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Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years

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Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years

#61

Post by stvltvs »

dylan604 wrote: post #29
stvltvs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years

#62

Post by jongjong »

pseudalopex wrote: post #55
jongjong wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years

#63

Post by zrn900 »

mindwok wrote: post #20

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.

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.

Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years

#64

Post by scrlk »

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...

Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years

#65

Post by fmajid »

pydry wrote: post #19
iberator wrote: post #7

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:)

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 instit…

It happened in Australia in 1975, and Chuck was directly involved in it.

Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years

#66

Post by fc417fc802 »

pjc50 wrote: post #45
jfengel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years

#67

Post by YawningAngel »

infotainment wrote: post #44
sb057 wrote: post #27

Also in the pipeline: elimination of jury trials https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2x01yne13o

> 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

Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years

#68

Post by alexpotato »

endoblast wrote: post #57

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 regula…

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.

Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years

#69

Post by fc417fc802 »

Chinjut wrote: post #12
theodric wrote: post #11

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…

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.

Aren't you supporting parent's point? The senate is elected these days after all ...

Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years

#70

Post by skissane »

protocolture wrote: post #37
amadeuspagel wrote: post #13

> 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 her…

>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 pa…

> 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”

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