords through prominence in public life, then allow me the same here: they're just there to pursue the interests of the landed gentry and hold back progress on issues like fox-hunting. And they have done exactly this in the past. The fact they're not trying to win an election means they are entirely free to pursue selfish aims.
There's no virtue in maintaining the privileges of these alleged 'nobles' to interfere in the running of the state.
What they’re going to get is 92 fewer (to use the modern parlance) nepo-babies having access to the levers of power. It’s something to celebrate.
Lots of countries call themselves democratic that absolutely aren't e.g. The DPRK for a ridiculous example. We actually aren't even democratic in the truest sense that we don't all vote on everything but instead elect representatives to vote for us (we hope). It's all a compromise with trade offs.
Here one will just get different "nepo babies" who are more directly involved in the struggle for power because they will be connected those in power - people who have been useful and will be wanted in future.
Some people say that the desire for power is the thing that should disqualify a person from having it. i.e. we perhaps need some anti-politicians. This would mean people who don't want to be in power having some forced upon them like in Jury duty.
> That is exactly what hereditary peerage is. The few, by definition. The aristocracy.
Not true at all - there's nothing special about having a rich land-owner in your ancestry - most people do.
In fact, now, after a few centuries of reversion to the mean, the hereditary peers are the only people in government who are representative, in the statistical sense.
(Not that this is related in any way to the actual reason why this is being done - the actual motive is that a hereditary peer is necessarily British, and Starmer hates the British and wants them disenfranchised so that he can continue with their destruction. But that's another story..)
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.
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.
One of the nicer things about Lords debates is that many members have ended their working lives and are no longer worried about the day to day felicities of their industry.
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.
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.
Did the government pass any laws to steal those 130 billion dollars from Americans? I can't recall that it did.
Are there any consequences for the people who did it?
The government has long ceased to govern by law. It now governs from the bench, and from executive order, because laws are too troublesome to actually pass.
America operates on a strong executive common law system not whatever system you are imagining.
I took business law more than a decade ago and the professor basically said do what you want (money wise) if you can pay for it. This is the English legal system and is how it's always worked. Liability is purely monetary and the law only applies to those who can show standing to do anything about it.
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.
Oh yeah, gotta love the "if you dont join our illegal unnecessary war, you support religious dictatorship".
Spoken by supporter of a goverment who prefres dictatorships over democrscies, claims does not even want regime change in iran, claims they dont care about targetting civilian infrastructure.
That just made it so goverment in Iran is more hardline. And that just gave a lifeline to Russia while being at it.
> 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.
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).
Okay, though to be fair to me, you said just after
> and ignoring the Salisbury Convention (which is that they shouldn’t block manifesto commitments)
which is what attracted my question.
Thanks for the link. I haven’t watched it, but I will observe that a lot of the modern legislation that comes out of the commons should properly attract the attention of the Lords, as it doesn’t get nearly enough attention from the commons.
I totally agree, the upper chamber can and should make amendments to legislation. In this case, they made a generally good amendment to the Employment Rights Bill (allowing "at-will" dismissal up to the first 6 months rather than the initially proposed total ban).
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.
> 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.
Entire village? How's that work? What can the new owner do with the village? I imagine the inhabitants aren't enslaved?
Ah, so the property is owned by the people living there, while the land is owned by someone else? That sounds like a nightmare for everyone involved. Is this common in the UK?
Yes, it's a system called leasehold which has its roots in medieval feudalism. Essentially, a property owner owns the building and a long-term (usually either 99 or 990 years) lease on the ground it sits on.
Everyone recognises that it's absurd, and there've been attempts to fix it for over a century. They've already gone in Scotland, and the previous government finally passed legislation that would allow new leaseholds to be banned in England and Wales too (although it hasn't yet gone into effect). The current government has introduced a bill which will eventually bring the system to an end altogether.
As you might expect, there's huge opposition to these reforms from vested interests who are using every trick in the book to delay them. Getting rid of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords can only improve matters.
Because 150 years ago the labour to keep the estate running was very cheap. Now that labour is expensive, it costs more in maintenance than the property is worth, unless it's highly productive land. Reminds me of the joke, how to make a thousand dollars: buy a million dollar boat.
On other side my guess is also that net labour productivity of land has dropped significantly. What I mean that same amount of farm land does not produce same amount of excess labour buying power. So even if productivity itself for farming has risen massively. The amount of labour that you can buy with produced production has plummeted.
My father-in-law always liked to see an exact number of democrats and republicans in congress, or congress held by one and the senate the other, for exactly this reason. With deadlock they can’t screw things up more. I’m not sure I disagree.
Congress has had one of the lowest approval ratings of anything in government for a long time now because it doesn't get things done. Most Americans are quite unhappy with Congressional deadlock being the norm.
It's also directly lead to the continued rise of the powers of the unitary executive - the EO that have become the norm in the 2000s are in large part because Congress has largely voided all responsibility for legislating.
Congress passes tons of laws - just not on subjects on which the country is divided. Is that not a feature? Other systems require 50% + 1 to radically remake the entire country. Would that be better? Or worse? Imagine if <insert your most hated President> were Prime Minister instead, and had control of a truly sovereign Parliament with virtually no guardrails at all. Better or worse?
EOs are a problem, but SCOTUS is walking at least some of that back in subtle ways, such as the end of Chevron deference. (Not that you'd get any of this from the media, who desperately want SCOTUS to devolve into the media-friendly horse race they've imposed upon all of the rest of politics.)
Congress isn't supposed to decide on social questions. Society is. Congress is meant to represent it. A divided Congress is accurately representing a divided country.
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.
> "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.
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.
You just explained in your second paragraph how one party would block PR statehood for no valid reason, not because it shouldn't be one, but because it would presumably advantage Dems. That is literally what I said: any change gets blocked for fear it would advantage the other guys. And whether it's "always worked that way" doesn't make it right. A fair system would have said that an existing territory with enough people that can organize a government and vote to join the union must be admitted, to avoid those shenanigans. Leaving them unrepresented is embarrassing.
And your first paragraph sounds like it's quoted from an anti-statehood propaganda flyer. PR has high taxes today -- an 11.5% sales tax, and a high local income tax, because PR has to pay for everything itself, and because Congress screws them over, such as refusing bailouts when natural disasters devastate the island. Many states receive significant money from the Federal government that PR doesn't get. If it were a state, some people would have to pay some federal income tax, but it would not be automatically a worse tax burden.
Same for language, there's nothing in the constitution that mandates that. PR already has two official languages. And nothing lawmakers decide will stop people from choosing to speak Spanish all day long if they want. If you don't agree with me, walk around any city in California, Arizona, or Texas.
27th amendment was about congressional salaries and had basically no effect on governance.
26th amendment lowered the voting age to 18 for state and local elections and had no effect on national elections (statute already set the national voting age as 18, but courts prevented it from applying to state and local elections).
25th clarified presidential succession to work exactly how everyone had already assumed it to work for over a century, so for practical purposes did nothing.
24th in 1964, which outlawed poll taxes as a criteria for voting, was the last amendment with any effect on national governance.
>> 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.
Please, please, please go read the Federalist papers. The Founders thought of a lot more than you realise.
The design of a constitution is the design of the distribution of power. The nature of power hasn't changed.
1. Any voting system other than the disastrous FPTP which forces a two-party system and punishes any attempt to break this duopoly.
2. What if Congress is composed entirely of weasels and just, though formal law-passing or by sheer inaction, cedes nearly all their power to the executive branch?
3. What if the Supreme Court has at least 5 partisans who will say just about anything to keep in power the party (or even the individual) who put them there? What if they say stupid things like "A President has absolute criminal immunity for any act that falls within his 'conclusive and preclusive' constitutional authority, and presumptive immunity for all other official acts."
4. Even if SCOTUS is basically working as intended, what if the President just...ignores them?
5. What if a President is mentally incompetent due to age, and his whole party refuses to acknowledge it? (This one is Biden, arguably - I'm disgusted with both parties)
I do get checks and balances, I know that a big part of the whole "they can't pass anything" is a feature and not a bug. But come on, it's got out of hand when every single term we have multiple debt limit hostage negotiations -- and now BOTH parties are doing it!
That's a lot of what ifs, some more fanciful than others. There is no political system that could withstand a such a barrage of bad intentions and corruption. But I'd note that despite how bad things seem, the things you describe for the most part haven't actually happened? The executive is generally complying with SCOTUS decisions, e.g. tariffs. The US remains a robust if fractious democracy, unlike much of the rest of the world.
More broadly, go look at other countries' politics. The facade of stability is being held up in a lot of places by restrictions on speech, on assembly, on political organisation of a kind that would be unthinkable in the US. It's borderline illegal to assemble for Palestine in Britain. Is that society less divided than the US, or just more controlled? And that's a democratic peer country. Things get much worse - Hungary, Russia, Iran, etc
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.
Look, just let us get rid of first-past-the-post as the only voting method, and I'll be happy. I'm not asking for voting via Neuralink, holographic VR Presidential debates, or flying car taxis to the polling places.
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.
The parliament of Northern Ireland also used STV for the same (er, well, inverted) reasons from 1921 until the Unionist majority forced a change to FPTP for most seats in 1929.
More generally, STV was the default choice for assemblies throughout the British Empire (and became known as 'the British system' as a result) from the late 19th century onwards.
It was even agreed on for use in Westminster in 1919 - though only the university seats ever actually used it - making it "more traditional" than the current single-member FPTP system which dates only from 1949. The failure to actually implement it was part of a more general reactionary movement in the aftermath of the war, when Lloyd George's promise of a "land fit for heroes" was thoroughly betrayed.
The Irish system seems to work well, and can be used as a comparator for considering what the UK might look like if that betrayal hadn't happened.
Huh! I didn’t know any of that. I presumed that Stormont elections had always been FPTP and that gerrymandering – particularly in Derry – was the worst abuse of the democratic process in Northern Ireland.
That’s really interesting that the British promoted STV within their sphere of influence and had intended to use it for elections to Westminster. Thanks for the informative comment and useful historical context.
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.
> 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.
