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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The tax credits defeat happened because the Tories are still paying a price for not winning a majority in 2010
Whenever I see animal welfare posters like the one above I think of the Coalition agreement of May 11 2010 – the day that David Cameron became PM after reaching an agreement with Nick Clegg and his team.
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And no matter how much Kippers wish it, Glenn ain't dead.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tom-watson/11956780/Tom-Watson-confused-claims-over-VIP-child-sex-abuse.html
Lords reform has been on the agenda for decades, but no-one can ever agree on what form any changes should take. The first job is to understand what the Lords are for, then how they should be formed.
It is clear in the meantime that Corbyn's Labour party intend to challenge all and any convention that's not explicitly codified if it means destabilising the government.
Dare I suggest that if Cameron finds himself as PM for a couple of years after the EU referendum, a Constitutional Convention would be a useful exercise that could also bring forward suggestions regarding English democracy at the same time.
A 24-year-old who claimed benefits for two years said it was the government's fault he remained unemployed.
Daniel Shaw from Manchester said it's 'ridiculous' how much money he was getting in handouts - £16,000 a year - and it made him less inclined to seek full-time work.
He was even forced to survive on food banks after he gambled his entire handout away in a casino.
'As it stands I am earning more now than someone on minimum wage in a shop,' he told Channel 5 documentary Benefits, which airs this evening.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3286037/Jobless-man-used-food-bank-blowing-benefits-casino-blames-government-giving-ridiculous-money-one-go.html#ixzz3pifj6F6c
That is simply not true.
Food Banks are actually quite hard to access and are pretty much limited to those who have had a benefits sanction and asylum seekers. A referral can only be made by a Job Centre or certain specific charities and none of them will refer someone on the basis of "I gambled it away".
The benefits system is broken but these sort of lies don't help fixing it.
You only addressed the one point that would in some way make the rest of the information broadcast as also unreliable. There is another point to keep in mind, the what should perhaps happen does not.
The series Benefits St showed clearly claimants buying beer and cigarettes before turning up at such centres to collect food because they were short of / had no money. I see no difference in that and gambling away money unless the recipient is asked specifically what each penny was spent on. Obviously not because when they came out from the centre they lit up.
It was the main reason why food vouchers were discussed during that period as an option because people working hard were angry at keeping others in "beer, fags and flat-screens "
As this was a rebellion then in PB terminology the thread header should actually read
" A Traitorous pig dog is for life, not just for Christmas"
http://d.gu.com/CYtd64
They won't be welcomed by those who wish these people would just evaporate.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/11956396/Tax-credits-the-House-of-Lords-is-undermining-democracy.html
It seems like as good a way as any to bog the government down in an irrelevant sideshow.
I'm sick of him wailing from afar, he ran off to take the money, if he had anything about him he'd have stayed on and helped his brother fight an election.
LOL.
Even so the identification that a large number have sold up and paid it all to traffickers to get to Europe should be worrying for all. As they stated they have no intention of going back and who can really blame them. The lines of people trudging through Europe at the moment as a result of Merkels folly is never ending. We should hope one day many will return and rebuild but it now seems unlikely.
So what do wee do? It is inevitable fences will not keep them out so some clearing station and European "Ellis Island" will be needed. This may stem the flow temporarily but the argument put forward that this clearing will give the applicant there chances of acceptance or not is quite naive. If little chance then back to the traffickers and trudging northwards but still come they will.
When they look back on this then the monumental folly of Merkels we will take all will be laid bare. We have a duty to help refugees but we have all sorts in this bundle and we are simply importing unrest and trouble for the next generation if we do not carefully vet these people and select but Is that a fair approach though. It's a mess and could end Europe as we presently know it and this country because the infrastructure to support these additions is just not there. We should help but governments must also look after and protect our own.
Admittedly the Lords often eventually backed down, but as you sow .......
There just would not be enough popcorn to go around
I still think that the only sensible course is to abolish the whole thing. I accept that this might require reform of the way the Commons passes legislation so there is more meaningful scrutiny (I think evidential hearings on the impact of proposed legislation as per the Scottish Parliament is a good way to go) and additional resources but none of these technical difficulties justify keeping the absurdity that is the HoL.
The government is going to have to find some additional hundreds of millions as a result of last night's votes. Lords expenses are the obvious place to start.
Tbh both the left and the right have ideas that could save some cash, if I was in charge I'd cut the lot.
I don't think that will be noticed behind the headlines which will, rightly, be about the bloodied state of Osborne's nasal implement. But given how many of Jeremy Corbyn's problems are currently coming from the Lords, might not he be moving towards its outright abolition as well? (I am assuming he has always wanted to reform it, because that is one of the comparatively few sensible policies the Loony Left has never ditched.)
