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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2022-11-20 11:54 pm (UTC)AIUI there are two reasons for having a second chamber.
The classic House of Lords reason is to have a revising chamber where unelected but seriously-minded people (ideally retired politicians with no skin in the game any more, or domain specialists) look at laws carefully and say to the House of Commons "did you actually mean this?". This is supposed to be the "nobody would have designed a system like this, but it turns out that it's really useful" genius of the UK constitution. Given that recent governments have packed the Lords to get a majority, and we still have hereditary peers and bishops, arguably the Lords no longer serves this purpose.
The other reason is to have a chamber which is not purely democratically elected, to act as a check on the democratically-elected lower house. This is a checks and balances and "we really have to agree a whole lot", although depending on the power of the upper house the impact can be limited. In France, the Senate is indirectly elected by local authority (council, département, region) officials, and tends to be more rural and right-wing (but I repeat myself) than the Assemblée Nationale. It doesn't have much power other than brief annoyance, though. In the US, the Senate is prestigious (fewer members so each member gets proportionally more media exposure; government and legal appointees have to be voted in by the Senate), and there's a saying that every Senator sees a future President of the US when they look in a mirror.
I suspect that Gordon Brown's plans are for a second chamber which is deliberately (a) elected somewhat proportionally locally, so to give smaller parties (e.g. Greens, Mebyon Kernow, but I suppose also Respect unfortunately) a say, but also (b) deliberately non-proportional at a state-wide level, so to favour non-England nations and non-SE England regions. This feels like a stable-door way of saying "OK, but the next time we think of doing something as stupid as Brexit, we need everyone to agree".
Either way, while I take your point that if we have some kind of PR, there's no need for two chambers, this isn't what's being proposed now.