Having an apolitical (or unelected) and slow changing second chamber is a useful counterbalance to elected officials running amok. There’s no “great” answer to this that I’m aware of but it has been a viable compromise.
Apolitical? Hardly. They are literally politicians, just unelected. It’s all the worst aspects of elected officials with added nepotism and no ability to remove them.
They are not political appointees, so have a lower chance of being correlated with whatever movement of the moment and so serve as checks and balances. The fact that they can’t be replaced is a feature.
>>They are stuck in the past. 6% aren’t white. 26% are female.
If you excuse me, I just don't understand the implication here - if they were exactly representative of British racial demographics and exactly 50/50 men and women, they would not be stuck in the past?
I’m not intending to imply anything, I’m trying to state it.
Having political control of the country being hereditary, male and white is something that does not represent the make up of Britain. It represents the way Britain was run a long time ago and the current political infrastructure is not a strength.
If political control was actually democratic and representative of the country, I don’t think the situation would be worse.
It’s a non sequitur and not with engaging with. The purpose of a second chamber is temporal representation, as in the makeup is “stuck in the past” (more of a moving average) and not subject to the whims of the day. Some idea of forcing it to be composed based on arbitrary and irrelevant personal characteristics would accomplish nothing for the state and would be as stupid and in democratic as trying to do something like that for elected officials.
> In terms of them not being swayed by ‘movements of the moment’, you are quite right. They are stuck in the past. 6% aren’t white. 26% are female
You think this is an argument against the lords but for the people on the other side they think you are supporting them with these points.
Britain was white country for the last 12,000 years and had primogeniture for the last 1,000+. The UK today is a proverbial pale blue dot on the timeline
Technically they are mostly affiliated with one or other political party. It's even a convention for the internal elections that select which peers sit in the Lords, to only have candidates from the same party as the one being replaced, to maintain the ratio set by New Labour in the nineties.
Was that always the case? I took from TFA that some number are purely hereditary and that all of them used to be before a recent reform.
Or was it that one has to be a hereditary peer in order to be a government appointee?
Either way, the greater the barrier to the house of sober second thought being stacked by whoever is currently in power, the better. I’d also favor people being randomly appointed for life.
Labour had campaigned for years to abolish the Lords but when they got the chance Tony Blair decided on a watered down reform instead. Now the bloody place is just packed with political stooges and party donors. Over 800 of them. It's corrupt as hell.
Another compromise in the same vein was (until 1913) the U.S. Senate, elected by the state legislature rather than direct election and for terms 2.5x as long as that of a House rep
To me (a non-American), that actually makes a kind of sense. Have people in the federal Congress whose job is to speak for their respective state governments. Instead of duplicating the House of Representatives with different electoral boundaries.
Quite like the European Council. Well if it was the state governors flying in to DC once a month, so maybe not exactly like it.
The USA's Fedederal vetocracy gauntlet is composed of Senate, POTUS, and SCOTUS.
I'm very curious about comparisions between governing systems. But am noob, so haven't gotten very far.
I too value -- without evidence pro or con -- some balance between fast, slow, and middling.
Senate was designed to counter balance the House. I'm very skeptical of its benefit; both in principle and in practice.
Our State's patchwork of arrangements is probably informative, in the small. Somehow rank States by legislative output, (their) Supreme Court's actions, lag time in pivoting to adopt norms (marriage equality), or some such.
There's a Harvard researcher (on mobile, can find cites later if needed) who concluded that most all national (democratic) govts eventually adopted norms. On the time span of decades and generations. Regardless of their system. Strongly suggesting that public pressure and need to maintain legitimacy do matter.
I've since wondered if we're just too impatient. I certainly am. Or if that thesis is even true. For example, the USA's Jim Crow era endured for 100+ years. And still remains contested.
> Having an apolitical (or unelected) and slow changing second chamber is a useful counterbalance to elected officials running amok.
Then just have people chosen at random from birth to become lords. That makes as much sense, unless what you're interested in is a mechanism that helps powerful families to remain powerful
