Legislation for gay marriage is approved in the UK House of Commons!

[Tiberius]

Can someone from Britain explain the House of Commons/House of Lords branches of Parliament to me? Feel free to PM me to avoid topic drift on this thread. Just curious. Thanks.

The House of Commons is the elected part of government. It is made up of 650 Members of Parliament who are elected every 5 years in a general election (or in a by-election if one dies/resigns) by the unfair First-Past-The-Post method. The party which wins a majority in these elections gets to form a cabinet, with the party leader usually in the position of Prime Minister. In the 2010 election, no party got a majority, so the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats formed a coalition government, with the Conservative leader as Prime Minister, and the Liberal Democrat leader as Deputy Prime Minister (and other cabinet positions divided amongst both parties).

The House of Commons debates and votes on legislation, presided over by the Speaker, who is an elected MP but who has sworn to be non-partisan and has to resign from his/her party before taking the position. The current Speaker was elected as a Conservative.

The House of Lords is the vastly undemocratic and unsecular branch of government, formed of an unfixed number of Lords who are appointed by leaders of parties and also the Queen. 26 of the Lords are the "Lords Spiritual", who are bishops and archbishops of the Church of England (hence...unsecular). Most Lords are appointed for life, or until they resign. The House of Lords also has the power to veto some of the bills passed by the House of Commons (but, the House of Commons can also sometimes overrule the veto). There are a number of bills that for various reasons, the House of Lords cannot vote on, but they are still influential in decided a lot of law.

So there you have it, we have a parliament made up of unfairly elected MPs, who in turn appoint a number of unelected and sometimes more powerful Lords, who in turn can veto a lot of bills passed by the House of Commons, but are also limited in their power. The Lords also contains 26 bishops of the Church of England, disregarding people of other religions (who have to be appointed to get in). Oh, and the entire parliament serves an unelected monarch who in her spare time likes to have tea with dictators.