House of lords

Sunday

Alex Massie

To A Foulkes

George – now Lord – Foulkes is taking his leave of Holyrood and returning to the comfort of the red benches in the House of Lords. It’s fair to say that Foulkes’s ability to wind up nationalists has not endeared him to SNP supporters. Still,  Lallands Peat Worrier is quite right that the national bard would, were he still drawing breath, have felt the need to mark this heavyweight departure with some stirring lines in the old Scots demotic. Happily LPW was on hand to take dictation. It begins: To a Foulkes   So ye’re gaun at last, ye Lairdly ferlie? Your impudence protect you sairly! ‘Tis time again for

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Is the United States Senate Broken?

In one sense, yes it is. The Senate may be the world’s most exasperating deliberative body. As with it’s Roman counterpart there’s a growing sense that the Senate has outlived its usefulness, that it can no longer function effectively and that there’s no reason to suppose anything will change for the better. In Washington folk connected to the House of Representatives point out that their enemy is the Senate, not the opposition party. That’s what happens when you have a Republic, not a Democracy. And, as George Packer’s excellent New Yorker article amply demonstrates, the Senate is a ridiculous, infuriating place filled with puffed-up mediocrities unfit to inhabit offices once

Saturday

James Forsyth

Mandelson’s miscalculation

Peter Mandelson’s decision to support Gordon Brown right to the end enabled him to cease being a purely factional figure in the Labour party. The multiple standing ovations he received at the last Labour conference were a recognition of that. As he put it, he was now the prince of stability not darkness. It was easy to see how Mandelson could become one of the elder statesmen of the party. But The Third Man has thrown all this away. Mandelson is once more a highly factional figure. He has admitted that he wouldn’t have stopped his Cabinet colleagues toppling Brown if they could have and that Labour would have done

Monday

David Blackburn

Arise Lord Prescott

It’s John Prescott’s birthday – or Lord Prescott, as he will soon be. How odd of JP to don the ermine, given that he is on record saying that he hates titles, flunkery and ‘flooding’ the House of Lords with appointees – a practice in which he and Blair excelled as it happens.  He appeared on the Today programme this morning to defend his lordly person and was emphatically unintelligible. Listen to it; it’s a classic. You know Prescott’s the EU’s environment ‘rapporteur’? Terrifying.   John Humphrys objected to Prescott’s hypocrisy, but if Prescott doesn’t want to retire from public life then he must sit in the Lords. Which is an argument for

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Hurd weighs in on the 55 percent debate

Plenty of eyes on the Tory grandees at the moment.  I mean, the right of the party isn’t exactly delighted with the LibCon coalition – so the search is on for figureheads to lead the resistance.  Which is why Andrew Neil’s interview with Douglas Hurd on Staight Talk this weekend is worth paying attention to. As it happens, Lord Hurd is quite complementary towards David Cameron and his role in organising the coalition.  Here’s the actual quote: “I think it was a brave thing to do.  It might have gone terribly wrong, but he went straight for it and he was completely straightforward in saying this is what this is,

Thursday

Alex Massie

The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body

Meanwhile, can there be any doubt that the House of Lords remains, despite everything, the finest legislative body in the world? The people who want to put us through yet more elections must be stopped, if only because stuffing the place with more “real” politicians might deprive us of splendid discussions such as this recent set of questions concerning the Mouse Problem plaguing the Palace of Westminster: The Chairman of Committees (Lord Brabazon of Tara): My Lords, the administration is fully aware of the problem with mice in the Palace of Westminster and is taking all appropriate measures to minimise their numbers. We retain the services of an independent pest

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

John Butterfill won’t get a peerage…

…confirms David Cameron, at his monthly press conference.  If you didn’t catch last night’s Dispatches, Butterfill is the Tory MP who said, among other things, that it is “quite likely that I will go to the Lords,” and that this is “another string to my bow as far as you’re concerned”.  More on him from Paul Waugh here.

Sunday

Martin Bright

Cameron Must Show a Ruthless Streak

There is an excellent piece on the Ashcroft affair from Martin Ivens in the Sunday Times today. He quotes a member of Team Cameron: “Why didn’t David just take Ashcroft out and shoot him? His work is done. What’s the point of him hanging about?” Well said. No one has quite got to the bottom of why the Tory lead has shrunk. But one reason might be the sense that David Cameron is not quite as decisive as he ideally should be. He lost his nerve over George Osborne when he became an embarrassment in Corfu and he seems to have lost it again over Ashcroft.  Cameron has modelled his

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Labour’s pursuit of Ashcroft could backfire

I wrote yesterday that Lord Ashcroft’s statement about his tax status should have drawn a “rather neat line under the issue”.  Sure, it’s hardly ideal that someone with such influence in our politics hasn’t been paying UK taxes on much of his wealth (something which could equally be said of Labour donors like Lord Paul and Lakshmi Mittal), and was keeping mysterious about it.  But at least, now, most of the uncertainty surrounding Ashcroft’s position has been removed.  And we have his indication that he will become a full UK taxpayer in due course.   But I hadn’t counted on the tenacity of Labour, who are trying to spin this

