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:)
In Britain? Good luck with that.
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.
Just look at the US right now to see how civil military control can go off the rails too.
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.
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.
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.
We are too gregarious to prevent emergence of political groups. A parliament of cats would probably be more individualistic, but not that of humans.
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"
I'd argue their interest is tied to the welfare of the country for themselves, not the country itself or the general public.
Every single citizen has a skin in the game of their country. They live there.
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.
These, and other systems, helped prevent any one person from monopolizing power.
This is a good video on this: https://youtu.be/pIgMTsQXg3Q
The assembly then passes it's recommendation to the Parliament who are free to ignore it if they don't like it.
> 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.
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??
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.
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.
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”
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.
Nope. I don't think so, not even the length of the term is the same.
> 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]
Boring does not mean no information content. But the part of your comment about comment voting was boring and noise.
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.
It's messy. But I'd much rather that than need to ask "What would Pierre Trudeau think of this situation?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
The point of HN is to discuss, not to tweet about your political enemies.
And yet, they are still not quite there.
There is something to be said for design over stumbling.
Wow, this is literally the plot of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney video games. I'm sure it will go great with no downsides.
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.
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.
But heredity lords, no I don’t get that at all
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!
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 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.
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 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.
> 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...
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.
The nobility is another example of a minority with disproportionate power. It's important that they are reduced to ensure civil liberties.
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.
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!
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
What? Are the membership roles and the text of this law confidential?
pjc50•2h ago
As the article points out, the life peers are arguably worse. People like Mandelson.
graypegg•2h ago
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.KK7NIL•1h ago
That's a feature, not a bug ;).[0]
0: Any episode of "Yes, Minister!"