I don’t agree with abolishing the House of Lords. In fact, I think the ‘reforms’ of the late 1990s were a terrible mistake.
The House of Lords, when it still contained a significant number of hereditary peers meant there were people making decisions on laws whose families had been intimately involved with Britain for centuries, and who expected their families to be intimately involved with Britain for centuries to come. It meant that any legislation was considered in terms of its long term consequences, not just the consequences for the next election.
Like the Monarchy itself, it’s not a system that I think any sensible person would today design from scratch. But it evolved over time into something that really worked well in my view.
I get you, I don’t so much mind what it was, I wouldn’t mind at all if I were an Earl or something myself ;d, you make some good points, but there is gonna be no going back to that, I can’t see it happening in a million years.
What it is now is a bunch of Labour (and Lib Dem lol they have more than 10 times as many members in the Lords now despite never having had a Prime Minister) *ucknut life peers appointed by Blair and Brown with the power to delay and make a stink and nothing else. Uncool.
So what could be done with it, May appoints several hundred decent people so they outnumber the scum and suddenly it has 2000 members? That doesn’t sound good. Blair should have had the balls to just abolish it rather than turn it into a farce.
I don’t see a point to continuing to have an upper house in the UK or Canada, where their Senate is almost as bad, unless they are elected. And your Senate in Australia makes me question whether an elected upper house is a decent feature of a Westminster democracy at all, though that may be in large part be due to the weird election system that empowers tiny niche parties aka the egomaniacs who found tiny niche parties.