Hacker News Reader

Comment by phatfish | Hacker News Reader

The House of Lords is becoming a joke (it's just a place an exiting Prime Minister sends their mates now), but hereditary peers were abolished in 1999. Also, the HOL often pushes back on the more extreme legislation the MPs try to get through the House of Commons.

But i agree the unelected nature of it is undemocratic. It should be replaced with a second elected house that can perform the same role of putting a check on the HOC.

Full HOL reform would be a good way to start the move towards a proportional representation electoral system in the UK. Make the reformed second chamber a PR elected house and give them a slightly longer/fixed period between elections to shield them from the chaos of a general election and party politics.

View on HN

>Full HOL reform would be a good way to start the move towards a proportional representation electoral system in the UK. Make the reformed second chamber a PR elected house and give them a slightly longer/fixed period between elections to shield them from the chaos of a general election and party politics.

This is the best suggestion I've seen on HoL reform, ever. I mean, it'll never happen, but that really is a great idea, and would mean that the chamber would be clearly different from the Commons, which I've not seen another proposal making sense on this area.

> hereditary peers were abolished in 1999.

Mostly abolished.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By-elections_to_the_House_of_L...

Lots of sketchy heredity stuff possible through the King/Queen: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative_in_the_Unit...

> Full HOL reform would be a good way to start the move towards a proportional representation electoral system in the UK.

Ah, another one of those “if I were a dictator” comments…

UK citizens have democratically decided they don’t want proportional representation. But I guess you don’t care

That comes off as a childish understanding of what votes in a representational democracy actually mean.

> UK citizens have democratically decided they don’t want proportional representation.

When was that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...

That wasn't about proportional representation: that was about instant run-off: it's a vote counting algorithm, not an algorithm for assigning seats. For that referendum, they picked the worst simple voting system that was better than first-past-the-post, so I'm not terribly surprised it didn't win. https://ncase.me/ballot/ discusses these voting systems in more detail.

AV != PR

In fact had the AV referendum vote gone the other way it is likely that the composition of our Parliament after the following general election would have been less proportional to the overall share of the national vote won by each party.

AV has certain desirable characteristics if you want to elect a single representative fairly. It makes little sense as a way to elect a group of representatives fairly. It sure is a great strawman if you're trying to kill off interest in real and appropriate electoral reform and fixing the systemic democratic deficits clearly evident in the current system we use to elect our MPs though.

It's quite odd to me how we "hand wave" individual rights using the term "democratic" as if there is something intrinsic and unquestionable about it. LIke, sure 60% voted "democratically" for a decision to go one way. But what about the other 40%?

No they haven't. They decided they don't want ranked choice voting (known in the UK as the 'alternative vote'). Proportional representation is a different system, which the minority Liberal Democrat party and others had long argued for and quite a lot of people regarded the substitution as a form of bait-and-switch. Additionally some had reservations about the scheduling of the referendum to overlap with local elections in parts of the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com