Oligarchs are far worse. They're deliberate. Peers are just accidents of birth. The thing about the House of Lords is that they're not really rulers as such, they're more sort of advisors with...
Oligarchs are far worse. They're deliberate. Peers are just accidents of birth.
The thing about the House of Lords is that they're not really rulers as such, they're more sort of advisors with some limited powers. The hereditary section of the House, comprising 91 members of which only 15 are non-elected (out of 842 seats total), are close to being a non-issue in the UK government machine.
That said, I don't think we should keep them and this change is a good one, but they're not really a thing many people have been particularly worried about for a while. We could do to get rid of the Lords Spiritual as well (aka religious leaders) but again, they only get 26 seats and they commonly don't even vote on principle.
As far as British governmental reforms go the only one that matters - and probably least likely to happen - is changing our electoral system to proportional representation. A lot of other changes, including this one, is basically just rearranging deckchairs.
Like I said, no matter how dilute, nobody should have privilege or power that comes from their heredity, and while we can’t eliminate most of that we can at least avoid codifying instances of it...
The thing about the House of Lords is that they're not really rulers as such, they're more sort of advisors with some limited powers.
Like I said, no matter how dilute, nobody should have privilege or power that comes from their heredity, and while we can’t eliminate most of that we can at least avoid codifying instances of it into law.
Yeah, I think that abolishing hereditary nobility is objectively good on principle, and I would think it's the right thing to do even if it had negative effects. If it has no practical effect on...
Yeah, I think that abolishing hereditary nobility is objectively good on principle, and I would think it's the right thing to do even if it had negative effects. If it has no practical effect on UK politics, so much the better -- then there is nothing to do but benefit from not having something gross pointlessly enshrined in law in a way that doesn't even matter.
I'm genuinely uncertain what you mean. It's not super clear to me what definition you're using for "oligarch" that wouldn't include the bulk of hereditary nobility, and I don't understand what you...
Oligarchs are far worse. They're deliberate. Peers are just accidents of birth.
I'm genuinely uncertain what you mean. It's not super clear to me what definition you're using for "oligarch" that wouldn't include the bulk of hereditary nobility, and I don't understand what you mean by "intentional". It's definitely intentional that the previous UK law endowed certain people with political positions (even if they are less powerful positions than they once were in the modern day) based solely on their heredity. And if you mean that oligarchs are worse because under your definition of oligarch they're intentionally inserting themselves into politics as opposed to having political power handed to them based on their heredity and nothing else, I simply disagree with you.
OK so to clarify, people who have chosen to get rich and then chosen to use that money to gain and wield political power are worse for society than people who were born into having far less power....
OK so to clarify, people who have chosen to get rich and then chosen to use that money to gain and wield political power are worse for society than people who were born into having far less power. Business-created oligarchs (cf hereditary ones) explicitly choose to gain and use their power, it's intentional action on their part. Showing up to the House of Lords is intentional as well, to an extent, but perhaps less so, and possibly for better reasons although obviously that depends on the peer in question. There's no sense of noblesse oblige in business - although of course that shouldn't be the basis of a system of government either.
To put it another way, a sleepy Lord on the benches of the upper house or sitting on some obscure committee is far less dangerous to the fabric of the country and it's democracy than a billionaire leaning over the PM's shoulder or worse, as we can literally see happening right now, funding a far right political movement.
It is possible btw that there actually wasn't any law endowing peers with positions in the Lords. It's not called an unwritten constitution for nothing. All sorts of parts of the British political apparatus are nothing more than traditions and unspoken agreements. Surprisingly, it does seem to mostly work.
edit: it's worth adding that many hereditary peers are not rich people. They might own lots of assets in the form of country houses and land, but they are often not rich in usable 'money' (I know the difference between cash and assets in the context of say, Elon Musk). But a business oligarch can sell shares or leverage them for loans but a country house is less useful for that kind of thing. You can't sell a wing. You often can't even sell land that you own on paper but in reality is tied up in family trusts and so on. One of my friends at university was the scion of a hereditary peer and they just lived in a normal house and had normal jobs. They often got bumped on flights and restaurants and so on because of the title attached to their name, but that was as far as it went. I know a current Baronness (created, not inherited) who is very similar.
I'm less concerned with the goodness and badness of individual people who fall into these categories than you seem to think based on your comment. Though I agree that in the current era, extremely...
