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.
It’s monarchy-lite.
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.
It’s monarchy-lite.
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.
Are you talking about a specific example or a hypothetical?
I’m referring to the House of Lords. They are affiliated with political parties.
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.
https://www.democraticaudit.com/2018/10/02/audit2018-how-und...
>>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.
Ironically the the post appears stuck in 2021
How is a hereditary representative of anything other than a narrow gene pool?
You can’t think of anything better?
Why have anyone elected at all?
> Some idea of forcing it to be composed based on arbitrary and irrelevant personal characteristics
I can't think of a more arbitrary or irrelevant personal characteristic than being born to a family that inherits a political post.
> 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
Let's go even further back. Why not to when we were wearing skins and foraging for food. Or even further, when we were plain slime.
And if skin color and political decisions of people 1000 years ago controlled us today, this might be a reasonable point.
But they don't so it's not.
> so have a lower chance of being correlated with whatever movement of the moment
Correct, they instead have a 100% chance of being correlated with what is good for the aristocracy.
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.
Yeah it was 100% hereditary peers plus some bishops before the 1999 reform act:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords_Act_1999
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.
The hereditary peers are now a much smaller bunch, apparently there are 92, elected from the larger number of 800ish who are theoretically eligible.
Before 1993 all of them could hold seats.
The majority of the house these days is made up of life-appointed peers, who are nominated to the house by the commons. There are also 24 bishops.
There are moves afoot to remove the last hereditary peers, though I’m not sure of the current status of that bill.
If Labour get re-elected in a few years, they have made muttering about further second-house reform, but no plans or commitments at present
I was speaking purely of the 92 hereditary peers.