Documents are meaningless. In rotten countries they simply get rewritten or ignored. Nothing beats an electorate who value honesty over being told what they want to hear and who punish corruption.
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 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.
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.
The monarch being Commander in Chief is ceremonial. Everything is done on the advice of the Prime Minister and their cabinet.
The chance of the monarch overriding said request is less than 1%.
Even then, parliament is sovereign. Whilst the logistics are complicated due to how things are introduced to the house, if parliament says no to a prime ministers decision, it overrides anything the prime minister who has no absolute power like a president does.
Monarchists can't have it both ways, though. Making him a ceremonial CiC isn't going to provide you with much of a bulwark against abuse of power by parliament. Or he isn't ceremonial and he could become a threat himself.
Personally I love the idea that the codes for nukes are surgically implanted in a volunteer, and in order to issue the order to fire the nukes, the CIC must personally carve the codes from that person's chest with a knife, killing them in the process. Or the variant on that idea, that the codes are implanted in their own forearm, and to order the nukes they must cut the codes from out of their own flesh.
We could do the same for all military deployment orders.
The government, unilaterally, against the country's prevalent feelings towards this illegal war of aggression, permitted USA to use British bases, and if I'm not mistaken, without as much as the parliament vote.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
That's the point? Adding laws and rights is not necessarily a good thing. People tried to work towards a local maxima but it turns out that the approach is no good so it needs to be torn down and another direction of hill climbing needs to be tried. Or circumstances where a law made sense are no longer the same. Problems that the law makers did not foresee may come into the picture.
I'm parroting back the opposite of the original reply, which was upvoted
That leaves me to conclude HN is a left leaning circle jerk echo chamber, much like reddit. With any dissent to the right triggering the non-hateful liberal lefties.
You don't understand the core issue at heart in Britain.
The real distraction is the economic argument. The truth of the matter is natives feel like a stranger in their own country. I say this as someone who is mixed race and 2nd gen before you try and label me a racist. Yawn.
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.)
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.
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?"
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.
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.
It's fine to stumble initially, like discovering fire, but design gets us lighters and ovens. Good design allows for some flexibility without leaving everything to chance like pure stumbling does.
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.
The governments don't really cause the issues. The big issues are just things that face the country no matter who is in control - how to pay for everything, how to deal with population aging etc.
It's not a simple country - it's a machine with millions of complicated parts and therefore it's difficult to come up with simple things to do that will make everyone happy.
The public don't all have a 10000 foot view, which I don't think any 1 person could comprehensively understand anyhow, and are susceptible to being sold "simple solutions" by politicians - in fact they won't elect anyone who doesn't pretend at least to offer simple solutions.
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.
Just checking, but you do realize that this kind of unhinged, populist takes are exactly the kind of propaganda you use to destroy a democratic system. You know that right?
Only a couple of states are like you describe and none of them are red. The governor of KY (the reddest state) for example is a Dem. One of the Senators for Montana is a Dem, etc. In fact, if you want the Dems to win the presidency
in 2028, one of those folks is your best bet. The other thing we can do it get rid of gerrymandering but that's unlikely and the most recent gerrymandering attempts are likely to end up blowing up in the face of the party drawing the lines. Politics is nothing if not ironic.
PS Look at who is running for governor of CA right now and ask yourself if any of those folks actually represents CA in any real way. Also, ask yourself why there is only 1 Dem in that race?
You can't destroy a democratic system that isn't democratic and already doesn't serve the people. The Senate was never designed to be democratic in the first place. The House was, but its main problem is just campaign finance decadence that means to the extent those guys do any governing during their 2-year terms, it's a part-time gig in between fundraising. And together, the legislative branch has become a joke. They now just fart around, either rubber-stamping whatever the President says, or shutting down the government whenever the party out of power can't accept that the public has rejected their policies. So I hope I can be forgiven for being pessimistic about whether this "democratic system" even serves any purpose at this point.
But back to the Senate. Jon Tester was defeated in 2024. There is a peppering of Democrats in statewide office here and there -- Fetterman and Beshear, and the Virginia and Georgia Democrats, the latter of which got really lucky to both run in the election that was a referendum on Trump's COVID chaos, and the one getting to run against a proud child molester. They are also the exact kind of politicians that don't get support from the blue-state Democrats in primaries for national elections, because they are too moderate. If you don't check every box, the primaries will destroy you. To be fair, Republicans have the exact same problem. Blue-state moderates certainly could have been persuaded to support say, Jeb Bush, but the party only supports... well, since the phenomenon became locked in, they have only given their support to one man. Sorry to ramble, my point is that the practice of split-ticket voting is dying off faster than discounted DRAM.
There used to be a lot of these cross-party appeal people like Bill Clinton, Ann Richards, Jon Tester, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, and on the Republican side George Pataki, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie. But this is now massively the exception, and trending down.
BTW I'm all for getting rid of gerrymandering, but the Democrats have set that cause back by 100 years by selling out their supposed deeply held beliefs last year in California. Now we're just being honest that it's only about power.
I don't remember who's running for governor in California, but I am guessing there is only one Dem running it's because the California Democratic Party is powerful and disciplined in ways neither national party is, and has told everybody but the party's favorite to sit down and shut up. That's speculation - let me know if I'm wrong.
Not hereditary, but SCOTUS functions somewhat worse than the House Of Lords: unelected, unremovable, life appointments, but ability to change the law. Hence the decades spent shifting the balance to reverse Roe v Wade.
A lot of important US freedoms only came from the courts in spite of the legislatures, which I think is an under appreciated problem of the system.
The US system skews much older for some reason too. The only president born after 1946 was Obama. Like being stuck in a time warp.
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.
Worth noting that the distinction between democracy and republic that you're clearly advocating here is a usage particular to Americans. It doesn't have much currency elsewhere.
Countries like the Netherlands, Denmark etc all have safeguards the dilute the power of 50% + 1, and yet they are clearly not republics, being monarchies.
Political scientists tend to talk more of 'liberal democracy' (whether republican or monarchical) v 'electoral autocracy' etc. This depends on the classical use of the term 'liberal' of course, which is another word that Americans tend to use differently from everyone else.
> The nobility is another example of a minority with disproportionate power. It's important that they are reduced to ensure civil liberties.
Alexis de Tocqueville would disagree - he believed that intermediate institutions (churches, professions, elites, etc) blunt the power of the state before it reaches average people. A society without intermediate institutions is one where you have an all-powerful state on the one hand, and a largely un-coordinated mass of average people on the other. He thought this was the highway to democratic despotism. (Worth noticing that totalitarian governments focus a lot of their energy on destroying alternative centres of power such as these.)
Genuinely regrettable. The appointed life peers system is worse than the traditional ‘hereditary sortition’ (if you will).
The former creates a class of semi-sinecures of equally questionable quality yet beholden to the political system of the moment. Life peerages become awards for donors and loyalists, a legitimized corruption. The house’s composition becomes an ever-growing competition based on unlimited partisan appointment. The house becomes less thoughtful, more unwieldy, more pointless, more expensive. It will inevitably be abolished on this path.
In contrast aristocrats are at least less likely to owe anything to a special interest, and more likely to hold firm to unpopular but perhaps higher ideals: they owe their position to no other power center, neither voters nor parties. They are also inherently invested in the nation’s long term success. It’s hardly democratic but at least it’s not a wasteful partisan circus.
My pitch would be to keep a small number of intra-peerage elected hereditary peers, keep the bishops, add various ex officio academics - but fill the majority of seats by true sortition. Every British subject is liable to be drafted, and paid, into a year or two of part-time lordship. (Though I’d grant the whole house a right to easily expel such members, should they fail to meet basic expectations.)
I wonder if you might find the book “Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case” by Tongdong Bai to be interesting. It delves into exactly these issues: how to ensure that long-term interests, or the interests of future generations, are also taken into account, and not just the interests of the current electorate.
A lifelong hereditary appointment is an affront to democracy imo. It is regrettable we have a monarchy, but their power is very limited. The Lords however have a regular say in the production of laws. A second house is good. But hereditary appointment is only one degree removed from some divine right.
But I entirely agree about political appointments. You only have to look at the last set from the Tories/Boris to see that the system has been abused.
Did you ever actually read the candidate statements written for the hereditary by-elections whenever a new spot opened up in the Lords?
Seriously, they're worth a read. A collection of posh nobodies all with a 'long career in business/finance' but rarely any particular concrete achievements to talk about. My favourite is Earl Dudley, who stands at every single opportunity seemingly only in a desperate attempt to promote his semi-pornographic youtube channel.
Sortition sounds great in theory, but I don't think it's well-suited to a permanent chamber. Use it for citizens juries, or appoint a time-limited jury to scrutinise a single reading of each bill, similar to the work of a select ctte today.
It's worth considering that the life peers system is similar in many ways to the Roman Senate, which worked fine.
Senators got that way by popular election rather than by appointment, which is a significant difference.
Appointed life peers are even more similar, basically identical, to appointed officers in an imperial court. Courts operate on appointments as opposed to heredity when the throne is powerful.
It looks to me like only the king can create peers. If a British king was interested in reclaiming some power, that would be a promising place to start.
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.
Jury trials are a colossal and disproportionate waste of time. Jury trials have it place, but most of the time is spent on jury selection, theatrics, and deliberation--all this cost dearly, both in terms of time and money.
Thanks to its high cost and unpredictability, laughable inventions like "plea bargains" exist, only to selectively prey on the vulnerable.
It's not perfect (nor are jury trials), but when it comes to truth discovery and arriving at a proportionate sentence, as long as all parties are fairly represented, one without jury trials should be just as effective.
> 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.
I feel it is important to point out that the UK doesn't have freedom of speech, has never had freedom of speech and at this point doesn't look like it ever will. The idea of freedom of speech actually comes from the Netherlands and was first codified in the US. The UK never adopted it.
The person floating this idea (of removing jury trials) would gain the power to imprison people simply for criticizing the government (and anything he didn't like really). But sure, plea bargaining isn't a perfect idea so whatever the British government does is fine.