Thursday

David Blackburn

The House of Lords at its exceptional best

Archbishop George Carey has his detractors, but his article in the Times is a candid explanation of the ills that unfettered immigration is causing this country. The tone is so frank it shocks; the title reads: ‘Migration threatens the DNA of the nation’. Carey, of course, is not inciting anything as palpably evil as eugenics or as unworkable as uniformity between different ethnic and regional groups; he refers merely to the essence of Britain’s political, religious and social institutions. Society is determined by the health of its institutions, and ours have disintegrated through apathy. Society is broken, though not in the manner that is often assumed. Political Correctness declared discussing

Thursday

Alex Massie

Three Cheers for the House of Lords

Everyone, and not without reason, holds the House of Commons in some degree of contempt. This has provoked any number of proposals for reforming the lower house. One simple, if admittedly difficult and controversial, measure, however would be to grant the House of Lords more power, relative to the Commons, than it currently enjoys. It is hard to see what harm this could do, not least since frustrating the Commons ought to be an objective, not a tactic. And then there’s the splendid nature of the Lords, even now that they’ve been denuded of backwoods hereditary peers. Consider this exchange at this week’s edition of Transport Questions. The matter under

Thursday

David Blackburn

Welcome reforms, but they do not provide the complete answer

Baroness Royall has confirmed the Eames inquiry’s recommendation that the House of Lords has its own standards watchdog, following allegations that four Labour peers offered to amend laws for specific companies in return for substantial sums of cash. Whilst this move is welcome, the more pressing issue is how to redress financial strains on members, which tempted corruption originally. Whilst a separate review will examine the options for a system of financial support, current reforms are merely concentrated prescriptions. James Landale revealed today that the amount claimed for overnight accommodation will be reduced, though peers will have to provide claim receipts (for the first time, incredibly). Prescriptions and greater accountability

Thursday

David Blackburn

Ironically, Cameron can only deconstruct the state by manipulating central patronage

If it remains a mystery that, 12 years after describing the House of Lords as an “affront to democracy”, Labour have not attempted wholesale reform, then look no further than the fact that Labour is the largest party in the upper chamber. As Ben Brogan notes, this causes Cameron a problem: ‘For the first time, a Conservative leader faces coming to power with an Upper House that will not reflect the outcome of the election. All those People’s Peers created by Mr Blair have made Labour the biggest party on the red benches, with 213 to the Tories’ 192. Add in 71 Lib Dems, and the unpredictability of 183 crossbenchers,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

David Cameron, his Goats & his Pocket Boroughs

The other day Pete mentioned David Cameron’s desire to bring in outsiders to staff his government ministries, making it a Tory version of Gordon’s so-called Government Of All the Talents. One can see why this must be an appealling notion. You might share it if you were charged with assembling a government from the parliamentary Conservative party. Christ, you might think, they sent me this? Bricks without straw also ran. Now Benedict Brogan says that the Tories are thiking of creating as many as 40 new Conservative peers to stack the House of Lords with reliable Cameron votes. Again, one can see why he would want to do so even

Thursday

David Blackburn

Bercow wants Lords Mandelson and Adonis to be questioned by MPs

Speaker Bercow has suggested that prominent cabinet ministers who sit in the House of Lords should be brought before the backbenchers for scrutiny. The Telegraph’s James Kirkup has the details: ‘Mr Bercow said: “I find the fact that backbenchers have no means of directly questioning prominent Ministers of the Crown because they happen to sit in the House of Lords to be less than satisfactory,” Mr Bercow said. “That is even more true at a time when the Cabinet contains the esteemed Lord Mandelson, whose empire is of a scale not seen since the death of Alexander the Great.” He also highlighted the role of Lord Adonis. “I suspect that

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The benefit of the Lords

I disagree with Helena Kennedy on a whole host of issues, but her speech last night in the Lords debate on assisted suicide was fantastic. Here’s the opening section of it: “Although I am a great believer in individual liberty and in the autonomy of the individual, I also believe strongly in the symbolic nature of law. The laws of a nation say a great deal about who we are and what we value. One of the ways in which cultural shifts take place in a society is by changing law. Many of us who have argued that changes in attitude follow changes in law did so particularly around issues

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

A welcome rejection of assisted suicide

I’m delighted that Lord Falconer has just failed in his attempt to legalise assisted suicide for people sending friends and relatives to Swiss death clinics. This is a topic which I suspect even CoffeeHousers will be evenly divided on, but to me the whole idea is just wrong – and it goes straight to the heart of how we, as a society, regard the disabled and the elderly. For those who haven’t been following the debate, Falconer used the Coroners and Justice Bill to propose a new law to make it legal to help one’s friends and relatives be killed in the Swiss death clinics. He proposed that any two