The Greens have seats???
In Wales, they do. 
The Greens have seats???
Allow me to talk about the US, a nation I am more familiar. If America was a democracy we might expect:
-segregation to be the law of the land.
-school prayer, heck prayer at all sorts of public events.
-a strict enforcement of the No Bra Rule in the Women’s National Basketball Association.
-abortion would be illegal.
-restricted immigration.
-you could go bankrupt via some sort of mail-in application.
A democracy, rule by the people, must be moderated. In large groups people are misled, misinformed and deceived all too often. Which is more important to you, doctrinal adherence to ‘democracy,’ or good governance?
In a democracy, you, your family and your property are secure only until fifty-one percent of the voters decide otherwise. (Cite)
Right-wing aristocrats? No, I am not in favor of that. I would prefer Lords to be as Male, Christian, Straight and Able-bodied as the general British population, and no more. It needed to be tweaked, not whacked.
By the way, why does Lords upset people? As a practical matter it is a darn small issue. What has Lords ever done to upset so may people? Just its existence?
Right, that’s three out of over a thousand. Keep the count up to a fair representation (socialists in Britain have had over a third of the vote for nearly a century) and I’ll start to take you seriously.
Keep counting and let me know when you have more than a hundred Labour Hereditaries. And that still be less than 10%. And still won’t be anywhere near parity.
The Hereditaries were largely Tory or Tory leaning. Accept it.
Slaphead
The 1832 reform act still did not enfranchise the majority of the population, not by a long shot, and the Lords could veto any bill they wished, and they would do so at the behest of the monarch of the day, certainly during Victorias reign.
I just do not see how you could possibly say the the Lords were completely subordinate.
The 1832 reform act was a step along the way, but noth more than that, it made the transfer of real politcal power more possible, but the act ifself was more about trying to keep civil order than it was about democracy.
I don’t doubt it, but they had no reason to be. They tended to vote Tory of their own free will. There was nothing stopping them for voting for the Liberals, or Labour, or Plaid Cymru. Or are you suggesting that they were blind slaves of some mythical Tory beast?
They were blind slaves of the Class from which they were drawn. That is not acceptable for a democracy.
I am bailing out of this argument over the historic Lords. The current house is largely an appointed assembly with the Lords Spirtual and 93 additional hereditary members who will be expelled when Parliament decides to reform the House- it was only a stop gap measure to retain these hereditary hangovers until a permanent settlement was made.
Any arguments for the old system are no of no meaning. We shall not be going back that way. No party supports that. AFAIK very few Brits support it. The Old House is a Dead Parrot.
I suspected it was nailed to the perch all along.
Repeatedly. By the Tory Party. 
Also note that it was obcviously a Norwegian Blue (Tory Colors)
Now if it had been a Norwegian Red (Labor Colors) then it might have been a different matter.
Sorry if I hijacked your thread. Still you made an interesting OP.
May I ask you though, would you agree that as a practical matter, the present system really is not too far off the mark? I (as an American) would say that as a practical matter, the British system does not seem broken.
The problem with Westminster seems to be theoretical. Simply said, it is a dictatorship by Commons, tempered only by a bunch of traditions. Still it seems to work.
Again, my apologies if I ruined your thread.
The question of tyranny by the majority is an old and well recognised one, however, this is why we have an independant judiciary, to ensure that the rights of individuals are not infringed.
In the UK, this is now overseen by the European Courts, which often uses British judges, or any others since they rule not on just on points of law, but also on the interpretation of laws and conditions with regard to the European Act and the European Consitution.
Things like segregation, religious observance, abortion, and so many others would not be enforceable if it were found by the judiciary that the rights of individuals were being unjustifiably infringed by the lawmakers of a nation that is covered under the EU treaty.
It seems pretty obvious to me. The Lords hated the measure, the Commons wanted it, the Lords tried to hold it up and got steamrollered, just as they did in 1909 and just as they would today. Enfranchisement is a side issue to the balance of power between the two houses, even though fixing some of the flaws gave more legitimacy to the Commons and so even more power.
