“Appalled and embarrassed” – that is how Liberal Democrat peer and Constitutional Affairs Spokesperson Paul Tyler described his reaction to the attitude and behaviour of some members of the House of Lords:
I have been appalled and embarrassed by the number of Peers, even including a few former Cabinet Ministers, who use the place as a convenient private club, with good parking and subsidised catering. They never speak or even ask a question, let alone contribute to a debate.
His comments were made when discussing the publication of the Consultation on Members Leaving the House, which looked as the views of peers as part of a review to identify options for allowing people to leave the House of Lords other than through death or misconduct.
As Paul pointed out, with the use of block capitals, underlining and an exclamation mark, there are 79 peers who did not turn up (let alone speak or vote) even once in the 2009-2010 Parliamentary session. There are some very rare cases where long-term non-attendance in justifiable, and in the past some peers have spoken out over the lack of an option to retire if their health is no longer up to attending. Yet the overall picture, especially when you extend the figures to include peers who almost never turn up or who turn up but do not participate, is of large numbers who do not carry out the role of being a Parliamentarian in even the most minimally reasonable way.
There are also practical problems about the sheer size of the Lords, as Paul also commented,
The case for reducing the number of Peers is compelling: increasing costs, not enough room for all to get into the Chamber or have desks, excessive size compared with the Commons and (most persuasively) “damage to the credibility of the House occasioned by the large number of members who take no active part in proceedings.”
Lovely dining club – with a Parliament attached
So with Lords reform in the air and promised in the Coalition agreement, you might expect peers to be thinking sensibly about how to leave behind the idea that the upper house is a lovely dining club, great car park and a mark of social distinction – with a Parliament attached.
Alas, not everyone – for the suggestions made by some of Paul’s fellow peers show how out of touch many of them are with the idea that Parliament is a place to work on holding the government to account and governing the country:
In the circumstances I cannot take seriously some of the suggested remedies to this serial non-attendance. Giving retiring Peers “dining rights”, let alone offering the opportunity to speak but not vote, seems totally inappropriate. As for the idea that they should be awarded an honour “on the lines of the armed services’ Long Service, Good Conduct medal”, or that their “life peerage might be converted into a hereditary peerage”, I can only suppose that somebody was taking the mickey.
Yes really: there was the suggestion that the ‘reward’ for not turning up and doing a job in the Lords should be to be given a medal. The Order of the Free Car Park perhaps?
Paul’s pugnacious attitude towards the views of other members of the Lords is very welcome, especially as there is a very strong rearguard action being fought by many members of the Lords against having democracy in the Lords. Or if there really must be democracy having it in as weak and diluted a form as possible – and certainly not moving any time soon to the idea that all members of the Lords should have to do a job of work there.
The political debate within Parliament and within the coalition on this is finely balanced at the moment. It may yet tip either way, as the report last week in the The Times illustrated when it talked of how:
A 300-strong mini Senate would replace the House of Lords under plans being drawn up by Nick Clegg. However, the Deputy Prime Minister is facing setbacks as he tries to deliver constitutional reform. He is having to surrender the Liberal Democrat ambition of a wholly elected Upper House amid stiff resistance from peers in all parties and will struggle to ensure that a reformed second chamber will be mainly elected.
Superficially that sounds a bad news story (and contrasts with the tone of The Times in August – “Absent peers face sack … The least active and least effective peers could be ejected at the end of each Parliament”). However a much smaller house would also up the pressure to only have minimal ‘grandfathering’ – that is letting existing members of the Lords continue in place without having to face elections – as otherwise it’d be a house dominated by the unelected.
As on so many other issues in the Coalition, it is not a simple case of Lib Dems versus Conservatives, because Cameron has no great love of many of the ranks of the Tory peers. In this case it is more a case of MPs versus peers, with honourable exceptions on the peers front including many Lib Dems such as Paul Tyler.
People such as Paul deserve our full support in those debates.
Because, you see, Labour MP and campaign coordinator Andy Burham has said that his party would not be working much for a Yes vote in the AV referendum as,
It would be a recipe for chaos and confusion if Labour candidates were also supporting AV in their literature.
