UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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From an outsider, I have to ask - is the house of Lords really all that necessary? Wouldn't it be a good option just to remove it?
The argument in favour of the lords is it allows scrutiny on laws without party politics - if something is stupid but popular their job is to say no, when the commons would want to push it through to increase their reëlection chances. Replacing them with an elected chamber is just as bad as completely removing them in that case.
There’s also bishops from the Church of England in there having a say in what happens like it’s still the Middle Ages.
The only other country where senior religious figures have that kind of say is Iran.
Yeah, I agree that's not great but it's still not a reason to risk rushing in to making it worse
Personally I think the fact it's unelected is great, but the way people get into it isn't so great, so would rather have reform but keeping it unelected or at most indirectly elected, with voting rights going to MBE holders (or a pool of MBE holders elected by the commons in some format which accounts for party makeup of the commons) or all Livery Company/Professional Association leaders or some other group which should know their stuff better than both the people we currently have in the lords or career politicians
Well, depending on how they're elected - these sorts of systems can be democratic and effective, but they have to be designed well
Doing something like the staggered terms used in the US senate is a pretty good way of reducing that sort of effect
The Australian system seems to work pretty well if the electorate is smart enough to not give a major party a sweeping majority which seems to be the case since the Whitlam dismissal,so regardless of who is in power in the lower house they have to negotiate with minor parties to get legislation through the senate unless both the major parties agree on something.
The point is there nearly always has to be some discussion and negotiations.
The senate elections are staggered as well with only half up for reelection at every lower house election.
In Sweden, all proposed laws basically go through an investigation by a group of civil servants, which I believe could be said to fulfil the same objective.
According to Ian Dunt's How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn't, the HoL is the only place where high quality scrutiny of legislation actually takes place. It shouldn't be that way, in theory that should be something MPs do. But MPs aren't taught to scrutinise legislation, often are not lawyers, and have what is basically a full time job on top of that running constituencies and lobbying on behalf of their constituents. So actually the HoL is currently very necessary.