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Comment by seabee | Hacker News Reader

The main duties of the Lords are to impart wisdom and delay bills. On the whole this is a good thing, and it is unclear what benefits will come from being democratically elected.

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I'm torn on the Lords.

In theory they are completely wrong, in practice I only see them doing good things.

Think of them as a bunch of people selected at random - rather like a jury.

Nobody argues that juries should be elected, or selected by the police.

I actually rather like the idea that a small part of the Lords should be selected entirely at random.

That's what hereditary basically does

Let me clarify. Randomly selected such that over time they will represent all walks off life, backgrounds, regions, ages, faiths and so on.

Heredity as it is (or rather was) favours white, male (many of the titles couldn't be passed to women), upper class, privately educated, wealthy, christian individuals.

I think I am more in favour of the un-elected House of Lords than you are, but I rather liked the proposal in the recent draft that elected Peers serve for 15 years. Having long terms would make them less influenced by the political wind (I would hope).

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt201012/jtselect/j...

What I'd like to see along with that is that a third of the chamber would be elected every five years so it never moves too wildly.

However, it's fairly clear what one of the downsides would be: media manipulation. Allowing Rupert Murdoch and his media empire an even tighter grip on UK parliament would be nothing but a terrible thing.

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