Odd then that it wasn’t a recipe for chaos and confusion in London in 1998 when there was a referendum on the same day as other elections. And I’m sure that the fact that the 1998 referendum was introduced by a Labour government whilst the 2011 one …
Labour MP Michael Meacher is facing the threat of legal action after he took to his blog at the weekend to repeat some of the allegations made by now disgraced Labour MP Phil Woolas despite the court ruling that they were false.
Michael Meacher represents the neighbouring seat of Oldham West and Royton and claimed on his blog on Saturday that, “In the course of the one-week election court proceedings it appears that Watkins himself admitted that he had spent some £200,000 on the election, which is 7 times above the maximum permitted limit.”
Yet the court judgement (which appeared before Michael …
The law gives very broad scope to contentious and aggressive claims, partly because – as Arthur Balfour succinctly put it when pushed to expand the law in 1905, “It is evidently not easy to go further, if only because of the difficulty of distinguishing between the mis-statements which are due to malice and those which are due to mere stupidity.”
The offence was introduced in 1895 with, until then, the only offence under election law regarding false statements about candidates being if you falsely claimed that someone had pulled out as a candidate.
It is worth considering what, however, would be the position if even this narrow legal offence did not exist. Imagine case, say, of a candidate campaigning to oust a Labour MP and making false claims about the Labour MP being a supporter of terrorism. The Labour MP loses, sues for libel and wins. During the court case it is revealed that the victorious candidate always knew the claims being made about the now ex-MP were false but even so deliberately decided to include them in leaflets distributed during the election.
Without the sort of offence for which Phil Woolas was found guilty the victorious candidate might have to pay up in libel damages but could continue as an MP. (Eagle-eyed readers will have noted by this point that there are some important difference between the Representation of the People Act 1983 and libel law, but they don’t affect this example.) They would be able to continue speaking and voting in Parliament, drawing a Parliamentary salary, accruing a Parliamentary pension and so on for the next few years. Would that be a satisfactory outcome?
Your answer to that determines whether or not the principle of provisions like those in the Representation of the People Act 1983 is right. I think it is – we should give very broad scope to the public getting to determine who wins and loses in elections, but that is not the same as saying that anything goes.
Those who argue otherwise are wrong and, in fairness to Labour, it should be pointed out that the vast majority of the online coverage from Labour bloggers has been to condemn what Phil Woolas did. I also had the experience of listening to Harriet Harman on the radio at the weekend and agreeing with her. She is right that what we know Phil Woolas did has no place in politics even if he manages a successful legal appeal. What puzzles me, however, is that very little new came out during the case. There have been some interesting details – such as the forged diary, the evidence of the Labour Party agent being called “not reliable” by the judges and the complaint about a cat. At heart, however, what we now know Phil Woolas did is what we always knew he did, which makes Ed Miliband’s decision to appoint him not merely a Shadow Minister but one for immigration, all the odder. Hopefully, however, that will soon become no more than a curious political footnote.
As for political campaigning more generally, I don’t think the ruling will have a major impact – nor should it, because the law should only be for exceptional cases. Leafing through the advice I’ve co-authored for candidates on what you should or should not say in political literature (which was quoted in the court case and described by Phil Woolas as “naive”!), there does not look to be anything that needs changing based on this case. In that, there’s nothing new – for when the original provision was brought in by the 1895 act, the Liberal Party’s then election manual, Woodings, was updated to mention this new offence. It rightly noted it but did not make a song and dance about it for it was rightly considered then, as has been the case, to be a provision that only covers unusual and extreme cases. As the Judge put it in the 1911 case which hinged on this offence:
The primary protection of this statute was the protection of the constituency against acts which would be fatal to freedom of election. There would be no true freedom of election, no real expression of the opinion of the constituency, if votes were given in consequence of the dissemination of a false statement as to the personal character of conduct of a candidate.
The law has been in place for 115 years. That Phil Woolas is one of only a very small number to fall foul of it shows not that the law is too broad but that his behaviour was so awful.