I'm less concerned with the goodness and badness of individual people who fall into these categories than you seem to think based on your comment. Though I agree that in the current era, extremely wealthy capitalists tend to be the bigger threat than the vestiges of nobility, the system that allows them to do so tends to be the same one that allows ordinary citizens like me to participate in politics -- their outsized influence due to their wealth is a problem, but it's a problem that would require pretty fundamental changes to our society to get rid of it, because the dangers of oligarchs emerge from first principles in a system that doesn't actively combat the influence of generational wealth. It's a complicated problem to even theoretically engineer a system of democratic government that prevents the rise of oligarchs under your definition, much less practically implement one.
The existence of hereditary nobility, on the other hand, is much simpler. Giving someone any power or benefit, even a small amount, based solely on their bloodline is gross and wrong. My impression is that the existence of hereditary peers in the House of Lords was written law insofar as I believe there is mention at least in the Treaty of Union, and there are ofc also a number of acts of parliament from up through the 20th century modifying how hereditary peerages work as well (several of these acts are directly responsible for the decline in the power of hereditary peers and the House of Lords in general, which is how we're even in a position where their seats are as perfunctory as they are). But whether the law(s) that resulted in peers having any political power at all were written or unwritten, their existence in practice was fundamentally unjust. If, as you state, very little political power is granted to hereditary peers and they don't matter much for British politics, then there is nothing simpler than getting rid of their direct political influence by no longer giving them seats in parliament for life -- as, indeed, it appears is happening now.
That they had less power to actually affect British politics directly through their seats on the House of Lords thanks to various earlier acts decreasing their power probably does decrease the urgency in changing things, perhaps, but it doesn't change the fact that hereditary peers existing at all is fundamentally wrong. It should not exist in a modern society on principle, and I'm glad that the UK is abolishing it. Removing their explicit political power like this cannot remove all political power from the nobility, of course, as many (but as you note, not all), retain wealth and/or other political influence, but that wraps back around to the same problem we have with oligarchs. As much as I would love to see the UK abolish capitalism, which would definitely have a much more powerful effect than this change will, I must concede that it's not nearly as simple as abolishing hereditary political power (and this act doesn't even fully do that, of course, as abolishing the monarchy would be a lot more contentious).
Ultimately the existence of a more harmful thing doesn't mean we can't get rid of a less harmful thing that is also unjust. Just because I have a serious chronic illness doesn't mean I can't go to get a wonky mole removed. Years of incremental progress have resulted in the mostly-irrelevance of hereditary peers in the House of Lords we see today, and the last step is to get rid of them like the vestigial thing they are now.
Reading this and largely agreeing with both you and @mat, as I think you’re actually more or less agreeing with each other, I read the original line you quoted to mean: I don’t think anyone’s...
Reading this and largely agreeing with both you and @mat, as I think you’re actually more or less agreeing with each other, I read the original line you quoted to mean:
Oligarchs are far [more harmful]. They're deliberate. Peers are just accidents of birth.
I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that hereditary rule is anything other than morally abhorrent, and I don’t think anyone’s saying it shouldn’t be abolished - but from a purely practical perspective, the individual you end up with in a hereditary position is kind of a biased random choice. Each person filling the seat is their own individual in a way that’s not directly correlated with any specific set of qualities.
Compare that to the billionaires who influence politics, and there’s an incredibly strong selective pressure towards ruthlessness, selfishness, grandiosity, and a whole bunch of other qualities that are terrible in a position of power.
I disagree that there is no correlation with specific qualities involved in hereditary nobility. I don't think that's what we observe in practice at all, and even if we discard the influence being...
I disagree that there is no correlation with specific qualities involved in hereditary nobility. I don't think that's what we observe in practice at all, and even if we discard the influence being raised in a particular environment has on a person, the goodness or badness of hereditary nobility has nothing to do with the personality of any given noble and everything to do with their material interests. A nobles personality may have mattered more when they had more unchecked power, but of course that's also true for any individuals with inordinate power in an unjust society. An individual king can be better or worse in terms of how he manages the kingdom and treats his subjects, but the existence of better kings doesn't contradict the evil in directly endowing an individual with power based on who their parents are. The same is true on a smaller scale for nobility. Even if everything you say about their personalities compared to modern billionaires is true, and much of it might be, a political system that must rely on their personal benevolence as individuals or worse, as a class, is fundamentally wrong and that's true even if the amount of power they have in practice is extremely small. It is good to abolish unjust systems like this even if the effect is tiny.
