What? Are the membership roles and the text of this law confidential?

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 hereditary nobles.

> Labour remains committed to eventually replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is “more representative of the U.K.” If past experience is anything to go by, change will come slowly.

Why does the House of Lords need to be replaced at all? Most countries are gridlocked enough with one chamber of parliament.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2x01yne13o

  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!

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 regularly to converse and debate in a prestigious and historical chamber. Allow them only the power to veto or delay legislation.

Gilbert and Sullivan were satirising but I think their point stands. It is possible to do nothing and to do it very well. While they're busy doing nothing they're not interfering or messing everything else up, even though they probably could outside the chamber.

The fact that heriditary peers are being ejected means nothing beyond the fact that these nobles have lost their inherent power.

> 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...

Nobody tell these extreme optimists about America. Replace 'titles' with 'generational wealth' and that's precisely what not just our upper house, but most of our government, is. And they're all elected!

However, given the Labour party just gave children the vote, cancelled local elections in conservative-leaning areas, and now they're removing the (traditionally conservative-leaning) hereditary peers, it's starting to feel a lot like the Left are gerrymandering our democracy.

When I was a kid I was appaled that a country in this age can have a king/queen. Then I understood that they are basically like an animal in a zoo, all for show with no actual power.

It's a dreadful fate to be born as a monarch.

Democracy had pretty good PR in the 20th century, but having institutional counterweights is never a bad idea.

For more than a century the majority of those who sit in the House of Lords have been "Life Peers", appointed by a politician and without any heriditary aspect. They include such towers of statepersonship as : Evgeny Lebedev (Russian businessman, son of a KGB officer); Alexander Lebedev (another Russian businessman, he's actually been in the KGB); Charlotte Owen (junior aide to Boris Johnson for three years) ... the list goes on.

This isn't new (although in recent time the dodginess has risen to new highs) and many of those appointed to Life Peerages meet the goal of having significant life experience they can use to illuminate aspects of legislation that might otherwise be missed. Equally heriditary peers are not all some Wodehousian stereotype of bumbling idiots.

Rotten boroughs also existed for hundreds of years. Parliament got rid of them in 1832, and good fucking riddance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs

> For centuries, parliamentary representation and the right to vote in elections to the House of Commons remained largely unchanged from medieval times, even as population and economic activity shifted, contributing to an unequal distribution of seats by the early 19th century. In some constituencies the electorate was so small that seats could be controlled through patronage, bribery, or coercion, and many seats were treated almost as "property" under longstanding family influence. Early 19th-century reformers used the term rotten borough for depopulated constituencies that retained representation, and pocket borough for constituencies effectively "in the pocket" of a patron who could dominate the outcome.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/30/charle...

The former creates a class of semi-sinecures of equally questionable quality yet beholden to the political system of the moment. Life peerages become awards for donors and loyalists, a legitimized corruption. The house’s composition becomes an ever-growing competition based on unlimited partisan appointment. The house becomes less thoughtful, more unwieldy, more pointless, more expensive. It will inevitably be abolished on this path.

In contrast aristocrats are at least less likely to owe anything to a special interest, and more likely to hold firm to unpopular but perhaps higher ideals: they owe their position to no other power center, neither voters nor parties. They are also inherently invested in the nation’s long term success. It’s hardly democratic but at least it’s not a wasteful partisan circus.

My pitch would be to keep a small number of intra-peerage elected hereditary peers, keep the bishops, add various ex officio academics - but fill the majority of seats by true sortition. Every British subject is liable to be drafted, and paid, into a year or two of part-time lordship. (Though I’d grant the whole house a right to easily expel such members, should they fail to meet basic expectations.)

* Britain has not had a parliament for seven hundred years. The current parliament dates back to 1707 or 1801 depending on your POV. This is the usual conflation of England with Britain.

* If you want to take a more Anglocentric viewpoint then Oliver Cromwell ejected hereditary nobles back in the 18th century. So not the first time.

On a different note, it is worth saying that hereditary peers are often more independent. They are born into the role so hold their own viewpoints. Some of them were and are to the left of recent British governments, even though that may be hard to believe. The current Labour government wishes to replace them with appointees so that the entire House of Lords will become another party political machine.