Credit, by the way, to the judges for their understanding of how easy it is to find coverage of election candidates online – para 123 of the ruling shows a familiarity with the internet that counters some of the stereotypes about an out of touch judiciary.
Clifford Chance (CC) is set to repeat the first round of its senior partner elections due to a glitch in the firm’s partnership deed.
The unexpected voting re-run has arisen because the magic circle firm’s partnership deed does not state that the contender receiving the least amount of votes in the first round is obliged to withdraw from the race.
All three partners in the running – London finance partner Malcolm Sweeting, German corporate finance partner Daniela Weber-Rey and City tax partner Jonathan Elman – were all asked to reconsider their position after last week’s stalemate, but none chose to
The Australian Parliament building in Canberra is a gem of democratic political architecture. Australia’s capital city was facing the need to expand and replace its existing Parliament building. But where to put the new one? The old one had deliberately been placed at the foot of the hill in Canberra, so that politicians would not be looking down on the public. Now the only suitable free space left was on top of that hill. The solution was clever: chop the top off the hill, build the new Parliament and then stick the top of the hill back on top of …
Kicking off a new series in The Ecologist, earlier today the magazine wrote:
Redoubtable Huhne
But actually, from a purely environmental perspective, it’s hard to stay too depressed because (whisper it) there are some signs that this government may really be serious about its green agenda. The simple presence of the redoubtable Chris Huhne at DECC is cheering for a start: this is a serious and intelligent politician who is showing encouraging signs of knowing how to maneuvre and fight to get what his department wants. DECC didn’t do nearly as badly in the cuts as some had expected; he preserved the
Immigration was one of the issues on which Nick Clegg and David Cameron repeatedly clashed during the general election, so it is no surprise that it has continued to be a source of tension in the coalition. More surprisingly, the fault line in the coalition has not been a simple Lib Dem versus Conservative because many Conservatives are persuaded by the pleas from universities (that they need high fee paying foreign students else the funding higher education would be an even bigger political problem) and from business (that many firms in the UK cannot get the right skilled staff except through immigration).
Last week I talked about the role reversal facing the Liberal Democrats, with the party’s traditional stronger record at political tactics than strategy having been flipped around. In that, and the subsequent post Part 2 of the Nick Clegg reshuffle, I highlighted some tactical communication needs the party must get better at. Given my own habit of pointing out that people should not just criticise but should also offer solutions, here are my own suggestions.
Middle-ranking ministers need to communicate more
The large majority of Liberal Democrat ministers are not in the Cabinet. However, the departmental communication structures are set-up to …
Excellent news about Brighton Green Party councillor Jason Kitcat, who has been cleared of standards charges for posting footage of a council meeting on YouTube (story covered previously by us here and here).
Meanwhile in Scotland, charges against Labour councillor Gilbert Davidson for inappropriate behaviour towards a female colleague (which we briefly covered here) have been dropped.
The Market Research Standards Board (MRSB) has cleared YouGov of all the complaints made about its polling of 16-19 April during the general election – but in so doing has raised a big question about what now counts as ‘ethical’ polling. The MRSB’s ruling gives the green light to pollsters asking questions on behalf of their clients which contain false allegations about a person, even if those allegations have not previously been made in public.
The Market Research Society Code of Conduct (to which YouGov subscribes, along with other British political pollsters), states that “researchers shall be … honest” and …
The following figures show (approximately – see notes below) the number of Liberal Democrat voters from May 2010 who read different newspaper titles:
The Sun: 796,000
Daily Mail: 576,000
Daily Mirror: 396,000
The Times: 340,000
The Guardian: 331,000
Daily Telegraph: 278,000
The Independent: 233,000
Daily Express: 190,000
Daily Star: 136,000
These figures have been calculated from the data provided in The British General Election of 2010 and are based on survey data for newspaper readership, party support and turnout. The newspaper readership figures include people from age of 15 and also adults who are not eligible to vote. Therefore all the figures for individual titles are a little on the …
Party members are unusually lucky with the current contest for President of the Liberal Democrats. It is rare for there to be two credible, high-profile candidates standing at the same time but this time there is a real choice between two such people.