PS A few more sacred cows while I'm at it (just for fun):
- The stereotypical British accent was formed after the US Revolution, before that Brits sounded like Americans (and visa versa)
- Richard the Lionheart didn't speak English but instead spoke French
- Churchill was lousy at military strategy and opposed the Normandy landings
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.
Also, I feel like there is something important you don't understand about the US system. A grand jury isn't a jury trial. A grand jury just allows a jury trial to happen (for a defendant to be charged at all). The defense isn't part of a grand jury. That's why the quote is what it is. It isn't talking about jury trials, just that a prosecutor can charge someone with a crime (the outcome them winning at a grand jury) pretty easily. Hope this helps.
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.
So you are telling me that the people who make money from criminal trials don't like the part of the system that would make a trial not necessary. Weird huh...its almost like they have a significant monetary reason to get rid of plea bargins.
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.
This is more an argument against political appointees than it is an argument for hereditary peers. I agree that the system has been abused. It's need reforming
If you don't see any difference between people who won US presidential elections and those appointed for political favoritism, then I don't know what to tell you. Also, if you look at the current state of the UK vs US and don't see any difference then you need to get out more.
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.
Venice's system also involved random selection, though in a very convoluted way.
There were multiple repeated iterations where they selected a random group of eligible people and then that group voted to select a group who would then have a random selection taken who would then elect another group and so on.
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.
Some people who actively seek positions of power are terribly unqualified or have other discommending properties, as well. This does not seem too great an impediment to their success.
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.
371 x 250 days is about $100k...in London...that's pretty middle class if you ask me. Just look at how Congress makes out in comparison. They legalized insider trading for themselves and only themselves. What you describe is quaint by comparison.
If you are in a position to be appointed to the House of Lords, it is reasonable to assume that you were not hand-to-mouth before that happened. At worst, you had a good job in one of the classes that gets you access to British Costco. At best, you have an estate and staff.
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.
Your fortunes are not inextricably tied to your country any more than mine are. I've lived in four countries; am now a citizen of two. I have no passive incomes or sociolegal status which is tied to an estate or a title in a country that must continue to prosper or that status and wealth will diminish. If I see shit going sour, I'll sell my farm in Ireland for twice what I paid for it, move somewhere else, and still be a commoner.
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.
This is where the intra-party coalitions become important. Every party of significant size has them. Labour is effectively a coalition between a rightwing faction (New Labour/Blue Labour) and everyone else who is more leftwing. The internal and external debate is the question: should they focus "right" (immigrant and queerbashing, welfare cuts) to appease the right wing of the party and try to pick up Reform/Conservative voters, or focus "left" on their base and people who are switching to Green?
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.
The Senate gives a rather disproportionate democracy in which the votes of a small number in small states take on disproportionate significance compared to the votes of a large number in populous states.
That still does nothing to refute the parent's complaint about democracy. Lopsided representation is still representation (as opposed to a council of nobles or military generals or whoever).
Also the thing you're objecting to is literally the entire point of the senate from day one. It was intended to give less populous states an equal voice in contrast to the house of representatives. Unfortunately history happened and the house of representatives hasn't been proportional for a long time. But if you're going to complain about something it should probably be the latter rather than the former.
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??
“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.
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.
>like an animal in a zoo, all for show with no actual power
I used to think that but it's not true. The military swear allegiance to the crown, as in Royal Navy, which makes it hard for a dictator to take over. You may think that's academic but other European countries ditched the monarchy and got Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco etc.
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?
No, you can do things that benefit you electorally, but are also just the right thing to do. Changing the voting system from FPTP would obviously benefit parties other than the major ones, but that doesn't mean it'd be wrong for those parties to do it if they got into power. So the question is if it's good policy, and so I argue it is, if someone can be living by themselves, working in the army or as a full-time apprentice, married, and having a child, they should be able to vote.
> 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.
Yes, it's absolutely bad that the government isn't making sure these things are legal before doing them, just as with the Palestine Action proscription. It's also hardly a sign of it being gerrymandering, why would they bother when it's going to give them basically zero advantage, given it would only achieve getting a council that will have no time to actually do anything? The obvious conclusion is they thought it was a waste of money and effort to hold them, but if you have to fight a legal battle over it, it won't actually save any money or effort as that has a large cost, even if it is legal.
> Can you name a single Conservative hereditary peer that will be given a lifetime peerage in Starmer's reform plan?
> The BBC understands ministers have offered the Conservatives the chance to retain 15 hereditary members of the House of Lords as life peers.
So it's not specific names as it hasn't been finalised, but 15 of them. I accept I misremembered when I said "all", but the point stands: not gerrymandering.
> No, you can do things that benefit you electorally, but are also just the right thing to do. Changing the voting system from FPTP would obviously benefit parties other than the major ones, but that doesn't mean it'd be wrong for those parties to do it if they got into power
You're reinforcing my point.
Minor parties (who might collectively be popular with the electorate) will never be able to change the voting methodology to their advantage because FPTP keeps the incumbents in place, and only the incumbents have the power to choose the voting system. So democracy suffers and the incumbents benefit.
Similarly, in this case, allowing children to vote helps the incumbents stay in place despite their party, and their leader being deeply unpopular with the electorate overall. So democracy suffers and the incumbents benefit.
This "logic" doesn't track at all. Enfranchising women may have benefited the party, does that mean we shouldn't have given women the vote and doing so hurt democracy? Of course not.
Just because something benefits a singular party doesn't make it antidemocratic. Expanding the franchise is more democratic, not less. A party being rewarded electorally for doing something good is the system working, not failing.
There are reasonable arguments to be made (in my opinion) that 16 is too young but you aren't making that argument, the one you are making is completely invalid.
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
You do know that actual political scientists don't use left vs right to describe parties. They use terms like libertarian, socialist, etc. They do that because left vs right change from place to place and time to time. From the POV of the US, Labour are communists. In France perhaps they are center or center left or even center right. Even the things you call left vs right don't remain consistent. There are policies in the 50s which were considered left but now would be right and visa-versa.
PS You have be to be pretty extreme to think the Labour party isn't "left" enough for you. As in, I'm not sure what else they could do to appease the far left in practice without sever negative consequences for the UK.
> PS You have be to be pretty extreme to think the Labour party isn't "left" enough for you. As in, I'm not sure what else they could do to appease the far left in practice without sever negative consequences for the UK.
Have you looked at actions rather than manifesto? There's very little change in policy actions from the previous non-Labor government, so it doesn't track unless you see the tories as left wing. Which is clearly more extreme.
* Britain has not had a parliament for seven hundred years. The current parliament dates back to 1707 or 1801 depending on your POV. This is the usual conflation of England with Britain.
* If you want to take a more Anglocentric viewpoint then Oliver Cromwell ejected hereditary nobles back in the 18th century. So not the first time.
On a different note, it is worth saying that hereditary peers are often more independent. They are born into the role so hold their own viewpoints. Some of them were and are to the left of recent British governments, even though that may be hard to believe. The current Labour government wishes to replace them with appointees so that the entire House of Lords will become another party political machine.
> For centuries, parliamentary representation and the right to vote in elections to the House of Commons remained largely unchanged from medieval times, even as population and economic activity shifted, contributing to an unequal distribution of seats by the early 19th century. In some constituencies the electorate was so small that seats could be controlled through patronage, bribery, or coercion, and many seats were treated almost as "property" under longstanding family influence. Early 19th-century reformers used the term rotten borough for depopulated constituencies that retained representation, and pocket borough for constituencies effectively "in the pocket" of a patron who could dominate the outcome.
> 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.
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.
> Government minister Nick Thomas-Symonds said the change put an end to “an archaic and undemocratic principle.”
> “Our parliament should always be a place where talents are recognized and merit counts,” he said. “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.”
Really? About time they got rid of the monarchy then also.
The logic is to divide power into as many pieces as possible to prevent tyranny by structure. Unless you admire totalitarianism and unitary executive theory.
The Founders were wrong about this one. We have an overly powerful executive because they split up the legislative power too much and it doesn’t act as an effective counterweight.
Look around the world and find the countries where the legislature rather than the executive is the most dangerous branch as Hamilton suggested. It’s a very short list.
Partially true. None of the mythologically-lionized founders were perfectly omnipotent and couldn't hope to have predicted changes in society, technology, economic development, or pervasive corruption. They also couldn't envision ignorant, craven, leaders of poor character being given immense power and ignoring traditions. It's bikeshedding whether a monocameral or bicameral legislature parts, executive, or judiciary is more important, because currently, all 3 are totally compromised in similar manners that cannot adequately be reformed from within in a reasonable timeframe. The problem is a small cabal of rich people and their enablers have corrupted it to the point where no lasting fairness or integrity can be restored and vigilantly assured. The token "clean money" elected officials are a drop in the bucket when 90% of their colleagues and their large benefactors are legalized and pardoned criminals whom deserve to be imprisoned.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
Appointees are even worse. We already have MPs who are supposed to be elected but enact the same UN NGO and WEF programmes as other countries without democratic assent.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather some real democratic reform of the Lords, but there's no chance of that any time soon. In the mean time getting rid of as many people as possible who have no democratic legitimacy whatsoever is a good thing. And at least appointees were in general appointed by someone who had the democratic mandate. People who were born into it are so far from accountable it's not funny.
When the brexit referendum was going on, I lose count of the number of times I was told that having appointees in the EU Commission didn't undermine the democratic nature of the union...
>> We already have MPs who are supposed to be elected but enact the same UN NGO and WEF programmes as other countries without democratic assent.
MPs ... who are elected? Seems like they do have democracy behind them, no?
I am not a fan of the Lords and would have it abolished completely, and replaced with an elected second chamber.
That said appointed peers have no more legitimacy than hereditary ones and that is what we're getting. It allows politicians to stuff the chamber with their own. We're already run by committees and QUANGOs, let alone the United Nations NGOs, none of which have any democratic oversight.
"MPs ... who are elected? Seems like they do have democracy behind them, no?"
There is the whole issue of whether the First Past the Post system does the job or not, and proper representation of minor parties in the press. In fact the British state even punishes minor parties with electoral deposits if they do not get a big enough vote.
