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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

I’m sorry but this is a very simplistic take. The King has no meaningful power at all, MPs have power over the Lords and they are democratically elected.

I’m not for a second saying the system is wonderful and beyond reproach. But suggesting it’s equivalent to an autocracy or something is just flat out wrong. If you want to complain about the U.K. political system complain about first past the post or the creeping anti-democratic forces pushing things like voter ID laws. The House of Lords and the King aren’t anything comparatively.

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It was just a quick quip how we regard as "democratic" a country (?) called "United Kingdom", language is funny like that.

Sure, UK is a great place to live for many of their citizens, and a great country overall, culture and so forth. It's not for nothing we are speaking their language and not Esperanto or something. But it's not a democracy, and that is fine.

If you ask me (I know you didn't, but just in case), not even the Nordic countries or Switzerland pass the main test of democracy: not being able to vote for everything, but being able to vote "No" to anything and everything. That should probably be the hallmark of a democracy. Even the toga-wearing Greeks did not have democracy to such an extent.

In an ideal world, every ballot would have as a first option the option "No". I said in some other HN comment [1], a second point would be to tie the duration of the mandate to the voter turnout, if 30% vote, then the mandate is not 100%, but 30% also of the 4/5 years mandate.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35300083

Tying mandate to turnout is actually a very interesting idea. Has this ever been tried?

I am afraid it's rather original. Afraid since originality in politics increases the chance of assassination, or even worse, marginalization.

One technical issue to solve beforehand is reducing the cost of elections by 6-7 orders of magnitude. 2020 US election costed $14 billion (presidential and congressional) [1], 2020 India election costed $7 billlion [2]. It's completely unsustainable. Sending 500 million HTTPS messages using Amazon SES costs around $50,000. Perhaps elections should cost a bit more, but not with much, in order to be able to run them every other day/month.

The fact that our societies are unable to hold elections often and at the cost of spam emails is also a sign we are not trending towards increasing democracy.

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/10/cost-of-2020-electi...

[2] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/elections/lok-sabh...

The problem is that people are very bad at assessing what is in their best interest. For sure, the result is a pretty thorny ethical debate, but you can't deny that the ability of the electorate to veto things would not necessarily result in an improvement.

In general I believe people are bad at assessing their best interest as a failure of education (too few teachers, too many students), perhaps with the rise of personal artificial mentors this will be better.

Being able to vote "No" or "No One" may see no improvement, but it would at least give a true option to the 30%-60% of people (various countries) who never vote, a protest vote which is actually significant, especially if voting "No" further decreases the mandate time.

I guess in general we should ask ourselves if the principles on which we build the society are for increasing democracy or for decreasing it. And then we can label it as "democratic" or not, but the rate of change towards a heightened democracy is more important than a single scalar "democracy index". Hence my initial repartee about a 1,300 old society which steadfastly had and has bishops, lords, kings as instruments of power or power-adjacent implementers of power.

The king has veto power over any acts he believes affects him, and him and the queen have apparently used the threat of this many times in order to shape UK legislation before it's argued on. Apparently almost all legislation is passed by the royal family's office for edits before it goes up for debate.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...

This idea that the royal family has no meaningful political power is not congruent with how the British political system works.

Yes and when was the last time a reigning monarch exercised those powers? The answer is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Militia_Bill

If you'd have read the article you would see that it has been used numerous times over the last couple of decades.

If you read the article, they practically exercise those rights up through the current day. The PM's office runs nearly all proposed legislation by them and makes changes to acts before they go up for debate. Acts have changed from threats of using the royal consent at least as recently as 2021, but it's hard to get complete numbers as most of this process happens in secret.

This is all outlined in the previous citation I gave.

> The King has no meaningful power at all,

Please define "meaningful power".

Because getting millions of pounds from the state every year [1], having massive media attention, having the ear of international leaders in politics, and having ones face on currency, sounds pretty impactful to me, especially given the fact that all this is conferred by being born to certain parents, and not by, say, something like an election.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Grant_Act_2011

It's so much more complicated that this. In modern times the UK monarch fulfils the role of an apolitical leader of the UK and commonwealth nations.

Just imagine for a moment if the PM was head of state... Who would be leader of commonwealth? Liz Truss? Boris Johnson? Can you see how this would cause conflict? Having a heredity apolitical monarch works really well in the context of a commonwealth of nation. Electing someone would introduce politics and that isn't feasible when you need someone who can represent such a diverse range of views.

I also think the UK monarch serves as a unifying voice for the UK. No matter our political differences we can still all turn to the monarch as voice of unity for the nation during difficult times. I think this lack of an apolitical leader is quite noticeable in the US and other nations.

I don't like all of the tradition and baggage that comes with the Royal Family and I think they would benefit from trying to modernise their public perception, but I do think there is value in having an heredity head of state with very limited powers. I think the question really is how much we should be spending on that. At the moment it does seem a bit excessive...

> Who would be leader of commonwealth?

Does it need one? For doing what exactly? And why is a hereditary position better for this than one elected by democratic means?

> Having a heredity apolitical monarch works really well in the context of a commonwealth of nation.

Why?

> , but I do think there is value in having an heredity head of state with very limited powers.

Such as? Because tons of countries in the world don't spend huge sums of money on such an institution, and don't seem to miss out on anything.

In this context by "meaningful power" I mean "ability to override democracy".

I'm not saying the Royal Family are not impactful (I'm certainly not defending them at all!) but I'm specifically refuting the notion that the presence of a King means that the country is not democratic. Kim Kardashian has millions, draws massive media attention and in all honesty could probably have the ear of international leaders. None of that means she can override what US voters do.

constitutional monarchies also dominate the top of democracy ratings

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

turns out separating politicians from the concept of The State works quite well

if a voter ID is free and requires no effort on the citizens part, how is it anti-democratic? is this to say that all IDs are anti-democratic?

> if a voter ID is free and requires no effort on the citizens part

That alone is a big "if". Getting an ID rarely requires no effort. But the bigger question above all that is why do it anyway? Why do anything to make it harder to vote? There is little to no evidence of voter fraud taking place in the UK (or US for that matter), certainly never on a scale that would come close to affecting the outcome of an election. Every time the number of people who would be unable to vote (even just because they've lost their ID) eclipses the number of fraudulent votes that would supposedly be caught.

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