Some differences between Susan Kramer and Tim Farron were obvious from the start of the campaign and are swaying some voters, depending on their views on matters such as how important (or not) it is for one of the party’s most prominent posts to be held by a woman, whether an MP has enough time to do the job, whether a current MP from outside London or an ex-MP from London is more outside the Westminster bubble and so on.
However, two further differences between the candidates have come out clearly during the campaign.
Susan Kramer and Tim Farron were both asked the same ten questions about their bid to be LibDem President and given the option to reply in whatever format and at whatever length they wished. Susan’s answers are below and you can find Tim’s answers here. My own commentary on the answers and race more generally is here.
Susan Kramer and Tim Farron were both asked the same ten questions about their bid to be LibDem President and given the option to reply in whatever format and at whatever length they wished. Tim’s answers are below and you can find Susan’s answers here. My own commentary on the answers and race more generally is here.
1. Many parts of the Bones Commission were deferred until after the 2010 general election. Now that it has happened, what would your plans be for implementing, modifying or mothballing those outstanding parts?
The Bones report was insightful and a lot of thought …
Over the weekend we saw two stories, two prominent Liberal Democrats, two public staking out of positions on issues that are the subject of much debate within the coalition in Whitehall:
David Cameron was warned yesterday by a senior Lib Dem not to delay the introduction of legislation banning non-doms from making donations to political parties in Britain. In a sign of strains within the coalition, Treasury spokesman Lord Oakeshott said there was “absolutely no reason” to delay the legislation. (The Guardian)
and
Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat energy secretary, reiterated his party’s strong opposition to retaining a policy that he had previously
Both of the candidates to be the next Liberal Democrat President have expressed their support for the party retaining a long-term aim of abolishing tuition fees.
Tomorrow Liberal Democrat Voice will publish in full the answers from Susan Kramer and Tim Farron to a set of questions Lib Dem Voice has posed them. Their answers paint two different views on what the role should be of the Party President and how they would approach it. But on several issues they both agree, including on tuition fees:
Do you believe the party should have a long-term commitment to the abolition of tuition fees?
Paul’s got a great set of guest posts lined up already, so do pop back tomorrow to take a read.
This is the last of our little run of experiments with guest editors so if you’ve got any views on how it has gone and whether we should do something similar in future, please comment below.
Welcome to the first and quite possibly last in a new and therefore also probably soon to be axed series: the worst political soundbite of the week. (Not to be confused with the worst political phrase ever.)
Paris is a city generally held in high esteem in Britain: it’s a popular holiday destination, it’s got great food, it’s got the Eiffel Tower, a Doctor Who story was filmed there, it has public transport that seems cheap and spacious compared with our own capital’s underground and so on. All in all, helped of course by the usual grass is greener on …
The more that comes out about how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown behaved (or perhaps more accurately, how Gordon Brown behaved towards Tony Blair) the more you wonder quite what world they were living in. Here, courtesy of The Guardian’s Nicholas Watt, is one of the latest revelations of the sort of behaviour that would get most people the sack but didn’t stop Gordon Brown getting the Premiership:
During tense negotiations over Britain’s EU budget rebate in 2005, the former prime minister became so exasperated with the Treasury that he kidnapped its man in Brussels.
Writing recently in the London Review of Books you talked about how in your view Vince Cable and others in the Orange Book a vision of a “small government”.
I’m confused because it’s true that Vince Cable’s chapter does call for a cap on the maximum that the state can raise in taxation. However, that maximum was set higher than the Labour government was taking in at the time in 2004, several years after they had ‘turned on the taps’ on public expenditure and left previous Conservative Party spending targets well behind.
Over the summer Nick Clegg shuffled round his special advisers having had the benefit of several months experience seeing how government works from the inside. Now it’s the civil service side of his team which is being adapted:
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister, has moved to boost his firepower inside Whitehall by appointing Chris Wormald, the head of the economic and domestic affairs secretariat in the Cabinet Office, as the head of his office.