But what does it matter if they just enact the same World Economic Forum/COP/WHO etc policies? The UK is gradually getting the same policies as elsewhere on everything from smoking to digital ID and then pretendinf we voted on it.
There is barely a cigarette paper between the current Labour government and the previous Tory government. They are so close on so many issues it's laughable. They just take turns to get into power.
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.
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.
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.
I might take this argument seriously, if not for the fact that the party of “state’s rights” are pushing for a national ban on abortion. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/what-you-need-to-kn...
Exactly! What the Constitution /says/ and how it is interpreted... The Tenth Amendment is written (IMO) incredibly short to underscore its importance AND breadth:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
But I've very seldom heard the phrase "states rights" uttered by anyone who isn't pro-gun and anti-abortion. I doubt they'd feel any freer if their state came down like a ton of politically-angered bricks on unfettered gun ownerships and anti-abortionists.
Pro gun is explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, about 8 amendments before the tenth, so that argument isn't the best tack
While the American left has largely ceded the term “states rights” to the American right (and was/is well on the way to ceding the term “Free Speech”) they have their own share of “states rights” issues. Medical and recreational marijuana is a “states rights” issue. “Sanctuary cities” are a “states rights” issues. The fact that the Trump administration can’t (yet) force California schools to drop teaching certain things is a “states rights” issue. California deciding they’re goin to just gerrymander the heck out of everything in response to the current administration is a “states rights” issue. In fact basically every state level opposition to the current administration is a form of a “states rights” issue.
It’s immensely frustrating to me that what should be a huge lesson in the importance of limited government power and diffusion of that power across multiple governmental levels isn’t likely to result in that lesson being learned. I have a real fear that in history Trump will have been an inflection point on the road to an ever more powerful federal government in general and executive branch in particular, rather than a historical anomaly at the high end of that same power dynamic.
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.
Shelby Foote has a great quote about this in regards to the Civil War:
“The war happened because we failed to do the thing that we have a true genius for and that’s compromise”
> 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.
In the American system as originally founded, black people were property.
It should be expected that the American system is not eternally bound to the will and scope of vision of the founding fathers, that it can and should evolve over time as the needs and nature of society evolves. Otherwise, it isn't a republic, it's a cult.
Yes, that was corrected by using the amendment process (and fighting a huge war) a long time ago. The system was designed to allow for correction.
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.)
There's a long political tradition which doesn't acknowledge that there are political questions. In their world, there's only good policy and bad policy, and making the first is only a question of competence. Conflicts of interests they won't talk about. These people fight a constant battle to take political power away from people (not just regular people, elected representatives as well), and give it to their preferred "experts".
Could you explain this to a non USian???
Or a USian who has no idea which lawyers you are referring to obliquely, so as to look "cool" and "knowledgeable", while avoiding communication with the sullied masses?
They're referring to increasingly partisan Supreme Court Justices
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.
Are we reading the same constitution?
Article II, Section 1
> The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President
A party is a thing where multiple elected officials band together in a persistent coalition. The section you're quoting from only applies to a single elected office in the whole country. Are only two parties are going to run candidates for President when there are five or more parties in the legislature?
On top of that, that section applies to how the votes of the electoral college delegates are counted. It doesn't specify how the electoral college delegates are chosen, which it leaves up to the states. There are plenty of interesting ways of choosing them that don't result in a structural incentive for a two-party race.
> The section you're quoting from only applies to a single elected office in the whole country. Are only two parties are going to run candidates for President when there are five or more parties in the legislature?
I don't think it's a coincidence that every US state is structured as a smaller mirror of the federal government.
It's not a coincidence because they adopted their initial constitutions at around the same time or based them on the existing states that had. But we're talking about the electoral college and none of the states use something equivalent to that to choose their governor.
Using score voting instead of FPTP for state-level offices would be a straightforward legislative change in many states and still not require any change to the US Constitution even in the states where it would require a change to the state constitution, which is generally a much lower bar to overcome than a federal constitutional amendment.
I'll tell Hillary Clinton, she'll be thrilled.
And Al Gore, while you're at it.
US "parties" are giant coalitions compared to the "parties" in parliamentary democracies. You're solving a problem that doesn't exist.
Change the American voting system tomorrow and legislators will belong to different nominal parties that end up forming precisely the same coalitions.
Love him or hate him, Trump is a great example of this - in 2016, Trump effectively formed a new party focused on anti-immigration and protectionism, which rapidly grew to dominate the "conservative" coalition. But those other parties, ranging from libertarians to the Chamber of Commerce (highly pro immigration and highly pro free trade) parties are still there in the coalition.
> Change the American voting system tomorrow and legislators will belong to different nominal parties that end up forming precisely the same coalitions.
The US is extremely partisan right now and the partisanship is strongly aligned with the two major parties, not the individual coalitions that make them up. And with two parties you get polarization, because then it's all about getting 51% for a single party rather than forming temporary coalitions between various parties none of which can do anything unilaterally.
A different voting system allows you to have more than two viable parties, which changes the dynamic considerably.
Coalitions are pretty static in most parliamentary democracies except sometimes when forming governments post-election.
The 51% is for the coalition, not the party. That’s what you’re missing. CoC Republicans for example have temporarily sacrificed their immigration policies to retain legislative influence - and they are a check on the Trumpist wing passing whatever anti-immigrant legislation they want, because they too cannot act without at least tacit support from the CoC wing.
The “major party” is from a systems perspective no different than a European parliamentary governing coalition.
> Coalitions are pretty static in most parliamentary democracies except sometimes when forming governments post-election.
The "except when forming governments post-election" is a major difference. It also presumes that a coalition in the legislature is required to persist for an entire election cycle rather than being formed around any given individual piece of legislation. You don't have to use a system where an individual legislator or party can prevent any other from introducing a bill and taking a vote on it.
In less partisan periods in US history, bills would often pass with the partial support of both major parties.
Moreover, the US coalitions being tied to the major parties makes them too sticky. For example, the people who want lower taxes aren't necessarily the people who want subsidies for oil companies, or increased military spending, but they've been stuck in the same "coalition" together for decades.
Suppose you want to do a carbon tax. People who don't like taxes are going to be a major opponent, so an obvious compromise would be to pass it as part of a net reduction in total taxes, e.g. reduce the federal payroll tax by more than the amount of the carbon tax. But that doesn't happen because the coalition that wants lower taxes never overlaps with the coalition that wants to do something about climate change. Meanwhile the coalition that wants lower taxes wouldn't propose a carbon tax on their own, and the coalition that wants a carbon tax to increase overall government revenue gets shot down because that would be extremely unpopular, so instead it never happens.
All countries have these problems which vary by the local political environment and history. Multiple European countries are facing particularly absurd varieties of these dilemmas because of their refusal to form coalitions with the second or third largest party in their country.
Again, it seems like the flaw is in trying to form a long-term coalition instead of just passing the bills that have enough support to pass when you put them up for a vote among all the people who were actually elected. Why should anyone have to give a crap what someone else's position is on immigration when the bill in question is on copyright reform or tax incentives for solar panels?
The coalitions do a pretty good job of representing people’s pre-existing positions. People aren’t not voting for copyright reform because their party said so, but because they agree with their party. Party discipline in the US is not nearly as strong as in most parliamentary systems.
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?
Things substantial plurality of public wants are not being done. The votes in legislature dont match what plurality of voters want.
Public opinion is not really represented in a way your comment implies.
It's not supposed to cause things a significant plurality of the public wants to happen. It's supposed to cause things a significant plurality of the public doesn't want to not happen.
>federalizing who can vote
Almost every single democracy in the world requires proof that you are eligible to vote. 80% of Americans agree with the idea as well.
https://wisconsinwatch.org/2026/02/voter-id-americans-suppor...
So let's have a national ID, given to all citizens.
Unfortunately the party calling most strongly for proving eligibility absolutely hates that idea.
And that national ID has to be free, and available to people who cannot appear at federal offices during business hours without losing what sparse wages they get...
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.
It could be my interpretation, the framing of the above comment feels as if Obama gave Trump the idea to use executive orders in expansive ways. I think Trump would have used executive orders expansive even if no president ever had used executive orders.
Trump is just trying to get away with as much as he can. The tariffs used by Trump and his "jokes" about skippings election and other things he did are quite unprecedented.
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%
True. Seems self-preservation is strong in our genes and can manifest in strong greed or prefering to avoid (direct) conflict with the greedy.
Humans are not always social creatures on all social fronts.
The idea of a second chamber is not controversial. The argument is how you populate it.
Elected - you have the problem of two chambers claiming legitimacy and potential deadlock, and also the problem of potentially having the same short term view as the other elected chamber.
Appointed - who gets to appoint, on what criteria, who are they beholden to ( ideally unsackable once appointed - I want them to feel free to say what they really think ).
Inherited - Very unlikely to represent the population. No quality filter. Potentially a culture of service built up - and free to say what they think.
Random. - More likely to represent the population. No quality filter.
You can obviously have a mix of all or any of the above.
In my view, the ideal second chamber would be full of people of experience, who are beholden to nobody (unsackable), that represented a broad range of views, with a culture of service.
I'm against a fully elected second house - as that's not really adding anything different to the first house. Appointed has worked quite well in the past, but it has become more and more abused recently as the elected politicians have two much control.
It's tricky - perhaps some sort of mix.
Abused is probably an understatement. The Tories made some extremely questionable and bizarre appointments in their recent terms. We have the son of Russian oligarch sitting there! Inexplicable advisors whose appointment is a mystery even after FOIA requests. And extreme partisans like Jacob Rees Mogg and Priti Patel.
Imo they should be proposed and voted on by the house. That should at least offer some prevention of peerages as favours, as they quite clearly have been used.
>Imo they should be proposed and voted on by the house.
Then why wouldn’t the house just stuff them with people that will agree with everything they do and remove any checks and balances? You only need one house at that point.
In part because the composition of the commons changes over time - so if the term timescales are different then they won't necessarily agree at any point in time - but I do agree it would potentially become too politicised if you had that kind of vote.
