The point of an upper house is that it is supposed to be impartial to the whims of the voters. In the USA we originally had an appointed Senate and still to this day have an appointed Judicial system. Should supreme court judges be elected?

I have to say as a quasi-outsider (English raised in the USA) that more often than not I'm extremely impressed by what comes out of the House of Lords. For example their recent statement on the EU's right to be forgotten.

I was sad when I found out that the House of Lords is in the process of being reformed, with membership moving from peerage to either elected or elected-appointed positions. I fear that this won't end well for Britain :(

Countries where both houses are elected and enjoy equivalent powers (like Italy or the US) complain that this arrangement slows down lawmaking, in an age where everything else is actually speeding up.

Countries where the second chamber is not elected, like Britain, experience a certain unease: they wage war oversea "to bring democracy", and then half of their lawmaking is in the hands of a completely undemocratic body with dubious legitimacy.

Countries where the second chamber actually represents different bodies from the electorate (like Germany) seem to have found a pragmatic third way, but then this chamber ends up over-representing certain interests (in Germany, local ruling classes and their nests of semi-private special businesses), which again is not really democratic in nature.

I think we'll have to learn again why balance is required in matters of such importance, and we'll probably have to learn it the hard way. The major supporters of "streamlined" government have always been tyrants and oligarchs, after all.

Its been quite a long time (more than a century) since the Lords could be said to hold anything like half the legislative power in the UK.

My original comment related to very pragmatic situation of acting as "champions of democracy" while still maintaining a very significant role in the lawmaking process for a wholly-undemocratic body. It's a real problem that has not been solved and significantly weakens British arguments in, say, foreign policy and cultural debate.

I know I am an outlier, but it seems a totally strange and foreign concept to me that one could criticize the UK for being hypocritical in promoting democracy abroad because of the House of Lords.

No "we" don't (dunno about you but I live in a constitutional monarchy, which is a fairly popular form of government in Europe, and it just ain't a republic in any technical sense).

> it seems a totally strange and foreign concept to me that one could criticize the UK for being hypocritical in promoting democracy abroad because of the House of Lords.

You should visit the Middle-East sometimes, but even just France would be an eye-opener I think.

That seems to demonstrate a problem of ludicrously binary thinking. The UK is far more democratic than a great many countries -- and has been making democratic progress longer than many countries have existed. The existence of the shrinking vestigial powers of the House of Lords isn't even a little bit of a pragmatic problem for the UK as an advocate of democratic progress abroad.

... and far less democratic than many others.

> and has been making democratic progress longer than many countries have existed

... or, in other terms, has been slower to produce a soundly-democratic system than many younger countries.

In fact, one of the main puzzles constitutional scholars struggle with, is exactly this: how (and why) did a nation that reached substantial parliamentary rule so early, deliberately refuse to evolve towards more democratic forms of governments for so long? Why did England fight the French Revolution so bitterly, when on paper the French were just completing the job started in Westminster so many decades before? How can aristocratic privilege survive, in this day and age, in the same nation that first theorized it as fundamentally unjust?

I know this can be difficult to understand for people grown under the ultimate myth of Westminster "mother of all democracies", but there are other models out there; and some of these models are ultimately much more coherent, in theory and in practice, than the constitutional hodgepodge we experience in modern Britain.

What is sad about that unease is that it has everything to do with the objecter's mind and nothing to do with the state of the world. "Does it work? Is there any alternative that is better?" <-- That is all we should be asking.

But I'm too cynical a person to ever hope for consequentialism in politics.

The problem is, how do you define "working"? Who defines it? The Victorian Empire "worked" perfectly well for the ruling classes; less so for Indians and lower classes. That's where the absolutist coherence of "one head, one vote, in all matters" comes in; but in practice we know the idealistic approach doesn't always result in smooth sailing, so we introduce elements of moderation here and there, and then we bang our head against the wall of doubt -- is this counterbalance too anti-democratic? Should we really stop people from shooting themselves in the foot, or is there a deeper horizon where such an outcome could be desirable? Etc etc.

That's the open-ended question of constitutional studies.

Familiarize yourself with the drivel that passes the House. The Senate has allowed horrible things like lynching to persist for decades, but it stops truly dumb knee jerk measures from being placed into law.

We don't need to "balance" the City. We need to take the gloves off and do what we can with the last remaining world class industry we have.