The Lords cannot do more than delay a measure that the Commons really wants to push through, the monarch is basically a puppet of the Prime Minister, so the current situation is that a PM with a substantial majority basically has total and unchecked authority over the entire political system. This has not changed substantively for a very long time, even though there has been some fine-tuning of procedure. If the Lords was such a huge Tory choke-hold on the body politic, don’t you think the various Liberal and Labour governments would have made a serious attempt to do something about it? The reality is that it suits governments of whichever flavour to have a feeble upper chamber with no political legitimacy, because it provides no real obstacle to the exercise of executive power, just as it suits Westminster to keep local authorities and mayors feeble and dependent on central funding. This excessive concentration of power and legitimacy is IMHO the real issue with the current system, since the PM/Commons has control over not just funding, appointments and the passing of legislation, but has a monopoly on the claim to representation. An elected upper house or more powerful local authorities would help a lot, but does not fit very comfortably with English political tradition. However, given that there are Welsh and Scottish Assemblies, it’s not impossible that an English one might appear, and some other type of structure might develop out of that, so who knows.
The point I was making was that the 1832 act did not make the Lords ]completely subordinate - your words.
Its hard to say that the upper house was completely subordinate as long as it could veto any legislation it chose, and it could choose the legislation through its own non-democratic processes.
What it began a was process that continued right up to the Hunting Act 2004.
This last finally and completely determined that the governments of the day actually does have the right to push through bills.
Prior to this, it had been a tradition, even from 1911, that the House of Lords could not imped the progress of so called ‘Money Acts’, and the pro hunting lobby took this tradition to a judicial review where it was finally and legally established.
That we could use a second chamber is without question, of whom it should comprise and its method of selection is the great debate.
We still have not rid ourselves of hereditry peers, and we should, things would be far simpler if we had a written constitution as this would be enshrined within.
We could have an appointed body who could make recommendations of perhaps experts, ethics commitees and the like, we could try to make it apolitical, which would be the ideal situation.
In the end it will become a politically appointed body and probably filled with placemen.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, having a two party rotating dictatorship is not the best solution and the only other alternative would be some form of PR, perhaps one chamber could be selected on PR and the other, the Commons, in the current manner, the problem would be that the PR body would be more truly representative and thus would carry a greater moral authority.
England is so much bigger than the others, however . . . Wouldn’t an Assembly for each of England’s nine regions make more sense? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_England
Has the Commons forced things into law despite opposition from the Lords? Yes, many times.
Has the Lords ever succeeded in halting something that the Commons really wanted, or pushing through legislation the Commons didn’t want? Not that I am aware of in the last century or so.
As demonstrated in 1832 and 1909, the government effectively has the Lords at gunpoint through its control of the appointments process, and if the Commons has a demonstrated ability to ram anything it seriously cares about past the Lords, I fail to see how it can be anything else than subordinate. Your argument is tantamount to saying that Canada is militarily equal to the US because it too has tanks and planes. The fact that disputes are normally settled by means other than a full-on confrontation doesn’t affect the underlying balance of power.
Absolutely - however I’m not sure that an appointed chamber or PR elections are the only options. If you look at the systems in use in other countries, there is a bewildering array of structures and elective methods. Iceland seems to have a single-chamber system, the US Senate is non-PR, the Swiss somehow manage to cope with two equivalent houses with identical powers( 
) but one uses PR and one with direct elections - all of them seem to work more or less OK, but I’m not sure any of them would transfer too well to the UK.
Having said that, I think an adaptation of the US system would probably be better than trying to explicitly engineer a non-political lower house - a lower house full of people with no government experience and no ambition for a future career in the same is likely to result in too many single-issue campaigners, interest group proxies and minor celebrities, especially bearing in mind the size of the constituencies you are proposing. Think about it - who would you expect to stand for election to such a chamber?
Combine this with a ban on any party organisation and there is a high risk of incoherence and disorganisation which would either result in gridlock or mean the politicians in the upper house could run rings around the lower house. The US system of having the upper and lower house on opposing election cycles is probably a better way of stopping one party from rampaging in government, especially if the voting system could be tuned to prevent the current two-party ping-pong game. It would at least focus their attention on maintaining popularity rather than just opening the taps of the excequer once every four years.