I also think the parallels between these modern oligarchs and the nobility back when they did have much more power than they do today is being overlooked. They differ a lot less than it seems -- oligarchs are nigh-universally recipients of generational wealth, for instance. There are differences between modern late capitalism and the feudalism from which nobility arose, but there is a lot fundamentally in common there. The only reason modern hereditary nobility is so much less harmful than modern capitalist oligarchs is because they have less power, not because of any inherent quality that makes nobility less bad all else being equal. And they only even have less power because they have been gradually having their power limited and stripped from them over the course of centuries, something that abolishing their seats in Parliament is a part of.
I'm all for doing the same thing with capitalist oligarchs, for what it's worth! I'm all for democratic socialism if we can pull it off. We're just not nearly as far along in the process of stripping away their unjust power, as is probably to be expected, given that hereditary nobility does predate capitalism.
I mean... yeah, pretty much with you! I don't know, maybe I'm misreading your tone, maybe we're missing each others nuances, I guess I feel like what you're saying has the sound and shape of a...
I mean... yeah, pretty much with you! I don't know, maybe I'm misreading your tone, maybe we're missing each others nuances, I guess I feel like what you're saying has the sound and shape of a disagreement but the things you're saying are more or less the same as what I'm saying and what I think @mat was saying.
It's not about making any excuses for heredity as a system, or suggesting that good kings can somehow justify it as a practice - they obviously can't. It's just an observation that the chances of a given individual who actively seeks power through wealth being the right person to wield it, especially with the preconditions on gaining that wealth and power in our current system, are even lower than the chances of an individual with power arbitrarily thrust upon them being the right person to wield it.
I agree with that last point as stated, but I don't think that hereditary nobility is as arbitrary as just bestowing power randomly would be, for instance. I think oligarchs and nobility have a...
I agree with that last point as stated, but I don't think that hereditary nobility is as arbitrary as just bestowing power randomly would be, for instance. I think oligarchs and nobility have a lot more in common with each other in this respect. I think this is especially true in terms of their material interests as classes, which are I think the most important part on a practical level for us plebs, but I think even the cultural environment and background in which they grow up and move through during their lives has a lot in common that absolutely influences one's personality and worldview. They aren't exactly the same by any means, but there is absolutely a huge amount of overlap at minimum, and I think their similarities can inform us in how we approach them.
I'm sorry if my comments are coming off as too argumentative, though. When I first read mat's initial comment it essentially came across to me as defending hereditary nobility as not being all that bad because it isn't as bad as oligarchs and they don't have much concrete political power in the UK anymore. That was probably a little less charitable than I could've been, but the comment about this change being "rearranging deck chairs" was in particular something that bothered me, because I don't think abolishing something that is abhorrent on principle is pointless, even if its negative effects on the world are no longer very strong. I've also seen in other contexts similar arguments about their low amount of practical political power or limited exercise of their powers in practice used as an argument against getting rid of monarchial institutions altogether, and while mat did not say this, those experiences led me to view the comment in that light when it described the changes here as not really mattering that much.That's why my comments focused on what they did initially. Based on your comments, I definitely think we agree with each other on the major points.
Well, about time. There are few things more disgusting than hereditary rulers, no matter how dilute their influence has become.
Oligarchs are far worse. They're deliberate. Peers are just accidents of birth.
The thing about the House of Lords is that they're not really rulers as such, they're more sort of advisors with some limited powers. The hereditary section of the House, comprising 91 members of which only 15 are non-elected (out of 842 seats total), are close to being a non-issue in the UK government machine.
That said, I don't think we should keep them and this change is a good one, but they're not really a thing many people have been particularly worried about for a while. We could do to get rid of the Lords Spiritual as well (aka religious leaders) but again, they only get 26 seats and they commonly don't even vote on principle.
As far as British governmental reforms go the only one that matters - and probably least likely to happen - is changing our electoral system to proportional representation. A lot of other changes, including this one, is basically just rearranging deckchairs.
Like I said, no matter how dilute, nobody should have privilege or power that comes from their heredity, and while we can’t eliminate most of that we can at least avoid codifying instances of it into law.
Yeah, I think that abolishing hereditary nobility is objectively good on principle, and I would think it's the right thing to do even if it had negative effects. If it has no practical effect on UK politics, so much the better -- then there is nothing to do but benefit from not having something gross pointlessly enshrined in law in a way that doesn't even matter.
