ThunderDragon Blog

The Lords are our saving grace, yet again. This undemocratic but venerable institution is doing its level best to save us from the authoritarian tendencies of Big Brother this Labour government.

The government has been defeated in the House of Lords over the issue of keeping people’s DNA and fingerprints on the police national database.

Peers backed a Tory amendment calling for specific guidelines to help people seeking to have their details removed from the database by 161 votes to 150.

But ministers are unlikely to redraft the legislation, arguing that existing public safeguards will be sufficient. (BBC)

It seems that the House of Lords represents more of the electorate than the elected House of Commons, as they fight for us to keep our civil liberties.

Yet even as they do this, they just keep on driving deeper and deeper inroads into our rights and freedoms. Such as ID cards being brought in by the back door, little by little, so that by the time people notice, it’s already too late, as from later this month “ID cards [will be] compulsory for foreign nationals who come to Britain.” And this will spread to the some Britons from autumn next year. And then slowly and pervasively out across us all. Until we all exist only as a magnetic strip, all of our personal information just a swipe away.

But of course they’re not content with just that. They want to press ahead with their plan to know everything we communicate as well. So that nothing we say or write can ever be private again. After all, they’re The Government! We’re just their pawns, not real people!

I’m glad that we have sent the MP edition of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to parliament. Maybe they’ll read it and realise where they’re going wrong…

Fat chance. They’ll probably read it and realise that the telescreen would be a far more effective tool for them, knowing our luck and these politicians…

It seems that I am not the only one to have problems with Lords taking up Cabinet roles - as I wrote in my We The People column this week - that should go to elected representatives. Mark Oaten (remember him?) has tabled an Early Day Motion:

That this House notes the appointment of a new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform to the House of Lords; further notes that the lead Minister for this Department will therefore not appear in the House of Commons; and calls on the Government to bring forward proposals to ensure that all Government Ministers who are members of the House of Lords be required to attend departmental Questions and make Ministerial Statements in the House of Commons so that the elected House can hold them to account.

Oaten has raised an interesting point. How can these ministerial Lords be held accountable to the Commons? They’re not allowed to go there, and their department cannot be held fully to account through the second minister.

It’s a conundrum all right.

via Dizzy

Last week, Gordon Brown invited Peter Mandelson back from the EU and into his Cabinet. But - hang on! - don’t you have to be a member of Parliament to be a Cabinet minister? Yes, you do. So Mandy is being given a peerage.

Yet why do they need to be in parliament? So that they are answerable to parliament and us. However, when they are sitting in the Lords they’re not directly accountable. We can’t vote them out.

The tendency to appoint Lords to Cabinet positions other than the necessary ones is new. And a reversal of the previous convention that only elected parliamentary representatives - ie. MPs - should take important roles. This appeared to start in 2003 when Baroness Amos was appointed Secretary of State for International Development, followed by Lord Falconer who held the position of Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs and then Justice.

And now it is to be taken even further. Both Falconer and Amos had their titles prior to being given a Cabinet position - but Peter Mandelson, just appointed Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, doesn’t. Yet he is going to get given one because he has been given ministerial role.

Of course, the government aren’t the only people to take part in this. For example in the Conservative Shadow Cabinet, Sayeeda Warsi was made Baroness so that she could become Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action.

The only other people who have been appointed into the Cabinet without already being a member of either House of Parliament were Frank Cousins and Patrick Gordon Walker in Harold Wilson’s 1964 Cabinet - and they soon held by-elections to get them seats. But not for Mandelson, and certainly not now, when Labour can’t even hold on to a seat they had more than a 10,000 majority in.

What is happening is that our political system is turning more and more to the American model. Whilst there certainly can be benefits to bringing in people from outside parliament, it’s not exactly democratic. Our politicial system bases itself on parliament, and specifically the Commons, and this shouldn’t be thrown away for political expediency.

I object to people being given peerages for the sole reason that they can serve in the Cabinet - or indeed the Shadow version. If these people are wanted so much, an MP in a safe seat who is willing to resign in their favour should be found and a by-electon held. Otherwise, they should be no more than an advisor. It goes against our political system and, frankly, parliamentarty democracy itself.

