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This House believes the House of Lords should be reformed
This House believes the House of Lords should be reformed
This is a discussion on the Debatabase item titled: This House believes the House of Lords should be reformed.Below is the discussion so far. Feel free to add your own comments!
51 weeks 5 days ago
Angus wrote:
An upper house should be free from party politics and serve the national interest with honour and impartiality. Sadly that is not the case. The House of Lords is largely no more than a rubber stamping comittee for our corupt government of public scholl boys and thieves who use their postion to further the interests of friends and associates.
Unfortunately the case - but more I think due to the lack of ability to override the commons than an unwillingness to do so. The House of Lords quite regularly opposes the commons but the commons can override the veto so all the HofL can really do is delay bills and encourage the commons to rethink. I would imagine therefore that the Lords in its current form often passes bills because it does not see any point in a fight it cant win. More powers might mean the Commons gets blocked more often even without reform of the composition of the Lords.
That said with reference to the rest of your point I fail to see how a democratic Lords is going to be any less prone to be captured by interests than the Commons.
51 weeks 2 days ago
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Whilst I agree the House of Lords needs reform, let's not forget It is the house of Lords that has try in vien to help England beconme the democracy it has never been. We must take a balanced view. Whilst the house of Lords is subject to the whimps of minortiy interest groups it is an ineffectual way of policing the house of commons which is now formaly a dictatorship as it has placed itself above the law.
An upper house should be free from party politics and serve the national interest with honour and impartiality. Sadly that is not the case. The House of Lords is largely no more than a rubber stamping comittee for our corupt government of public scholl boys and thieves who use their postion to further the interests of friends and associates. News Internation, KPMG, BAE systems are three prime examples of how the connection to power net work operates. As the government decides who will sit in the upper house they are able to ensure only those who will obey the party line have seats, this is anti democratic.
If England was ever to be a democratic country, the upper house should have seats occupied by those the people chose because of theri action on behalf of their communities and country and not those who serve the power elite. This is easy to put into practise but those in power will not do it because it means they could be held accountable instead of being forced to account for their actions by a truely independent policing body that exists to protect the national interest. England need total political reform if it is to become a democratic country. As yet no where in the world has a nation state been democratic, not even the city state of Athens from which it is claimed the idea of democracy rose was demorcratic.