He is also considering expanding the deputy prime minister’s office by appointing what would, in effect, become his mini-policy unit inside the Cabinet
I only ask, because after the Met Police’s triumphant document that stated it would “Contribute to the step change in the walking experience”, we now have London Mayor Boris Johnson talking of “my role driving forward the Cycling Revolution”.
The Scottish Parliament (Elections etc.) Order 2010 has been tabled in Parliament this week bringing about changes in the law for the Scottish Parliament elections. As it is a Statutory Instrument (SI) it cannot be amended – either it gets Parliamentary approval or it is rejected outright. It is extremely rare for an SI to be rejected and there are no signs that this one will be in that class.
The main changes people can therefore expect for the next Scottish Parliament elections are:
There’s been quite a lot online and in some traditional media in the last few days about how the government is supposedly resurrecting Labour’s plans for online snooping (the cuddly sounding Interception Modernisation Programme). Zoe O’Connell has covered this story well on her blog so here are a couple of quotes followed by a link to her fullstories:
I dropped a note to the Home Office contacts I had, such that they are, asking if what has been announced as part of the Strategic Defence and Security Review was in fact the Interception Modernisation Programme. For those who
Better late than never, it’s worth highlighting Peter Oborne’s thoughtful piece on the politics of coalition which came out last month:
Cameron and his Liberal Democrat partner Nick Clegg have fundamentally changed the nature of British public discourse. For years, mainstream politicians haven’t questioned the dominant orthodoxy that robust argument is incompatible with good government. In particular, this doctrine lay behind New Labour’s humourless apparatus of strong central control. Those who spoke out of turn or questioned official policy were threatened, punished and if necessary eliminated…
We are already starting to take this courteous and civilised method of doing business for granted.
Hopi Sen has blogged thoughtfully several times recently about the risk to Labour of slipping into focusing on the tactics without getting the strategy right. In Labour’s case that means, for example, an undue focus on how to next best shout – “those cuts are awful!” rather than working out how to deal with the public mostly blaming Labour for the need to cut in the first place. Tactical triumphs at PMQs only gets you so far; rebuilding a reputation for economic competence is what is needed to win – as William Hague found in his time as Conservative …
On her blog the Conservative MP Nadine Dorries recently wrote,
For those who may not know – you become a ‘prospective candidate’ from the moment of selection until the legal election period begins which is when you transfer to being a candidate. You cannot be a candidate from selection because if you do call yourself such, the period of time you incurr election expenses kick in. Parliamentary candidates are Prospective Parliamentary Candidates, PPCs from selection until the election is called and then become Parliamentary Candidate from that time for the period of the short campaign. I imagine the same law applies to
Back in July we reported how Britain was set to gain an extra Member of the European Parliament following the Lisbon Treaty. The Electoral Commission has now crunched the numbers using the same rules as previously to allocate MEPs to the different Euro-constituencies and it is West Midlands which comes out with an extra MEP.
Technically the government still has formally to accept the Electoral Commission’s recommendation, but in practice the Commission’s recommendation in this field is what will happen.
David Allen Tristan,
Thanks for the link, which is interesting. Neidle's "taxes people want to raise" are ideas like wealth tax, which Neidle thinks wouldn't work well....
David Allen Peter,
In the 2025-2026 financial year, the UK government is expected to spend approximately £111.2 billion on central government debt interest. This repres...
Peter Martin "If we pumped loads of money into schools and hospitals, and insisted on getting all the money by borrowing rather than taxing, the bond markets would righ...
Tristan Ward @ David Allen
"getting taxes out of our wealthy oppressors is just too hard".
More importantly (possibly) is that it simply would not raise enough money t...
David Allen Where Vince goes wrong, in my view, is the next step. If we can't buck the bond markets, then we have a simple choice. Raise taxes, or accept that we "can't a...
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Good news on political donations?
Conference booked
New chair of North Northamptonshire Council stands down over social media posts
Are Labour going to cross another red line?
David Allen 
Peter Martin 
Tristan Ward 