Did he get the memo about the 800k flowing into Germany (alone) this year?
I also see he advocates settling a further 2 million in Europe (over the next 5 years) at a rate of 400,000 a year. He cites “the tumultuous convulsions inside significant parts of the Islamic world." and points out that "30 to 40 nations that can’t meet the basic needs of their citizens and contain ethnic, political and religious differences among their people..”
And he proposes absolutely nothing to address it. His one and only solution is to massively expand legal routes to migration and settlement.
It's razor sharp judgement like this that led him to not becoming leader of the Labour Party, yet alone Prime Minister.
I expect Cameron will appoint another 40-50 Tory Lords as soon as he's able.
And provided Osborne with his campaign material for 2020.
A coalition of god-botherers, Lib Dems and welfare addicted Labour voting this down will do George no harm at all.
A chamber of 400, with a 5% threshold across contested seats to keep out the headbangers (the BNP) and allocated in proportion after that, would be neither stupid nor unrealistic. It would be unambiguously democratic and would mean every vote would once again count for something.
The big snag, of course, is that the chamber might claim more direct democratic legitimacy than the Commons. But that could be resolved by both houses sitting in Grand Session (together) in the event of any dispute that lasted more than twelve months (which is what was supposed to happen in the nineteenth century - it should have happened in 1911 but the Liberals would have been outvoted, so they fought shy of it and came up with the flooding idea instead). Or it could be resolved by having 100 non-party appointees added to the crossbenches as unpaid legislators although that system would be wide open to abuse.
his father had lots of useful contactshe went to an inner city school and they were trying to help people from underprivileged backgrounds to go to university? This clearly includes the sons of Marxist millionaires who can't do basic maths. It was very noble of them to make sure that such disadvantages did not count against him.Mind you I have to admit that mathematics has never been my strongest suit either. I prefer the literary subjects (History, English, Philosophy). I am almost as bad at mathematics as Bertrand Russell was!
As antifrank says the first question is what the HoL is for. So far I have not seen a purpose that justifies its existence (and I agree with you that it has been an unacceptable source of corruption/patronage in the past).
As for a second chamber - well, I think a second chamber to balance the first would be a good idea. It allows controversial measures a little more time to be considered, and sometimes, sent back to be rethought, like this one, or some of Tony Blair's draconian civil liberties laws.
I think that the committee stage simply isn't strong enough. Thinking of Scotland, there are an awful lot of bills that would have benefitted from more scrutiny and some fairly major revision - Police Scotland springs to mind, as do the NHS reforms, or their Higher Education measures that are actually (almost unbelievably) more inept and discriminatory than the English equivalents, although not quite as hopeless as the Welsh ones. But there was no independent second chamber, so they didn't get it. The results in many cases have not been pleasant.
Beg to differ. The cause of the vote was juvenile Lib Dems and short-sighted Labour peers.
Labour will, almost certainly, one day form another government. Do they really want to set a precedent whereby the House of Lords votes down finance matters?
http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21654084-house-lords-aged-overcrowded-and-increasingly-effective-democratic-embarrassment
However, Mike's missing the bigger point. The Lords have no right or ability to say 'No'; they can only say 'Yes but ...', so yesterday, they said 'Yes but not until you've thought about it again', or perhaps 'Yes but not for a few months and when it's in a proper money Bill'.
Fact is that it's true that the Tories didn't win 2010 outright and there are inevitable consequences from that, but they came a damn sight closer to winning than Labour did, never mind the Lib Dems. While the Lords can create trouble, it will still be Conservative policy which gets implemented and Conservative laws which get passed. If Labour or the Lib Dems want to feel better about minor amendments in the Lords, fine; after all, the Conservatives didn't win an absolute majority of votes (though nearly as many as Lab+LD at the last election: 36.9 vs 38.3), and the Lords is there as a check on excessive power from the Commons.
Of course, if we're going to play missed opportunities then had the Lib Dems not thrown a strop over boundaries and sacrificed their Lords reform to block the changes, then the likelihood is that the new Lords/Senate, elected and with a democratic mandate, would have a greater authority to block the Commons and quite possible greater actual power to do so too.
Congratulations to the happy couple, whether she is getting hitched to the paper or the one who merely looks good on paper.
And absolutely fascinating that so many Tory posters on here are now calling for the abolition of the House of Lords. It was the self-interest of Tory MPs that prevented reform of the House of Lords in the last Parliament, combined with Labour playing silly games, as usual. True that government ministers backed the proposals that Clegg put forward - but then these were a Coalition measure, not a Lib Dem one.