I'm genuinely uncertain what you mean. It's not super clear to me what definition you're using for "oligarch" that wouldn't include the bulk of hereditary nobility, and I don't understand what you mean by "intentional". It's definitely intentional that the previous UK law endowed certain people with political positions (even if they are less powerful positions than they once were in the modern day) based solely on their heredity. And if you mean that oligarchs are worse because under your definition of oligarch they're intentionally inserting themselves into politics as opposed to having political power handed to them based on their heredity and nothing else, I simply disagree with you.
OK so to clarify, people who have chosen to get rich and then chosen to use that money to gain and wield political power are worse for society than people who were born into having far less power. Business-created oligarchs (cf hereditary ones) explicitly choose to gain and use their power, it's intentional action on their part. Showing up to the House of Lords is intentional as well, to an extent, but perhaps less so, and possibly for better reasons although obviously that depends on the peer in question. There's no sense of noblesse oblige in business - although of course that shouldn't be the basis of a system of government either.
To put it another way, a sleepy Lord on the benches of the upper house or sitting on some obscure committee is far less dangerous to the fabric of the country and it's democracy than a billionaire leaning over the PM's shoulder or worse, as we can literally see happening right now, funding a far right political movement.
It is possible btw that there actually wasn't any law endowing peers with positions in the Lords. It's not called an unwritten constitution for nothing. All sorts of parts of the British political apparatus are nothing more than traditions and unspoken agreements. Surprisingly, it does seem to mostly work.
edit: it's worth adding that many hereditary peers are not rich people. They might own lots of assets in the form of country houses and land, but they are often not rich in usable 'money' (I know the difference between cash and assets in the context of say, Elon Musk). But a business oligarch can sell shares or leverage them for loans but a country house is less useful for that kind of thing. You can't sell a wing. You often can't even sell land that you own on paper but in reality is tied up in family trusts and so on. One of my friends at university was the scion of a hereditary peer and they just lived in a normal house and had normal jobs. They often got bumped on flights and restaurants and so on because of the title attached to their name, but that was as far as it went. I know a current Baronness (created, not inherited) who is very similar.
I'm less concerned with the goodness and badness of individual people who fall into these categories than you seem to think based on your comment. Though I agree that in the current era, extremely wealthy capitalists tend to be the bigger threat than the vestiges of nobility, the system that allows them to do so tends to be the same one that allows ordinary citizens like me to participate in politics -- their outsized influence due to their wealth is a problem, but it's a problem that would require pretty fundamental changes to our society to get rid of it, because the dangers of oligarchs emerge from first principles in a system that doesn't actively combat the influence of generational wealth. It's a complicated problem to even theoretically engineer a system of democratic government that prevents the rise of oligarchs under your definition, much less practically implement one.
The existence of hereditary nobility, on the other hand, is much simpler. Giving someone any power or benefit, even a small amount, based solely on their bloodline is gross and wrong. My impression is that the existence of hereditary peers in the House of Lords was written law insofar as I believe there is mention at least in the Treaty of Union, and there are ofc also a number of acts of parliament from up through the 20th century modifying how hereditary peerages work as well (several of these acts are directly responsible for the decline in the power of hereditary peers and the House of Lords in general, which is how we're even in a position where their seats are as perfunctory as they are). But whether the law(s) that resulted in peers having any political power at all were written or unwritten, their existence in practice was fundamentally unjust. If, as you state, very little political power is granted to hereditary peers and they don't matter much for British politics, then there is nothing simpler than getting rid of their direct political influence by no longer giving them seats in parliament for life -- as, indeed, it appears is happening now.
That they had less power to actually affect British politics directly through their seats on the House of Lords thanks to various earlier acts decreasing their power probably does decrease the urgency in changing things, perhaps, but it doesn't change the fact that hereditary peers existing at all is fundamentally wrong. It should not exist in a modern society on principle, and I'm glad that the UK is abolishing it. Removing their explicit political power like this cannot remove all political power from the nobility, of course, as many (but as you note, not all), retain wealth and/or other political influence, but that wraps back around to the same problem we have with oligarchs. As much as I would love to see the UK abolish capitalism, which would definitely have a much more powerful effect than this change will, I must concede that it's not nearly as simple as abolishing hereditary political power (and this act doesn't even fully do that, of course, as abolishing the monarchy would be a lot more contentious).
Ultimately the existence of a more harmful thing doesn't mean we can't get rid of a less harmful thing that is also unjust. Just because I have a serious chronic illness doesn't mean I can't go to get a wonky mole removed. Years of incremental progress have resulted in the mostly-irrelevance of hereditary peers in the House of Lords we see today, and the last step is to get rid of them like the vestigial thing they are now.
