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...

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.)

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

> “Our parliament should always be a place where talents are recognized and merit counts,” he said. “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.”

Really? About time they got rid of the monarchy then also.

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

* 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.

See, also, US state legislatures post Reynolds v. Sims.

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.

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:)

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.

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.

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.