Ultimately in the UK system, the commons has the final say ( ignoring the monarch in the room here ), so most of the time what the Lords do isn't typically a big public issue - it's quiet revision, have you thought of this?, type stuff. Not that common to have a big conflict - though it does happen.
> Imo they should be proposed and voted on by the house. That should at least offer some prevention of peerages as favours, as they quite clearly have been used.
You'd get party political trading - we will vote for your pick if you vote for our pick - but perhaps it will help at the margins - the obviously embarrassing would be harder to squeeze through.
The problem is the current process relied a bit too much on people being trustworthy - as you say that's kinda fallen away recently - and obviously the election of Trump show how dangerous it is for a process to rely on people being decent and not abuse the trust. Which is a shame as trusting people gives people the leeway to do the right thing.
In terms of JRM or Patel - while they are not my cup of tea, I think there is value in senior politicians becoming members of the Lords almost by default ( like senior judges or religious leaders ) - as to some extent it does reflect what people have voted for in the past and they have valuable experience. However perhaps it's too early in their cases.
An age limit has been talked about - but normally in terms of upper age - I wonder if it wouldn't be better as an age threshold - you have to have retired and be no longer 'on the make'. Sure that means no young people in the second chamber - but ultimately being representative is the commons role, the second chamber is for experienced people to tell the commons not to be hasty and do more work.
It's very tricky to balance right that's for sure. Agreed that it opens the door to behind the scenes deals. But marginal improvements are still better than whatever the hell we have now.
In the case of Priti Patel she was fired from government for having secret/undisclosed meetings with Israel to recognise some contested land (IIRC). That should be an instant disqualifier for a lifelong peerage.
> That should be an instant disqualifier for a lifelong peerage.
Again the current process does have an element of that - MI5 et al have a look at the list and say 'reputational risk'. "That's a very brave choice minster.."
However, as with Mandelsons appointment to the Lords and US ambassador, it's clearly being ignored - but then who better than the PM of the day to have the final say - the problem is somebody has to - and if you take it away from the PM - then it potentially becomes undemocratic.
Perhaps one improvement would be the removal of the tradition of exiting PM's creating a nomination list - when they no longer care about what the public think - a bit like Joe Biden outrageously pardoning his son.
Jacob Rees Mogg isn’t in the Lords.
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-...On the other hand, the process of having Commons legislation rejected by the Lords, then amended and sent back can take almost a year. A government looking to push its legislative programme in a single parliament may choose to remove the most controversial elements in return for an easier passage through the Lords. In this way, just the threat of Lords scrutiny can be enough to moderate the output of the Commons.
If the Lords can’t veto bills, why does their rejection matter?
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.
Being out of touch with the electorate is the thing they have as a feature over the house of commons.
i.e. they're not trying to win the next election.
They're also not there because of the favours they've done existing politicians.
I don't think this is "great" but it does make me wonder if the people who want an end to herditary peers are really going to like what they get.
They're there because someone a long time ago was wealthy and probably had ties to one or more monarchs.
This is not a basis for holding power in any country that calls itself democratic. This idea that they are somehow above everyday concerns and that's a good thing is some sort of weird retcon, and if we're going to use unmitigated cynicism to impugn the validity of action of other office holders who are elected, or who have got to the lords through prominence in public life, then allow me the same here: they're just there to pursue the interests of the landed gentry and hold back progress on issues like fox-hunting. And they have done exactly this in the past. The fact they're not trying to win an election means they are entirely free to pursue selfish aims.
There's no virtue in maintaining the privileges of these alleged 'nobles' to interfere in the running of the state.
What they’re going to get is 92 fewer (to use the modern parlance) nepo-babies having access to the levers of power. It’s something to celebrate.
Lots of countries call themselves democratic that absolutely aren't e.g. The DPRK for a ridiculous example. We actually aren't even democratic in the truest sense that we don't all vote on everything but instead elect representatives to vote for us (we hope). It's all a compromise with trade offs.
Here one will just get different "nepo babies" who are more directly involved in the struggle for power because they will be connected those in power - people who have been useful and will be wanted in future.
Some people say that the desire for power is the thing that should disqualify a person from having it. i.e. we perhaps need some anti-politicians. This would mean people who don't want to be in power having some forced upon them like in Jury duty.
> That is exactly what hereditary peerage is. The few, by definition. The aristocracy.
Not true at all - there's nothing special about having a rich land-owner in your ancestry - most people do.
In fact, now, after a few centuries of reversion to the mean, the hereditary peers are the only people in government who are representative, in the statistical sense.
(Not that this is related in any way to the actual reason why this is being done - the actual motive is that a hereditary peer is necessarily British, and Starmer hates the British and wants them disenfranchised so that he can continue with their destruction. But that's another story..)
You argue that a lot of things are likely. Why don't you take the time to check instead of slander?
> 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.
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.
> for the rest of their working lives.
One of the nicer things about Lords debates is that many members have ended their working lives and are no longer worried about the day to day felicities of their industry.
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.
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.
Did the government pass any laws to steal those 130 billion dollars from Americans? I can't recall that it did.
Are there any consequences for the people who did it?
The government has long ceased to govern by law. It now governs from the bench, and from executive order, because laws are too troublesome to actually pass.
America operates on a strong executive common law system not whatever system you are imagining.
I took business law more than a decade ago and the professor basically said do what you want (money wise) if you can pay for it. This is the English legal system and is how it's always worked. Liability is purely monetary and the law only applies to those who can show standing to do anything about it.
So no-one affected by illegal tariffs has any legal standing?
Hyperbole beyond belief there
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.
Oh yeah, gotta love the "if you dont join our illegal unnecessary war, you support religious dictatorship".
Spoken by supporter of a goverment who prefres dictatorships over democrscies, claims does not even want regime change in iran, claims they dont care about targetting civilian infrastructure.
That just made it so goverment in Iran is more hardline. And that just gave a lifeline to Russia while being at it.
> 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
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).
> There is no "primacy" of the House in the US system.
I know, I'm saying this is not a good approach, for the reasons I gave above.
Which manifesto commitments have been blocked in this parliament?
> Which manifesto commitments have been blocked in this parliament?
To be clear, I didn't say they "blocked," I said:
> though the Lords recently have been playing silly buggers around the Employment Rights Act
This was a manifesto commitment which, while it eventually went through, it was touch and go for a little bit. Reporting at the time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f412kJChC6g
Okay, though to be fair to me, you said just after
> and ignoring the Salisbury Convention (which is that they shouldn’t block manifesto commitments)
which is what attracted my question.
Thanks for the link. I haven’t watched it, but I will observe that a lot of the modern legislation that comes out of the commons should properly attract the attention of the Lords, as it doesn’t get nearly enough attention from the commons.
I totally agree, the upper chamber can and should make amendments to legislation. In this case, they made a generally good amendment to the Employment Rights Bill (allowing "at-will" dismissal up to the first 6 months rather than the initially proposed total ban).
However after that amendment was accepted, Conservative Peers (who hold a majority) initially voted against the bill again: https://bectu.org.uk/news/prospect-slams-house-of-lords-for-...
It was eventually passed a week later when the Lords accepted the Commons amendments but that second block on 11th December shouldn't have happened.
> 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.
> 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.
Entire village? How's that work? What can the new owner do with the village? I imagine the inhabitants aren't enslaved?
Collects ground rent. A few hundred pounds each year from everyone who owns property or land in and around the village.
Ah, so the property is owned by the people living there, while the land is owned by someone else? That sounds like a nightmare for everyone involved. Is this common in the UK?
Yes, it's a system called leasehold which has its roots in medieval feudalism. Essentially, a property owner owns the building and a long-term (usually either 99 or 990 years) lease on the ground it sits on.
Everyone recognises that it's absurd, and there've been attempts to fix it for over a century. They've already gone in Scotland, and the previous government finally passed legislation that would allow new leaseholds to be banned in England and Wales too (although it hasn't yet gone into effect). The current government has introduced a bill which will eventually bring the system to an end altogether.
As you might expect, there's huge opposition to these reforms from vested interests who are using every trick in the book to delay them. Getting rid of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords can only improve matters.
Same thing landlords have done forever: Collect rents on their capital.
Because 150 years ago the labour to keep the estate running was very cheap. Now that labour is expensive, it costs more in maintenance than the property is worth, unless it's highly productive land. Reminds me of the joke, how to make a thousand dollars: buy a million dollar boat.
On other side my guess is also that net labour productivity of land has dropped significantly. What I mean that same amount of farm land does not produce same amount of excess labour buying power. So even if productivity itself for farming has risen massively. The amount of labour that you can buy with produced production has plummeted.
Downton Abbey played on this, they had to let people film a movie in their home just so that they could afford to fix the leaky roof =)
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.
My father-in-law always liked to see an exact number of democrats and republicans in congress, or congress held by one and the senate the other, for exactly this reason. With deadlock they can’t screw things up more. I’m not sure I disagree.
Congress has had one of the lowest approval ratings of anything in government for a long time now because it doesn't get things done. Most Americans are quite unhappy with Congressional deadlock being the norm.
It's also directly lead to the continued rise of the powers of the unitary executive - the EO that have become the norm in the 2000s are in large part because Congress has largely voided all responsibility for legislating.
Congress passes tons of laws - just not on subjects on which the country is divided. Is that not a feature? Other systems require 50% + 1 to radically remake the entire country. Would that be better? Or worse? Imagine if <insert your most hated President> were Prime Minister instead, and had control of a truly sovereign Parliament with virtually no guardrails at all. Better or worse?
EOs are a problem, but SCOTUS is walking at least some of that back in subtle ways, such as the end of Chevron deference. (Not that you'd get any of this from the media, who desperately want SCOTUS to devolve into the media-friendly horse race they've imposed upon all of the rest of politics.)
Congress isn't supposed to decide on social questions. Society is. Congress is meant to represent it. A divided Congress is accurately representing a divided country.
> 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.
That particular group of nobles have lost their power, we just now have a different group that are not as obvious.
The Iron Law of Oligarchy
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.
> "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.