Reading this and largely agreeing with both you and @mat, as I think you’re actually more or less agreeing with each other, I read the original line you quoted to mean:
I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that hereditary rule is anything other than morally abhorrent, and I don’t think anyone’s saying it shouldn’t be abolished - but from a purely practical perspective, the individual you end up with in a hereditary position is kind of a biased random choice. Each person filling the seat is their own individual in a way that’s not directly correlated with any specific set of qualities.
Compare that to the billionaires who influence politics, and there’s an incredibly strong selective pressure towards ruthlessness, selfishness, grandiosity, and a whole bunch of other qualities that are terrible in a position of power.
I disagree that there is no correlation with specific qualities involved in hereditary nobility. I don't think that's what we observe in practice at all, and even if we discard the influence being raised in a particular environment has on a person, the goodness or badness of hereditary nobility has nothing to do with the personality of any given noble and everything to do with their material interests. A nobles personality may have mattered more when they had more unchecked power, but of course that's also true for any individuals with inordinate power in an unjust society. An individual king can be better or worse in terms of how he manages the kingdom and treats his subjects, but the existence of better kings doesn't contradict the evil in directly endowing an individual with power based on who their parents are. The same is true on a smaller scale for nobility. Even if everything you say about their personalities compared to modern billionaires is true, and much of it might be, a political system that must rely on their personal benevolence as individuals or worse, as a class, is fundamentally wrong and that's true even if the amount of power they have in practice is extremely small. It is good to abolish unjust systems like this even if the effect is tiny.
I also think the parallels between these modern oligarchs and the nobility back when they did have much more power than they do today is being overlooked. They differ a lot less than it seems -- oligarchs are nigh-universally recipients of generational wealth, for instance. There are differences between modern late capitalism and the feudalism from which nobility arose, but there is a lot fundamentally in common there. The only reason modern hereditary nobility is so much less harmful than modern capitalist oligarchs is because they have less power, not because of any inherent quality that makes nobility less bad all else being equal. And they only even have less power because they have been gradually having their power limited and stripped from them over the course of centuries, something that abolishing their seats in Parliament is a part of.
I'm all for doing the same thing with capitalist oligarchs, for what it's worth! I'm all for democratic socialism if we can pull it off. We're just not nearly as far along in the process of stripping away their unjust power, as is probably to be expected, given that hereditary nobility does predate capitalism.
I mean... yeah, pretty much with you! I don't know, maybe I'm misreading your tone, maybe we're missing each others nuances, I guess I feel like what you're saying has the sound and shape of a disagreement but the things you're saying are more or less the same as what I'm saying and what I think @mat was saying.
It's not about making any excuses for heredity as a system, or suggesting that good kings can somehow justify it as a practice - they obviously can't. It's just an observation that the chances of a given individual who actively seeks power through wealth being the right person to wield it, especially with the preconditions on gaining that wealth and power in our current system, are even lower than the chances of an individual with power arbitrarily thrust upon them being the right person to wield it.
I agree with that last point as stated, but I don't think that hereditary nobility is as arbitrary as just bestowing power randomly would be, for instance. I think oligarchs and nobility have a lot more in common with each other in this respect. I think this is especially true in terms of their material interests as classes, which are I think the most important part on a practical level for us plebs, but I think even the cultural environment and background in which they grow up and move through during their lives has a lot in common that absolutely influences one's personality and worldview. They aren't exactly the same by any means, but there is absolutely a huge amount of overlap at minimum, and I think their similarities can inform us in how we approach them.
I'm sorry if my comments are coming off as too argumentative, though. When I first read mat's initial comment it essentially came across to me as defending hereditary nobility as not being all that bad because it isn't as bad as oligarchs and they don't have much concrete political power in the UK anymore. That was probably a little less charitable than I could've been, but the comment about this change being "rearranging deck chairs" was in particular something that bothered me, because I don't think abolishing something that is abhorrent on principle is pointless, even if its negative effects on the world are no longer very strong. I've also seen in other contexts similar arguments about their low amount of practical political power or limited exercise of their powers in practice used as an argument against getting rid of monarchial institutions altogether, and while mat did not say this, those experiences led me to view the comment in that light when it described the changes here as not really mattering that much.That's why my comments focused on what they did initially. Based on your comments, I definitely think we agree with each other on the major points.