alt Hacker NewsBritain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
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British democracy and government is cool. It's not enshrined in some document they got together and wrote down like the US constitution, it's this organic thing that they've stumbled towards over the last ~800 years with small changes like this one gradually evolving them into a modern liberal democracy.
The irony is that, on a technicality, the hereditary peers were the only members of the Lords who had to win an election to get their seats.
> 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...
If you're not British please don't assume that "ejecting heriditary nobles" from the upper house of parliament is automatically going to increase the quality of governance.
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.
Next, the monarchy?[1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/30/charle...
“It should never be a gallery of old boys’ networks, nor a place where titles, many of which were handed out centuries ago, hold power over the will of the people.”
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!
That something is ancient and traditional doesn't mean it's good.
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.
The title makes it sound like they’re removing the remains of lost Lords gathering dust on the seats although that’s probably not too far from the truth.
The author of the article is named Lawless. Is that an inverted nominative determinism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
> The case of Peter Mandelson, who resigned from the Lords in February after revelations about his friendship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, drew renewed attention to the upper chamber and the problem of lords behaving badly.
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.
Polybius might have an interesting opinion on this. Generally mixed forms of government are supposed to be more stable. If you make everything purely democratic, the structure weakens a bit.
Democracy had pretty good PR in the 20th century, but having institutional counterweights is never a bad idea.
Will they do the same for hereditary monarchy?
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.
Anyone else think Britain is going to eject the Royal Family within 100 years?
The point of the hereditary peerage was the same as the point of having a non-elected Senate. Now both will have been lost in the name of "democracy" - a system of government that constantly fails to do either what is the desire of the people OR what is truly in their interests. From here on out it'll just be whoever manages to connive their way into power through connections, payola, corruption, island meetups, and so on. I strongly suspect this will lead to a worse government, not a better one.
When the logic for bicameralism disappears, you should get rid of the second chamber. Not just find some other random thing to do with it.
See, also, US state legislatures post Reynolds v. Sims.
Directionally the UK gov has arrested more people for speech crimes than the Soviets..
Anything they pass or even look excited for is a negative signal. These people seem inept on every front, and I can’t even generously find something clever about them.
Iraq, Brexit, and Speech Laws.
If a Brit told me the sky was blue, I’d double check myself.
“…a compromise that will see an undisclosed number of hereditary members allowed to stay by being ‘recycled’ into life peers.”
What? Are the membership roles and the text of this law confidential?
To make room for something worse no doubt.
Removal of hereditary privilege is a good thing in principle.
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.
OK but can you wield supreme executive power if a watery tart throws a sword at you?
Now we're down to just an upper house absolutely stuffed with hundreds of washed up political hacks given a comfortable retirement and party donors. And a few priests.
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Win for democracy and fair representation of the working class!
Being Noble is like saying 'i used to have slaves(even if not, then feudalism was the de'facto slave system too!) and made profits from it'
Such people are enemies of humanity and democracy and markets. I hope one day they all just go.
King and his small family is fine btw. Cultural reason:)
This is a dark day for the monarchy... and for democracy in the UK.
Remove the only people who actually have a long-term vested non-financial interest in the system and replace them with more revolving-door politicians backed by the big money so that the big money can operate with even less friction than before. Great. Just great.
The problem with our current democratic systems with unlimited government fiat money is that capital is in control. Not voters. Capital. This should be obvious by now. Someone deprived of food will vote for whoever you tell them to vote for.
It’s not just about the seat they must lose their “lord” title
From hereditary buffoons to patronage pissoir and party hack retirement home, not much better off methinks.
Some years ago I, an American citizen and resident, studied abroad briefly and was asked by the House of Lords to speak to them about what GDPR (a UK law!) was, how it worked, and the impact it could have.
Further than ejecting nobles, they really should just overhaul the entire chamber, which is surely doing more harm than good if they need a foreign national to explain their own laws to them.
But they still haven't kicked out the Church of England bishops, including the rapist bishop of Lincoln.
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.