Sure. But it's amazing that we have a system where he needed the legislature. That's pretty new in the grand scheme.
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.
You just explained in your second paragraph how one party would block PR statehood for no valid reason, not because it shouldn't be one, but because it would presumably advantage Dems. That is literally what I said: any change gets blocked for fear it would advantage the other guys. And whether it's "always worked that way" doesn't make it right. A fair system would have said that an existing territory with enough people that can organize a government and vote to join the union must be admitted, to avoid those shenanigans. Leaving them unrepresented is embarrassing.
And your first paragraph sounds like it's quoted from an anti-statehood propaganda flyer. PR has high taxes today -- an 11.5% sales tax, and a high local income tax, because PR has to pay for everything itself, and because Congress screws them over, such as refusing bailouts when natural disasters devastate the island. Many states receive significant money from the Federal government that PR doesn't get. If it were a state, some people would have to pay some federal income tax, but it would not be automatically a worse tax burden.
Same for language, there's nothing in the constitution that mandates that. PR already has two official languages. And nothing lawmakers decide will stop people from choosing to speak Spanish all day long if they want. If you don't agree with me, walk around any city in California, Arizona, or Texas.
27th amendment was about congressional salaries and had basically no effect on governance.
26th amendment lowered the voting age to 18 for state and local elections and had no effect on national elections (statute already set the national voting age as 18, but courts prevented it from applying to state and local elections).
25th clarified presidential succession to work exactly how everyone had already assumed it to work for over a century, so for practical purposes did nothing.
24th in 1964, which outlawed poll taxes as a criteria for voting, was the last amendment with any effect on national governance.
>> 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.
Please, please, please go read the Federalist papers. The Founders thought of a lot more than you realise.
The design of a constitution is the design of the distribution of power. The nature of power hasn't changed.
Things they appear to have not thought of:
1. Any voting system other than the disastrous FPTP which forces a two-party system and punishes any attempt to break this duopoly.
2. What if Congress is composed entirely of weasels and just, though formal law-passing or by sheer inaction, cedes nearly all their power to the executive branch?
3. What if the Supreme Court has at least 5 partisans who will say just about anything to keep in power the party (or even the individual) who put them there? What if they say stupid things like "A President has absolute criminal immunity for any act that falls within his 'conclusive and preclusive' constitutional authority, and presumptive immunity for all other official acts."
4. Even if SCOTUS is basically working as intended, what if the President just...ignores them?
5. What if a President is mentally incompetent due to age, and his whole party refuses to acknowledge it? (This one is Biden, arguably - I'm disgusted with both parties)
I do get checks and balances, I know that a big part of the whole "they can't pass anything" is a feature and not a bug. But come on, it's got out of hand when every single term we have multiple debt limit hostage negotiations -- and now BOTH parties are doing it!
That's a lot of what ifs, some more fanciful than others. There is no political system that could withstand a such a barrage of bad intentions and corruption. But I'd note that despite how bad things seem, the things you describe for the most part haven't actually happened? The executive is generally complying with SCOTUS decisions, e.g. tariffs. The US remains a robust if fractious democracy, unlike much of the rest of the world.
More broadly, go look at other countries' politics. The facade of stability is being held up in a lot of places by restrictions on speech, on assembly, on political organisation of a kind that would be unthinkable in the US. It's borderline illegal to assemble for Palestine in Britain. Is that society less divided than the US, or just more controlled? And that's a democratic peer country. Things get much worse - Hungary, Russia, Iran, etc
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.
Look, just let us get rid of first-past-the-post as the only voting method, and I'll be happy. I'm not asking for voting via Neuralink, holographic VR Presidential debates, or flying car taxis to the polling places.
It’s true. In the long arc of history I have no doubt that our current government systems will be considered childish
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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.
The parliament of Northern Ireland also used STV for the same (er, well, inverted) reasons from 1921 until the Unionist majority forced a change to FPTP for most seats in 1929.
More generally, STV was the default choice for assemblies throughout the British Empire (and became known as 'the British system' as a result) from the late 19th century onwards.
It was even agreed on for use in Westminster in 1919 - though only the university seats ever actually used it - making it "more traditional" than the current single-member FPTP system which dates only from 1949. The failure to actually implement it was part of a more general reactionary movement in the aftermath of the war, when Lloyd George's promise of a "land fit for heroes" was thoroughly betrayed.
The Irish system seems to work well, and can be used as a comparator for considering what the UK might look like if that betrayal hadn't happened.
Huh! I didn’t know any of that. I presumed that Stormont elections had always been FPTP and that gerrymandering – particularly in Derry – was the worst abuse of the democratic process in Northern Ireland.
That’s really interesting that the British promoted STV within their sphere of influence and had intended to use it for elections to Westminster. Thanks for the informative comment and useful historical context.
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.
> 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.
Counterpoint, the recent ruling on the Tariffs.
Too late and too weak a response.
Documents are meaningless. In rotten countries they simply get rewritten or ignored. Nothing beats an electorate who value honesty over being told what they want to hear and who punish corruption.
> 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.
with first past the post there will only ever be a duopoly. It forces you into voting AGAINST your least favorite choice.
I’m not sure if you can talk about a duopoly of parties in the UK at present.
> 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.
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.
Isn't that worse? You don't even get to elect the commander in chief, its just some random guy who was born into it?
The monarch being Commander in Chief is ceremonial. Everything is done on the advice of the Prime Minister and their cabinet.
The chance of the monarch overriding said request is less than 1%.
Even then, parliament is sovereign. Whilst the logistics are complicated due to how things are introduced to the house, if parliament says no to a prime ministers decision, it overrides anything the prime minister who has no absolute power like a president does.
Monarchists can't have it both ways, though. Making him a ceremonial CiC isn't going to provide you with much of a bulwark against abuse of power by parliament. Or he isn't ceremonial and he could become a threat himself.
I didn't say it was a good argument ;)
Personally I love the idea that the codes for nukes are surgically implanted in a volunteer, and in order to issue the order to fire the nukes, the CIC must personally carve the codes from that person's chest with a knife, killing them in the process. Or the variant on that idea, that the codes are implanted in their own forearm, and to order the nukes they must cut the codes from out of their own flesh.
We could do the same for all military deployment orders.
There's a mechanism by which Congress can remove the president if he gets out of control.
This just happened.
The government, unilaterally, against the country's prevalent feelings towards this illegal war of aggression, permitted USA to use British bases, and if I'm not mistaken, without as much as the parliament vote.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
For “fixing things” there are well-defined mechanisms such as state of emergency declaration of war.
Those give the leader extra powers, but do not give them carte blanche to do as they wish. Those extra powers are limited to handle specific problems.
I think it's quite obvious now how this leads to the erosion of rights and laws, looking at the current state of the affairs.
That's the point? Adding laws and rights is not necessarily a good thing. People tried to work towards a local maxima but it turns out that the approach is no good so it needs to be torn down and another direction of hill climbing needs to be tried. Or circumstances where a law made sense are no longer the same. Problems that the law makers did not foresee may come into the picture.
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.
I'm parroting back the opposite of the original reply, which was upvoted
That leaves me to conclude HN is a left leaning circle jerk echo chamber, much like reddit. With any dissent to the right triggering the non-hateful liberal lefties.
A populist far-right racist would fix all the potholes and bring HS2 in under budget? Got it.
You don't understand the core issue at heart in Britain.
The real distraction is the economic argument. The truth of the matter is natives feel like a stranger in their own country. I say this as someone who is mixed race and 2nd gen before you try and label me a racist. Yawn.
You need to change your social media algorithm.
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.)
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.
Well, they used that same logic to force integration… so.. sometimes good sometimes bad?
That's ultimately the result of the threats FDR made to pack the court if they didn't do what he wanted.
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?"
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.
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.
The stumbling is natural - it's a sort of stable thing deriving out of the state of now.
Design is something put out there which may not stand up to the test of how people actually behave i.e. it may not be stable.
It's fine to stumble initially, like discovering fire, but design gets us lighters and ovens. Good design allows for some flexibility without leaving everything to chance like pure stumbling does.
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At least we know this wasn’t written by AI
Yeah everyone in Britain is mandatory gay now.
"They" want you to be! :)
> 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.
The governments don't really cause the issues. The big issues are just things that face the country no matter who is in control - how to pay for everything, how to deal with population aging etc.
It's not a simple country - it's a machine with millions of complicated parts and therefore it's difficult to come up with simple things to do that will make everyone happy.
The public don't all have a 10000 foot view, which I don't think any 1 person could comprehensively understand anyhow, and are susceptible to being sold "simple solutions" by politicians - in fact they won't elect anyone who doesn't pretend at least to offer simple solutions.
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.
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.
Just checking, but you do realize that this kind of unhinged, populist takes are exactly the kind of propaganda you use to destroy a democratic system. You know that right?
Only a couple of states are like you describe and none of them are red. The governor of KY (the reddest state) for example is a Dem. One of the Senators for Montana is a Dem, etc. In fact, if you want the Dems to win the presidency in 2028, one of those folks is your best bet. The other thing we can do it get rid of gerrymandering but that's unlikely and the most recent gerrymandering attempts are likely to end up blowing up in the face of the party drawing the lines. Politics is nothing if not ironic.
PS Look at who is running for governor of CA right now and ask yourself if any of those folks actually represents CA in any real way. Also, ask yourself why there is only 1 Dem in that race?
You can't destroy a democratic system that isn't democratic and already doesn't serve the people. The Senate was never designed to be democratic in the first place. The House was, but its main problem is just campaign finance decadence that means to the extent those guys do any governing during their 2-year terms, it's a part-time gig in between fundraising. And together, the legislative branch has become a joke. They now just fart around, either rubber-stamping whatever the President says, or shutting down the government whenever the party out of power can't accept that the public has rejected their policies. So I hope I can be forgiven for being pessimistic about whether this "democratic system" even serves any purpose at this point.
