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.
A man can dream... yes, I agree it’s hard to see how the House of Lords could be fixed in a way that takes it back to closer to what it was, but is it impossible? I thought Brexit was impossible - never thought that would happen. So I can dream a little more.
I certainly also agree that the House of Lords is somewhat broken at the moment, but the idea of abandoning something that worked well for centuries just because it’s had a couple of bad decades recently without at least trying to fix it, doesn’t sit well with me.
As for the Australian Senate, I actually do expect that to be sorted out, although it may take a little while - at the moment, the Labor opposition is certainly willing to take advantage of what has happened there to block government legislation, but longer term, both the Coalition and Labor know that something needs to be done to fix things so microparties can’t so easily get Senate seats, and I think even the Greens would come on board with that. What has happened at the moment, is somebody found a flaw within the system that they exploited (and were able to exploit because of better technology), and we’ve already started fixing things - if the most recent Senate election had been the normal half Senate election, rather than a full one triggered by a double dissolution, we’d be even further along. I think the minor party senators will also come to realise over time that the people will not tolerate a government’s mandates being blocked.