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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Flooding the Lords with 100s of new peers so several million people can be made poorer doesn’t sound like smart politics
Today, of course, the House of Lords gets to decide whether George Osborne’s controversial tax credits curtailment plan will go forward. Because of the way this is being pursued through Parliament, as a statutory instrument, this is a rare occasion when the Upper House can, if it wants to, block a major part of government policy.
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The problem is democracy, which causes governments to go in for mass bribery, whether we are talking about Tax Credits or the Pensions Triple Lock.
Win-win, so far as I'm concerned.
OWNBPM !!!!!!
When does today’s vote take place?
If the Lords do block this then Osborne should bring the measure back in the Budget.
I don't buy that the public doesn't support the measure. Most will have no idea of the details and I expect that the question could easily be phrased differently to produce an result supportive of the principles.
The coalition of losers and handwringers in the Lords certainly have a right to their say and I don't think that Osborne has been tactically astute in using the method he has to introduce the change. All the same, the government should hold firm. There will be plenty within the Tory party watching to see if Osborne has the steel necessary of a leader.
As an aside, does anyone know how the relative sizes of our two chambers compare internationally? There's a rumour that Sunil has a graph but he refuses to share it.
I suspect that some element of transitional relief will be necessary but again that is not the Lord's concern. At the moment the Commons have rejected that, twice. That is the end of the matter until the government itself decides to think again.
This thread does rather presuppose that Osborne will run for the leadership. I am still not convinced. He appears to be willing to do unpopular things he believes to be right (even though he then frequently changes his mind) which may be the attribute of a leader, but not of an ambitious politician. Look at Brown, who would only ever do things that he thought would buy him votes (e.g. tax credits, of course)! Or alternatively, Labour need to retain just over half their seats in order to remain the official opposition. Under Corbyn, that is a more realistic goal.
FWIW, I think it is the wrong direction. I'd introduce all of the Beechcroft reforms, and leave the minimum wage unchanged. I'd alter tax credits into a 'negative income tax'.
A 'negative income tax' was the trendy topic when I was an economics student 45 years ago. The idea is not that dissimilar to 'tax credits'. The up-side is that a negative income tax is an efficient, fair and cheap way of directing welfare cash to the most needy. Properly structured, it is possible to minimise the effect of the 'poverty trap'. Further, unlike most welfare expenditure, it does not prevent people managing their own resouces. The '16 hours/week' nonsense would be eliminated.
Rather enjoyed the race. Almost ran into the start of Homeland, though
But we won't get it, as the politicians want to reform it to their own advantage, and therefore no agreement can ever be reached.
Instead, it's time to convert it into the one organisation that can truly do its job well as a revising chamber.
A house of experts.
The Lords does a pretty good job at quite a low price.
But the ones we need to get rid of are the useless Ministers who were chucked upstairs to get them out of the way.
It's a pity Corbyn has been such a distraction. This new Tory government unencumbered by the civilizing influence of the Lib Dems is the closest I remember to the days of Thatcher
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/10/25/refugees-germany-fight_n_8383520.html?utm_hp_ref=uk
On related matters, why are schools like this allowed to exist in the UK?
Tablighi Jamaat is an ultra-conservative and separatist group which believes that Muslims should not integrate into non-Muslim society. Its current UK headquarters, in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, includes a school whose pupils are banned from watching televison, playing music or speaking to outsiders. The Newham mosque was to have been its new headquarters, with residential facilities, a library, visitor centre and sports centre as well as the mosque.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11953462/Islamic-group-blocked-from-building-Britains-biggest-mosque-in-London.html
All quite incredible. It was obvious on the evening of the June budget that the tax credit thing was a disaster-in-waiting. I don't know why it has taken so long for MPs to catch up with what was being proposed.
As Rawnsley was saying in Observer yesterday, Osborne is in an enormous hole and is still digging. IMHO his future as a credible leadership candidate stands on the brink this month.
Most MPs do not understand finance or welfare, because they have never experienced it and think only losers claim it, and they never bother to vote anyway. The last Prime Minister we had - and I think I am right in saying one of only two in the twentieth century* - who had an extended period out of work and reliant on benefits was Major. They seem incapable of understanding how far the welfare net has now spread over successive governments (starting with Thatcher's, remarkably) and how complex and difficult sorting it out will be. Not to mention how much political pain could be involved.
*The other was Ramsay Macdonald, but when he was out of work there were not many benefits aside from union/charity payments.
"Great opinion piece in today's Times by Matt Ridley. Lib Dem and Labour MPs should respect the will of the people "
Respecting the will of the people is nothing but a soundbite. The Tory prospectus for government never mentioned removing tax credits which surely should have been a central plank of their re-election campaign.
Though it's a pity it has to be the HoL it's important that someone tries to keep these charlatans honest
Whatever the actual position the public is clearly of the opinion that many “hard-working familes” where, for no fault of their own the breadwinners are on low wages will be penalised now, with something less than a promise and more than a suggestion, that the shortfall will be made up “soon"
A crap finish to a brilliant sporting weekend.