But back to the Senate. Jon Tester was defeated in 2024. There is a peppering of Democrats in statewide office here and there -- Fetterman and Beshear, and the Virginia and Georgia Democrats, the latter of which got really lucky to both run in the election that was a referendum on Trump's COVID chaos, and the one getting to run against a proud child molester. They are also the exact kind of politicians that don't get support from the blue-state Democrats in primaries for national elections, because they are too moderate. If you don't check every box, the primaries will destroy you. To be fair, Republicans have the exact same problem. Blue-state moderates certainly could have been persuaded to support say, Jeb Bush, but the party only supports... well, since the phenomenon became locked in, they have only given their support to one man. Sorry to ramble, my point is that the practice of split-ticket voting is dying off faster than discounted DRAM.
There used to be a lot of these cross-party appeal people like Bill Clinton, Ann Richards, Jon Tester, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, and on the Republican side George Pataki, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie. But this is now massively the exception, and trending down.
BTW I'm all for getting rid of gerrymandering, but the Democrats have set that cause back by 100 years by selling out their supposed deeply held beliefs last year in California. Now we're just being honest that it's only about power.
I don't remember who's running for governor in California, but I am guessing there is only one Dem running it's because the California Democratic Party is powerful and disciplined in ways neither national party is, and has told everybody but the party's favorite to sit down and shut up. That's speculation - let me know if I'm wrong.
In the US our unelected hereditary nobility just buys candidates.
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.
Not hereditary, but SCOTUS functions somewhat worse than the House Of Lords: unelected, unremovable, life appointments, but ability to change the law. Hence the decades spent shifting the balance to reverse Roe v Wade.
A lot of important US freedoms only came from the courts in spite of the legislatures, which I think is an under appreciated problem of the system.
The US system skews much older for some reason too. The only president born after 1946 was Obama. Like being stuck in a time warp.
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.
It could have said your comments if it meant your comments. And It never does any good, and it makes boring reading was not less true.
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.
What you describe is called a Republic. Pure democracy is precisely 50% + 1 vote.
Worth noting that the distinction between democracy and republic that you're clearly advocating here is a usage particular to Americans. It doesn't have much currency elsewhere.
Countries like the Netherlands, Denmark etc all have safeguards the dilute the power of 50% + 1, and yet they are clearly not republics, being monarchies.
Political scientists tend to talk more of 'liberal democracy' (whether republican or monarchical) v 'electoral autocracy' etc. This depends on the classical use of the term 'liberal' of course, which is another word that Americans tend to use differently from everyone else.
> The nobility is another example of a minority with disproportionate power. It's important that they are reduced to ensure civil liberties.
Alexis de Tocqueville would disagree - he believed that intermediate institutions (churches, professions, elites, etc) blunt the power of the state before it reaches average people. A society without intermediate institutions is one where you have an all-powerful state on the one hand, and a largely un-coordinated mass of average people on the other. He thought this was the highway to democratic despotism. (Worth noticing that totalitarian governments focus a lot of their energy on destroying alternative centres of power such as these.)
Genuinely regrettable. The appointed life peers system is worse than the traditional ‘hereditary sortition’ (if you will).
The former creates a class of semi-sinecures of equally questionable quality yet beholden to the political system of the moment. Life peerages become awards for donors and loyalists, a legitimized corruption. The house’s composition becomes an ever-growing competition based on unlimited partisan appointment. The house becomes less thoughtful, more unwieldy, more pointless, more expensive. It will inevitably be abolished on this path.
In contrast aristocrats are at least less likely to owe anything to a special interest, and more likely to hold firm to unpopular but perhaps higher ideals: they owe their position to no other power center, neither voters nor parties. They are also inherently invested in the nation’s long term success. It’s hardly democratic but at least it’s not a wasteful partisan circus.
My pitch would be to keep a small number of intra-peerage elected hereditary peers, keep the bishops, add various ex officio academics - but fill the majority of seats by true sortition. Every British subject is liable to be drafted, and paid, into a year or two of part-time lordship. (Though I’d grant the whole house a right to easily expel such members, should they fail to meet basic expectations.)
I wonder if you might find the book “Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case” by Tongdong Bai to be interesting. It delves into exactly these issues: how to ensure that long-term interests, or the interests of future generations, are also taken into account, and not just the interests of the current electorate.
A lifelong hereditary appointment is an affront to democracy imo. It is regrettable we have a monarchy, but their power is very limited. The Lords however have a regular say in the production of laws. A second house is good. But hereditary appointment is only one degree removed from some divine right.
But I entirely agree about political appointments. You only have to look at the last set from the Tories/Boris to see that the system has been abused.
Did you ever actually read the candidate statements written for the hereditary by-elections whenever a new spot opened up in the Lords?
Seriously, they're worth a read. A collection of posh nobodies all with a 'long career in business/finance' but rarely any particular concrete achievements to talk about. My favourite is Earl Dudley, who stands at every single opportunity seemingly only in a desperate attempt to promote his semi-pornographic youtube channel.
Sortition sounds great in theory, but I don't think it's well-suited to a permanent chamber. Use it for citizens juries, or appoint a time-limited jury to scrutinise a single reading of each bill, similar to the work of a select ctte today.
It's worth considering that the life peers system is similar in many ways to the Roman Senate, which worked fine.
Senators got that way by popular election rather than by appointment, which is a significant difference.
Appointed life peers are even more similar, basically identical, to appointed officers in an imperial court. Courts operate on appointments as opposed to heredity when the throne is powerful.
It looks to me like only the king can create peers. If a British king was interested in reclaiming some power, that would be a promising place to start.
What about just no house of lords?
Also superior.
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.
Jury trials are a colossal and disproportionate waste of time. Jury trials have it place, but most of the time is spent on jury selection, theatrics, and deliberation--all this cost dearly, both in terms of time and money.
Thanks to its high cost and unpredictability, laughable inventions like "plea bargains" exist, only to selectively prey on the vulnerable.
It's not perfect (nor are jury trials), but when it comes to truth discovery and arriving at a proportionate sentence, as long as all parties are fairly represented, one without jury trials should be just as effective.
UK trials don't spend lots of time on jury selection. And there's rarely days of deliberation.
Not everything is done in US style.
> 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
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.
RIP, Magna Carta.
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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!
I feel it is important to point out that the UK doesn't have freedom of speech, has never had freedom of speech and at this point doesn't look like it ever will. The idea of freedom of speech actually comes from the Netherlands and was first codified in the US. The UK never adopted it.
The person floating this idea (of removing jury trials) would gain the power to imprison people simply for criticizing the government (and anything he didn't like really). But sure, plea bargaining isn't a perfect idea so whatever the British government does is fine.
PS A few more sacred cows while I'm at it (just for fun): - The stereotypical British accent was formed after the US Revolution, before that Brits sounded like Americans (and visa versa) - Richard the Lionheart didn't speak English but instead spoke French - Churchill was lousy at military strategy and opposed the Normandy landings
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.
Also, I feel like there is something important you don't understand about the US system. A grand jury isn't a jury trial. A grand jury just allows a jury trial to happen (for a defendant to be charged at all). The defense isn't part of a grand jury. That's why the quote is what it is. It isn't talking about jury trials, just that a prosecutor can charge someone with a crime (the outcome them winning at a grand jury) pretty easily. Hope this helps.
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.
So you are telling me that the people who make money from criminal trials don't like the part of the system that would make a trial not necessary. Weird huh...its almost like they have a significant monetary reason to get rid of plea bargins.
Prosecutors are also members of the Bar and they don't make extra.
Is it so hard to understand that people don't like to work for a system where people are treated inhumanely and can't get justice?
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.
This is more an argument against political appointees than it is an argument for hereditary peers. I agree that the system has been abused. It's need reforming
> 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.
If you don't see any difference between people who won US presidential elections and those appointed for political favoritism, then I don't know what to tell you. Also, if you look at the current state of the UK vs US and don't see any difference then you need to get out more.
Well. Looks like you don’t know what to tell me, hopefully someone who does comes along.
It's because people find comfort in what they know, nothing more complicated than that.
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
Venice's system also involved random selection, though in a very convoluted way.
There were multiple repeated iterations where they selected a random group of eligible people and then that group voted to select a group who would then have a random selection taken who would then elect another group and so on.
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.
Also Renaissance era Florence did something similar. Also, fun fact, juries in Athens had 500 members to make it too expensive to bribe them.
AKA sortition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
“Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it.”
― Plato
Some people selected randomly might also be underqualified.
Some people who actively seek positions of power are terribly unqualified or have other discommending properties, as well. This does not seem too great an impediment to their success.
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.
371 x 250 days is about $100k...in London...that's pretty middle class if you ask me. Just look at how Congress makes out in comparison. They legalized insider trading for themselves and only themselves. What you describe is quaint by comparison.
If you are in a position to be appointed to the House of Lords, it is reasonable to assume that you were not hand-to-mouth before that happened. At worst, you had a good job in one of the classes that gets you access to British Costco. At best, you have an estate and staff.
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.
> 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.
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.
The usual elitist slop.
Every single citizen has a skin in the game of their country. They live there.
Your fortunes are not inextricably tied to your country any more than mine are. I've lived in four countries; am now a citizen of two. I have no passive incomes or sociolegal status which is tied to an estate or a title in a country that must continue to prosper or that status and wealth will diminish. If I see shit going sour, I'll sell my farm in Ireland for twice what I paid for it, move somewhere else, and still be a commoner.
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.
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.
You don't need to outlaw parties, just remove any privileges and powers they have.
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.
Deadlock would be fine if the other two branches weren't running amuck.
Not a problem in the UK system, although the PM has a lot of power he is very much removable if the party doesn't support it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't members of the current PM's party publicly saying he needs to step down right now?
Yes. They can say what they like, but until they can find 167 votes from Labour MPs to remove him, he stays. https://members.parliament.uk/parties/Commons
This is where the intra-party coalitions become important. Every party of significant size has them. Labour is effectively a coalition between a rightwing faction (New Labour/Blue Labour) and everyone else who is more leftwing. The internal and external debate is the question: should they focus "right" (immigrant and queerbashing, welfare cuts) to appease the right wing of the party and try to pick up Reform/Conservative voters, or focus "left" on their base and people who are switching to Green?
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.
