mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (09/23/83)
England hasn't been ruled by the House of Lords since te days of Elizabeth I (about 400 years ago). She had an awful lot of trouble trying to persuade the Commons to give her money to pay for defence against the Spanish Armada etc. Granted, at that time and for a long time thereafter (discounting the Commonwealth period), Lords had quite a big say in running England (later the United Kingdom as well). Lords haven't had much power as a group (politically, anyway), for over a hundred years. Nowadays, they can't reverse most decisions of the Commons, or (I think) even delay money bills. Another point, Most members of the House of Lords (at least active members) are no longer hereditary. The Labour (i.e. socialist) government a few years back decided that it would be a good idea to make the Lords useful, and started creating what they call "Life Peers", who are sometimes political hacks, but more often experts in something that can be useful to the country. The United Kingdom is sometimes socialist, sometimes not. Certainly it isn't ruled by socialists at present, and it looks as though they may well be out of power for a very long time. But politics is funny, isn't it! If we start using terms like "democracy", "socialism", "oligarchy" and so forth very precisely, we will have to invent new ones to describe the way real countries are actually governed. In my books, Britain is as close to a democracy as exists among major countries, despite being a monarchy and having a strong class structure. It has other problems, but lack of political power for the masses is not one of them. Martin Taylor