So what we have now is Labour demonstrating its hypocricy for all to see, and the Tories in a tizzy about the future of one of the institutions closest to their hearts. And the Lib Dems standing up for ordinary people and strengthening their argument for constitutional reform.
I think the Lib Dms emerged from yesterday´s events as the clear winners.
King Cole, no.
For a start, Clegg withdrew his proposal. Secondly, his proposal was demented indefensible tosh. One-off 15 year terms combine the worst aspects of democracy (pandering to the electorate for votes rather than taking a long-term, national interest view as hereditaries/crossbenchers might) and appointments (no way for the people to vote out a particular idiot because once they're there, they're there until the stupidly long term runs out).
And if we had some great lords, they'd be booted out automatically. It was an almost hilariously stupid suggestion by Clegg.
Or are Liberal Democrats happy to not take the credit and just have a warm feeling?
If we're not going to go with election for the upper house (and we should - ideally rolling terms like the US Senate, perhaps one-third every three years), then the proportions should be based on a party's average support over a longer period. I think 15 years would be about right. So parties which suffer slumps would see their entitlement drift down, which through death and resignations, their membership in the Lords would mirror.
I think it was the late Lord Onslow who commented in about 2005 that he expected one day his grandson would stand up in the Lords and say, 'my Lords, nobody would have invented this stupid system if they were starting from scratch. But it's here, and it works, and nobody can agree on anything better, so let's keep it.' We might well still be having this argument in 2115 if any of us are left (apart from the indestructible @JackW, of course)!
Abolish the lot.
Yup, it's our old "ethical versus realistic" dilemma all over again
But my intincts were right. The Tories have reverted. They can't help themselves. Theresa May has shown herself at conference to be a miserable right-wing Frankenstein even Maggie couldn't have invented and Osborne has attacked the poor with a malice that almost seems personal.
But if it is correct that lower-paid workers are set to lose £1300 a year from the proposed working-tax-credit cuts then it's right it's been stopped.
Lower wage workers can't be punished like that, not when the top rate of tax was cut from 50p to 45p,
Regardless of your political viewpoint, it just isn't fair.
I suspect most working class types (like me) accept that the finances need to be balanced, but hitting those people who jump out of bed each morning to work hard for a low wage isn't the way forward.
Osborne is smart enough to come back with something fairer and better and I expect that he will.
David Davis is correct.
In a way, Labour has helped the Tories here. By 2020, this will all be forgotten.
In space, no-one can hear you ignore the Salisbury Convention.
Watching this from afar the debate is all about emotions rather than facts. Some facts and figures would add enormously to the discussion.
Those in favour of the changes seem very quiet on the actual figures while those against appear to be cherry picking absolute numbers ("£1,500 a year worse off") while ignoring the totality of the situation ie. Part time worker sees their total income reduce from £30k to £28.5k, which is hardly most people's idea of the Dickensian poverty that it is suggested the reforms will bring.
Actually, I think that had the Lords been elected by PR then it would have weakened the case for doing likewise for the Commons: the two Houses should be composed differently - what benefit is there to producing an identikit version of the Commons in another place? To have one House based on geographic representation and the other on voter representation gives balance.
On Mike's subject of missed opportunities, this was the real one for the Lib Dems. Lords reform, including elections by PR there, would have gone through if that, rather than the AV referendum which ultimately delivered nothing, had been the trade-off for boundary reform.
Labour are not concerned about how much people suffer from ill-considered Tory policies, they just want to position themselves as the opposition to the Tories. Their objective is to get elected, not to change things.
Life is tough out here for lower-wage workers. You can't call yourself the party of the workers and then make them survive on less money. Not without serious political fallout.
The proposal itself, of party lists, is about the least democratic way of electing politicians and the reason why FPTP works well - any system of election has to be capable of kicking out politicians, list systems mean that those elected are decided by who sucks up the most to the current party leadership over the wishes of the electorate.
My preferred PR system is open list plus (i.e. open lists but with an option to vote for party as well, where those votes count towards party share but where candidates are still elected according only to their individual tallies), but I'd be comfortable with either standard open list or STV as well.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/oct/26/experts-urge-tories-to-phase-in-planned-reform-of-tax-credit-system#comment-62189779
Could they have been down to zero with it? Perhaps, but we'll never know. Personally, I think they'd have had at least two - some form of Westmorland and Norfolk North.
Polluting the sun with politicians - even cuddly Lib Dems - would just lead to it try to fuse hydrogen and bullshit. Any adherent to string theory knows this is impossible. Therefore the sun will start to swell as it forms into a red dwarf, enveloping first Mercury, then Venus, and finally Earth.
Please, for God's sake, keep politicians away from the sun.