Aren't you supporting parent's point? The senate is elected these days after all ...
The Senate gives a rather disproportionate democracy in which the votes of a small number in small states take on disproportionate significance compared to the votes of a large number in populous states.
That still does nothing to refute the parent's complaint about democracy. Lopsided representation is still representation (as opposed to a council of nobles or military generals or whoever).
Also the thing you're objecting to is literally the entire point of the senate from day one. It was intended to give less populous states an equal voice in contrast to the house of representatives. Unfortunately history happened and the house of representatives hasn't been proportional for a long time. But if you're going to complain about something it should probably be the latter rather than the former.
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??
“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!
“It should never be a gallery of old boys"
How else would you describe all the life peers who's sole qualification was to be mate with the prime minister at the time?
Kennedy, Bush, Clinton, Newsom related to Pelosi, etc... This guy might be onto something!
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.
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.
Royalty are zoo animals kept by countries for tourism purposes.
>like an animal in a zoo, all for show with no actual power
I used to think that but it's not true. The military swear allegiance to the crown, as in Royal Navy, which makes it hard for a dictator to take over. You may think that's academic but other European countries ditched the monarchy and got Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco etc.
The best punishment for thinking they're that important
Next, the monarchy?[1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/30/charle...
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?
> That's a separate argument.
No, you can do things that benefit you electorally, but are also just the right thing to do. Changing the voting system from FPTP would obviously benefit parties other than the major ones, but that doesn't mean it'd be wrong for those parties to do it if they got into power. So the question is if it's good policy, and so I argue it is, if someone can be living by themselves, working in the army or as a full-time apprentice, married, and having a child, they should be able to vote.
> 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.
Yes, it's absolutely bad that the government isn't making sure these things are legal before doing them, just as with the Palestine Action proscription. It's also hardly a sign of it being gerrymandering, why would they bother when it's going to give them basically zero advantage, given it would only achieve getting a council that will have no time to actually do anything? The obvious conclusion is they thought it was a waste of money and effort to hold them, but if you have to fight a legal battle over it, it won't actually save any money or effort as that has a large cost, even if it is legal.
> Can you name a single Conservative hereditary peer that will be given a lifetime peerage in Starmer's reform plan?
BBC reporting as of two days ago: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxg76rgdp7o
> The BBC understands ministers have offered the Conservatives the chance to retain 15 hereditary members of the House of Lords as life peers.
So it's not specific names as it hasn't been finalised, but 15 of them. I accept I misremembered when I said "all", but the point stands: not gerrymandering.
> No, you can do things that benefit you electorally, but are also just the right thing to do. Changing the voting system from FPTP would obviously benefit parties other than the major ones, but that doesn't mean it'd be wrong for those parties to do it if they got into power
You're reinforcing my point.
Minor parties (who might collectively be popular with the electorate) will never be able to change the voting methodology to their advantage because FPTP keeps the incumbents in place, and only the incumbents have the power to choose the voting system. So democracy suffers and the incumbents benefit.
Similarly, in this case, allowing children to vote helps the incumbents stay in place despite their party, and their leader being deeply unpopular with the electorate overall. So democracy suffers and the incumbents benefit.
This "logic" doesn't track at all. Enfranchising women may have benefited the party, does that mean we shouldn't have given women the vote and doing so hurt democracy? Of course not.
Just because something benefits a singular party doesn't make it antidemocratic. Expanding the franchise is more democratic, not less. A party being rewarded electorally for doing something good is the system working, not failing.
There are reasonable arguments to be made (in my opinion) that 16 is too young but you aren't making that argument, the one you are making is completely invalid.
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
You do know that actual political scientists don't use left vs right to describe parties. They use terms like libertarian, socialist, etc. They do that because left vs right change from place to place and time to time. From the POV of the US, Labour are communists. In France perhaps they are center or center left or even center right. Even the things you call left vs right don't remain consistent. There are policies in the 50s which were considered left but now would be right and visa-versa.
PS You have be to be pretty extreme to think the Labour party isn't "left" enough for you. As in, I'm not sure what else they could do to appease the far left in practice without sever negative consequences for the UK.
> PS You have be to be pretty extreme to think the Labour party isn't "left" enough for you. As in, I'm not sure what else they could do to appease the far left in practice without sever negative consequences for the UK.
Have you looked at actions rather than manifesto? There's very little change in policy actions from the previous non-Labor government, so it doesn't track unless you see the tories as left wing. Which is clearly more extreme.
There are so many errors in this headline:
* Britain has not had a parliament for seven hundred years. The current parliament dates back to 1707 or 1801 depending on your POV. This is the usual conflation of England with Britain.
* If you want to take a more Anglocentric viewpoint then Oliver Cromwell ejected hereditary nobles back in the 18th century. So not the first time.
On a different note, it is worth saying that hereditary peers are often more independent. They are born into the role so hold their own viewpoints. Some of them were and are to the left of recent British governments, even though that may be hard to believe. The current Labour government wishes to replace them with appointees so that the entire House of Lords will become another party political machine.
> There are so many errors in this headline:
> If you want to take a more Anglocentric viewpoint then Oliver Cromwell ejected hereditary nobles back in the 18th century. So not the first time.
Which was a neat trick considering he died in 1658... :P
Correct and my typo.
But the point stands. The House of Lords has not been running for as long as the article claims. A substantial break during the Commonwealth.
That something is ancient and traditional doesn't mean it's good.
Rotten boroughs also existed for hundreds of years. Parliament got rid of them in 1832, and good fucking riddance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs
> For centuries, parliamentary representation and the right to vote in elections to the House of Commons remained largely unchanged from medieval times, even as population and economic activity shifted, contributing to an unequal distribution of seats by the early 19th century. In some constituencies the electorate was so small that seats could be controlled through patronage, bribery, or coercion, and many seats were treated almost as "property" under longstanding family influence. Early 19th-century reformers used the term rotten borough for depopulated constituencies that retained representation, and pocket borough for constituencies effectively "in the pocket" of a patron who could dominate the outcome.
> 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.
Gridlock can be good if you get a daft leader. Those things do happen.
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.
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.
Out with the old, in with the Goverment appointed Stooges. That will fix it!
Notice there is no mechanism for the citezens to vote on who goes in. This won't go well.
The author of the article is named Lawless. Is that an inverted nominative determinism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
Anyone else think Britain is going to eject the Royal Family within 100 years?
“…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.
They still wear crowns?
> Government minister Nick Thomas-Symonds said the change put an end to “an archaic and undemocratic principle.”
> “Our parliament should always be a place where talents are recognized and merit counts,” he said. “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.”
Really? About time they got rid of the monarchy then also.
But they still haven't kicked out the Church of England bishops, including the rapist bishop of Lincoln.
OK but can you wield supreme executive power if a watery tart throws a sword at you?
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.
The logic is to divide power into as many pieces as possible to prevent tyranny by structure. Unless you admire totalitarianism and unitary executive theory.
The Founders were wrong about this one. We have an overly powerful executive because they split up the legislative power too much and it doesn’t act as an effective counterweight.
Look around the world and find the countries where the legislature rather than the executive is the most dangerous branch as Hamilton suggested. It’s a very short list.
Partially true. None of the mythologically-lionized founders were perfectly omnipotent and couldn't hope to have predicted changes in society, technology, economic development, or pervasive corruption. They also couldn't envision ignorant, craven, leaders of poor character being given immense power and ignoring traditions. It's bikeshedding whether a monocameral or bicameral legislature parts, executive, or judiciary is more important, because currently, all 3 are totally compromised in similar manners that cannot adequately be reformed from within in a reasonable timeframe. The problem is a small cabal of rich people and their enablers have corrupted it to the point where no lasting fairness or integrity can be restored and vigilantly assured. The token "clean money" elected officials are a drop in the bucket when 90% of their colleagues and their large benefactors are legalized and pardoned criminals whom deserve to be imprisoned.
To make room for something worse no doubt.
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.
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It’s not just about the seat they must lose their “lord” title
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?
From hereditary buffoons to patronage pissoir and party hack retirement home, not much better off methinks.
The hereditary buffoons were more independent-minded, and sometimes progressive, than the appointees.
Not a fan of the old system but this is not an improvement.
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.
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.
>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
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.
A lot of the arrests are for bad stuff - harassment, advocating arson etc. see https://www.reddit.com/r/IsItBullshit/comments/1q9pbh1/isitb...
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.
Since it is blue, that tells me everything I need to know about you two.
It's white here right now :shrug:
So I guess that means you're American?
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.
Appointees are even worse. We already have MPs who are supposed to be elected but enact the same UN NGO and WEF programmes as other countries without democratic assent.
They really aren't.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather some real democratic reform of the Lords, but there's no chance of that any time soon. In the mean time getting rid of as many people as possible who have no democratic legitimacy whatsoever is a good thing. And at least appointees were in general appointed by someone who had the democratic mandate. People who were born into it are so far from accountable it's not funny.
When the brexit referendum was going on, I lose count of the number of times I was told that having appointees in the EU Commission didn't undermine the democratic nature of the union...
>> We already have MPs who are supposed to be elected but enact the same UN NGO and WEF programmes as other countries without democratic assent.
MPs ... who are elected? Seems like they do have democracy behind them, no?
I am not a fan of the Lords and would have it abolished completely, and replaced with an elected second chamber.
That said appointed peers have no more legitimacy than hereditary ones and that is what we're getting. It allows politicians to stuff the chamber with their own. We're already run by committees and QUANGOs, let alone the United Nations NGOs, none of which have any democratic oversight.
"MPs ... who are elected? Seems like they do have democracy behind them, no?"
There is the whole issue of whether the First Past the Post system does the job or not, and proper representation of minor parties in the press. In fact the British state even punishes minor parties with electoral deposits if they do not get a big enough vote.
But what does it matter if they just enact the same World Economic Forum/COP/WHO etc policies? The UK is gradually getting the same policies as elsewhere on everything from smoking to digital ID and then pretendinf we voted on it.
There is barely a cigarette paper between the current Labour government and the previous Tory government. They are so close on so many issues it's laughable. They just take turns to get into power.