That's why in a two-party democracy a strong opposition is vital. A good opposition (remembering Tony Blair's and leaving aside my personal dislike of him) can actually achieve a lot by keeping the government on its toes - I seem to remember Tony Blair even got Major, admittedly at a moment of particular weakness, to add two bills to a Queen's Speech. At the moment, we are further from having such opposition than we have been at any time since the 1930s. That's not good.
The manifesto mentioned 12bn of welfare cuts. Promise of welfare cuts leads to welfare cuts shocker.
What if reform actually happened? As the polling stands, they'd lose influence in the Lords and have as little as they possess currently in the Commons.
I wonder if the best reform might be a Year Zero, with hereditaries and crossbenches remaining, and all party chaps and ladies removed. Then 200-300 would be appointed (or re-appointed) to function on behalf of parties.
Anyhoo, as a long standing supporter of electoral reform, we need to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a wholly elected Senate.
Notable how the Government are trying to make this all about the constitutional aspect, and the Opposition all about the impact on the losers. Very clear battle lines being drawn.
Agreed @TheScreamingEagles, it is rather an amusing irony.
They should definitely do this
Tories are planning a humiliating slapdown to their former Liberal Democrat partners by refusing to stop Parliament for their party conference.
A senior Conservative told the Standard ministers were questioning if it was worth halting debates for a party that has “just eight MPs”.
http://bit.ly/1WI0ffp
EDIT - of course if you're just talking about democracies you may have a point. I'm not sure I want to live in a state like North Korea or China!
Don't create hundreds of new Peers, just abolish the Lords completely.
That said, I was taking another look at the now rock solid Tory majorities across the South created by the collapsed Liberal support. This will likely continue providing:
- Labour are led from the left
- Lib Dems are not an orange Booker party
I.e for the next couple of elections at least.
Fortress South electoral strategy really paid off with Farron/Corbo victories.
When is he going to start getting the sort of treatment that was meted out to Nick Clegg throughout the whole of the last Parliament?
https://twitter.com/RobSkilbeck/status/651109773690163204
David Davis: Lords right to fight government over tax credit cuts
http://bit.ly/1Wd7aAr
Just be thankful that the double-summer time experiment didn't last too long - otherwise you would have lost TWO hours.
(PS - surely you mean you GAINED an hour yesterday, borrowed from Saturday? It's in the spring that we lose one.)
Mr. Clipp, Labour ruled out increasing income tax, and raising tuition fees. It did both.
Case closed.
Less than half.
We should harness it as a power source. Who needs nuclear energy.
But Cameron is lucky, and Clegg isn't.
"No, it's not caused by Labour activists. It's caused by Osborne seeing what he can get away with. What is being caused by Labour activists is Osborne being able to get away with the political equivalent of murder on a regular basis. You saw exactly the same thing in the 1980s under Thatcher, when Labour were too busy sorting out Militant to point out her more ghastly mistakes, and with Blair over Iraq in 2003, when the Tories had elected a rather dim nobody to lead them instead of somebody forceful and independently minded who might have asked awkward questions and held the government's feet to the fire over WMDs, post war planning, the leadership of the American forces, etc."
You almost make a case for an unelected House of lords. A crap opposition as in the examples you mention and there's no one to mobilize public opinion. A good example of a strong opposition rousing public opinion was the poll tax which was not only reversed but also led to the sacking of Thatcher .
The conservatives on here remind me of those people singing in 1997 when Blair was ordained, and we all know how that ended. It will go the same way for Cameron, it always does.
If anything, the latter deserve more excoriation than the former, who can't help being thick.
This is especially true at times when the government feels it can pass laws quickly without proper oversight because there is a weak opposition.
The answer, as I've said many times, is to convert the HoL into a House of Experts, with members being chosen by various sectors.
The only downside is that they'd probably show up the level of 'debate' in the HoC.
He's very good at politics.
As someone once said, the harder I work the luckier I get.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34635206
"In addition, Prince Mohammed said the "intense criticism" of the state's response to the Syrian refugee crisis had been "unfair, as it failed to acknowledge that Saudi Arabia has taken in over 2.5 million displaced Syrians"."
Is that true?
The problem with the House of Lords is not that I like it - it's an anachronistic joke - but that I have in the past struggled to think of anything that would be genuinely and unambiguously better. However, if we're going to have peers randomly appointed to get government business through over perfectly legitimate reservations, we might as well not have it at all. So maybe @antifrank has the best point when he said that we needed something like this to force the issue of reform back onto the agenda.
This is the policy support version of the triple lock.
But for stunts like this trying to block entirely financial measures based on a technicality rather than trying to revise laws ... that is absurd. Our elected chamber passed it already.
If we were to adopt the inane idea of some here and go for a PR HoL then it would have even worse quality MPs than our Commons already does. Lords solely there based on the strength of a party vote with no personal vote at all are just going to be party apparatchiks but worse with a so-called "mandate". Unacceptable.