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Comment by Dobbs | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what the fact that one house is not democratically elected has to do with anything?

The point of an upper house is that it is supposed to be impartial to the whims of the voters. In the USA we originally had an appointed Senate and still to this day have an appointed Judicial system. Should supreme court judges be elected?

I have to say as a quasi-outsider (English raised in the USA) that more often than not I'm extremely impressed by what comes out of the House of Lords. For example their recent statement on the EU's right to be forgotten.

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As an American ("no taxation without representation!") I've always... admired the House of Lords. They are able to say and do things which no elected politician can, and provide a sort of stabalizing feedback to the UK's parlimentarian system. Not unlike the relationship of the American congress with the appointed-judege court system.

I was sad when I found out that the House of Lords is in the process of being reformed, with membership moving from peerage to either elected or elected-appointed positions. I fear that this won't end well for Britain :(

The role of a second parliamentary chamber is hotly debated across the West at the moment.

Countries where both houses are elected and enjoy equivalent powers (like Italy or the US) complain that this arrangement slows down lawmaking, in an age where everything else is actually speeding up.

Countries where the second chamber is not elected, like Britain, experience a certain unease: they wage war oversea "to bring democracy", and then half of their lawmaking is in the hands of a completely undemocratic body with dubious legitimacy.

Countries where the second chamber actually represents different bodies from the electorate (like Germany) seem to have found a pragmatic third way, but then this chamber ends up over-representing certain interests (in Germany, local ruling classes and their nests of semi-private special businesses), which again is not really democratic in nature.

I think we'll have to learn again why balance is required in matters of such importance, and we'll probably have to learn it the hard way. The major supporters of "streamlined" government have always been tyrants and oligarchs, after all.

> Countries where the second chamber is not elected, like Britain, experience a certain unease: they wage war oversea "to bring democracy", and then half of their lawmaking is in the hands of a completely undemocratic body with dubious legitimacy.

Its been quite a long time (more than a century) since the Lords could be said to hold anything like half the legislative power in the UK.

Until 2005, they had ultimate responsibility for the judiciary (although mostly on paper). Also, the review process is half the lawmaking, although the most obscure half. All sorts of shenanigans can be slipped in through reviews, and compromises on sticky points can be "encouraged" by playing the timing card. The fact that the Commons can eventually steamroll the Lords doesn't mean that they always do, especially if majorities are weak.

The fact that the Commons can steamroll the Lords means the two aren't co-equal in power -- if they always did so, it would mean that the Lords had no legislative power, not merely the significantly-less-than-half of the legislative power that they actually have had since the early 20th century.

I think we're saying the same thing here, really; whether "half the lawmaking" is 45% or 50% is a technical point that is basically irrelevant in practice.

My original comment related to very pragmatic situation of acting as "champions of democracy" while still maintaining a very significant role in the lawmaking process for a wholly-undemocratic body. It's a real problem that has not been solved and significantly weakens British arguments in, say, foreign policy and cultural debate.

Who says that democracy has to be 100%? If you want to get technical, we all live in republics anyway, not direct democracies.

I know I am an outlier, but it seems a totally strange and foreign concept to me that one could criticize the UK for being hypocritical in promoting democracy abroad because of the House of Lords.

> If you want to get technical, we all live in republics anyway

No "we" don't (dunno about you but I live in a constitutional monarchy, which is a fairly popular form of government in Europe, and it just ain't a republic in any technical sense).

> it seems a totally strange and foreign concept to me that one could criticize the UK for being hypocritical in promoting democracy abroad because of the House of Lords.

You should visit the Middle-East sometimes, but even just France would be an eye-opener I think.

> My original comment related to very pragmatic situation of acting as "champions of democracy" while still maintaining a very significant role in the lawmaking process for a wholly-undemocratic body.

That seems to demonstrate a problem of ludicrously binary thinking. The UK is far more democratic than a great many countries -- and has been making democratic progress longer than many countries have existed. The existence of the shrinking vestigial powers of the House of Lords isn't even a little bit of a pragmatic problem for the UK as an advocate of democratic progress abroad.

> The UK is far more democratic than a great many countries

... and far less democratic than many others.

> and has been making democratic progress longer than many countries have existed

... or, in other terms, has been slower to produce a soundly-democratic system than many younger countries.

In fact, one of the main puzzles constitutional scholars struggle with, is exactly this: how (and why) did a nation that reached substantial parliamentary rule so early, deliberately refuse to evolve towards more democratic forms of governments for so long? Why did England fight the French Revolution so bitterly, when on paper the French were just completing the job started in Westminster so many decades before? How can aristocratic privilege survive, in this day and age, in the same nation that first theorized it as fundamentally unjust?

I know this can be difficult to understand for people grown under the ultimate myth of Westminster "mother of all democracies", but there are other models out there; and some of these models are ultimately much more coherent, in theory and in practice, than the constitutional hodgepodge we experience in modern Britain.

What is sad about that unease is that it has everything to do with the objecter's mind and nothing to do with the state of the world. "Does it work? Is there any alternative that is better?" <-- That is all we should be asking.

But I'm too cynical a person to ever hope for consequentialism in politics.

> Does it work? [...] <-- That is all we should be asking.

The problem is, how do you define "working"? Who defines it? The Victorian Empire "worked" perfectly well for the ruling classes; less so for Indians and lower classes. That's where the absolutist coherence of "one head, one vote, in all matters" comes in; but in practice we know the idealistic approach doesn't always result in smooth sailing, so we introduce elements of moderation here and there, and then we bang our head against the wall of doubt -- is this counterbalance too anti-democratic? Should we really stop people from shooting themselves in the foot, or is there a deeper horizon where such an outcome could be desirable? Etc etc.

That's the open-ended question of constitutional studies.

Complainers about the Senate are usually sour grapes.

Familiarize yourself with the drivel that passes the House. The Senate has allowed horrible things like lynching to persist for decades, but it stops truly dumb knee jerk measures from being placed into law.

The Lords do something which no elected politician can do: look further ahead than the next election. Regardless of the exact mechanism, a functioning country NEEDS this capability.

Unfortunately it's not clear they will be around for all that much longer. The Lib Dems had a 'reform' bill that would have made the House of Lords largely elected. It failed only because the relationship with the Conservatives fell to pieces at key time. A lot of people think that an unelected House is anathema still.

It's a shame that everyone's so insistent on democracy without having any creativity about it. Athens had the right idea -- create a set of objective standards for people qualified to serve in the upper house, then draw lots and whoever loses gets the job.

Not democratically elected = easier to corrupt. The previous leader of the Lords OWNES his own lobbying company! Cameron suggests him as Britain's EU commissioner, and it was only then that the EU parliament had to force him to sell the stakes in it for him to be an acceptable candidate. This guy was running the house of Lords for years!!! In which democracy is that acceptable??? How is being in political power and a lobbyist for industry at the same time NOT a conflict of interest??

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