This is why I still support the existence of the house of lords. They are a bunch of pricks but they often prevent the government doing stupid shit.
The concept of house of lords has never been a problen for me, the issue is the undemocratic makeup of its members.
It being undemocratic is actually pretty important for the system to work.
Because only the house of commons is elected they have legitimacy and the house of lords knows that while they can resist some dumb crap, they do ultimately have to accept the decisions made there.
If you have two elected houses you end up like the US with the senate blocking everything the house of representative does.
A more representative second house with less rich people and politicial cronies would be nice though.
I can sort of accept old mps going there but there is no way you could make me view hereditary peers or lords spiritual as even slightly acceptable. I would like to see a more merit based second house.
exactly, democracy needs checking not just because of cronyism, but the fucking morons that keep getting elected by an ever diminishing share of the population. 1997 was the last time turnout was over 70%. In most UK general elections since then, the winner has not beaten abstentions. My ‘protest’ non-vote should count.
I’d like MP voting power should be scaled down somehow by actual vote share (including abstention), for many votes - maybe not some essential ones - but with the same absolute threshold to pass a vote. You’d probably have to do that at party level to avoid under-representing some constituencies. Hardly anyone trusts these fucks so their power to fuck things up should to be limited to when even more of them agree cross-party.
As for other layers, I’d quite like some sort of randomly changing jury based tier to rule on some things with cases and evidence presented like in a court. Probably with some sort anonymity layer - where some third party only knows the identities of the jurors.
Lords should maybe be “qualified expert” level tier - but it’ll always get cronyist to some extent. That said if they’re in as a supposed expert accountant, and they don’t pay tax - they can fuck off. So the need for “expert” credentials could provide a basis for challenge. Certainly my random jury level tier could have the power to kick out lords if their credentials were challenged.
Maybe they vet candidates. Screen out the crap and the SPads and we get a reasonable list. Maybe require some consensus on appointments.
Spads.
A appropriately ugly term. It conjures images of them being cut into long chunks and deep fried in oil. Either that or some archaic, non-PC term for a person with some mental deficiencies
Spads. An amalgamation of special advisers used in the term of politics and appointments to the House of Lords. The context is everything here. A quick search would have shown you this. If your brain conjures up negative connotations and non-PC termd, that is on you.
It’s OK to say you do not know.
Oh, I know full well what a fucking spad is.
I just fucking hate them collectively, individually and linguistically.
Excellent. I first read “the Lord” and thought, cool God’s getting involved for once
Better be the old testament God, some major smiting needs to happen.
Well there are still a few Lords Spiritual in there and it looks like they voted against the government, so sort of!
Okay so the Lords are getting it, but what about the Ladies, amirite?