The new, “reformed”, House of Lords is “unacceptably dominated” by peers who live in London and the south-east of England, claims a report.

London has more peers than the east Midlands, West Midlands, Wales, Northern Ireland, north-east England and Yorkshire and the Humber put together…

A significant north-south divide is also apparent, with areas in the south enjoying far greater representation than those in the north.

The director of thinktank that wrote the report, the New Local Government Network, said:

It isn’t fair that our laws are being partly written without all corners of the country having a fair say. The Midlands and north of England are particularly poorly represented.

The problem with the state of our current political situation is that it isn’t equal:

• Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have their own legislative bodies, with varying powers. But England doesn’t.
• Scotland and Wales have larger representation in the Commons than their population warrants.
• The Cabinet is dominated by MPs with Northern and Scottish constituencies. Only two Cabinet ministers have constituencies south of Watford.

Frankly, that the House of Lords is biased towards London and the South East means little. Especially if you consider the role of the Lords. They’re not representatives, they’re a check on our representatives.

Under the partial reforms, the hereditary “representative” - according to this report - Lords were removed and appointed Lords instated. They were [presumably] selected because they have specialist knowledge or experience and can as such properly critique the bills passed to them from the Commons. Not because of where they live.

Representation is about more than geography. Representatives should be equal, yes, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. When it comes to electoral influence, it must be equal across the entire country. One person = one vote = the same level of influence. But if we are slecting the best people to perform the role, where the live or where they come from must mean bugger-all.

The former head of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, told the House of Lords that she objected to the bill to enable the security services to hold suspected terrorists for 42 days without charge because:

I don’t see, on a principled basis, as well as a practical one, that these proposals are in any way workable.

She also pointed out various other obvious home truths - that Labour don’t appear to get - that there is a “balance between the right to life”, that “the fact [is] that there is no such thing as complete security” and that “the importance of our hard-won civil liberties” massively outweighs any potential benefits of this law.

This intervention may well mean that Garbo’s declaration that “David Davis has failed“, well, fails.

I totally agree that peers in the House of Lords who are “non-doms” for tax purposes should be made to either become resident in the UK for tax purposes or be ejected unceremoniously from the Upper House.

As members of the legislature of this country, it takes an extreme level of of arrogance to also not pay the correct level of taxes to the government. No one likes pay taxes, but if you are or aspire to be a member of either House of Parliament, then you must also be willing to pay taxes to the state which you make laws for.

All non-doms who are also peers just must be extremely arrogant. They should have to pay the extra tax that they have saved over the entire period that they have been in the House of Lords and not being resident for tax, whether or not they are willing to become resident and remain in the Lords or not.

I still find the term “non-dom” immensely entertaining, though.

I wonder if this will be in return for another shot at getting a “K or a big P“?

After MPs voted to pass an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act exempting parliamentarians from the regulations, it is passed to the Lords for scrutiny and amendment. The Telegraph suggests that “Peers are already plotting how best to derail a bill passed by the Commons on Friday that would exclude Parliament from the rules.” They intend to either form a cross-party coalition to stop the bill or table an amendment to ensure the House of the Lords was not covered by the bill in order to shame the Commons into ending the bill entirely.

I very much hope that they are going to, and succeed in this venture of stopping this bill - in any way possible. No legislative organisation should be able to pass laws from which exempts itself and its members. Once again, we are seeing that it is the Lords - the appointed and hereditary chamber - who are the ones who are following the wishes of the people far closer than the representatives which the people get to elect.

The article suggests that the Conservative front bench will be urging Conservative Lords to vote against, supported by a quote from David Willetts:

“I think that it’s wrong for MPs to exclude ourselves from legislation that we apply to everyone else…
It would have been a free vote for individual MPs, but I personally think it is a mistake to pass legislation and then say we MPs should be exempt.”

Hopefully the Lords can see more clearly than the Commons in this matter. It really is quite disgusting that it takes the undemocratic chamber to remind the democratic chamber of what the people want and deserve.

Source: The Telegraph