Notice there is no mechanism for the citezens to vote on who goes in. This won't go well.

As the article points out, the life peers are arguably worse. People like Mandelson.

https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3755/publications

It's rather hard to read because the amendments are written as a diff, but it seems to imply the undisclosed number is 87 peers. I guess they need to decide amongst themselves who the lucky 87 are?

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/59-01/0295... Bill 295 2024-25 (Lords Amendments)

    “1. (2) (2) No more than 87 people at any one time shall be excepted from section 1.”

Edit: Wow, is this ever hard to pin down. I think section 1 of the lord's amendments were dropped here: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3755/stages/20179/motionsa...

which I guess means that the text remains the same as the original text in HL-49 (https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/56858/documents/533...):

    # Exclusion of remaining hereditary peers
    Omit section 2 of the House of Lords Act 1999 (exception to exclusion of hereditary peers from membership of House of Lords).

On the other hand it avoids the illusion that power resides in a text and that you can legal-magic your way past a power structure.

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 parties from holding the balance, its just been a massive rubber stamp. I loved seeing randos from minor parties getting to grill public servants on whatever their constituents were complaining about, particularly firearm legislation.

Wow, this is literally the plot of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney video games. I'm sure it will go great with no downsides.

Irish democracy in contrast uses STV voting and a written constitution and is modeled between the best of what the UK, the US and France had to offer when it was drafted and is a very representative democracy with many political parties compared to the duopolies in the US and the UK. It's also why Ireland is largely immune to hard shifts to the left or right relative to the UK and US.

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.

It’s also very brittle and one charismatic populist away from unraveling like the American government. Too much depends on gentlemen agreements and people trusting other people to do the right thing. It works in a stable environment, but shatters the moment someone with no shame and no scruples shows up.

The "point" of hereditary peerage is, from the perspective of the nobility, to preserve privileges with only self-interested regard for the welfare of the public—which very obviously resolves into tyrannical despotism at the earliest opportunity!

Utterly unconscionable to carry water for the literally medieval political economy that brought us, eg the calamitous 14th century.

Countless—countless—examples of the hideous cruelties of hereditary nobles abound since the institution's inception. You'd have to be a blind pig to ignore the myriad failure states. My God, man, do you want your children to be slaves??

Much, but not all secondary legislation is also published. A typical means by which Secondary Legislation is brought into existence is that a Law says there shall be some list or reference established by some particular minister, and that document is Secondary Legislation. For example maybe a Law concerning Clown Licensing says there shall be a list of Clown License Offices, and the Secretary of State for Hilarity shall write this list, that list isn't voted on by Parliament, the list gets written by some bureaucrats working for the current Secretary of State for Hilarity. This "undisclosed" list needn't be in secondary legislation either.

They didn't run pointless elections by request of the very councils that were due for them, because those areas are being redrawn and would have to have fresh elections almost immediately, making the results meaningless.

They also gave all the conservative hereditary peers lifetime peerages so they will keep their seats.

Your framing of all three of these is obviously intended to mislead.

Senators play a similar role. Their aim is heavily weighted toward oversight and advisory. Gov’t in general is weighted in that direction, because governments govern which is mainly about being a kind of referee, maintaining the social order, and aiding human beings in attaining their end as human beings through legislation.

Without this function, we have activity with little reflection spurred by politicians pandering to the mob.

If interest groups do not feel represented by the system, they will destroy it.

FWIW the majority of all criminal cases in the UK are dealt with by either a single judge, or three judges[1]. This is hardly surprising as assembling a jury is vastly time consuming and for minor criminal matters is hard to justify.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summary_offence#United_Kingdom

This is a poor justification for what still amounts to an unelected ruling class.

The nobles were the land owners, the business owners, the OG entrepreneurs, they were educated, and their children would grow up to be the same.

Historically the system made sense. But the last 150 years or so have basically taken their power away.

A couple of years ago an estate - that included a 9 bedroom country house, plus an entire village with a population of 100 people, and a church - was sold by noblety near where I grew up. The price was in the low tens of millions, not that much.