The United Kingdom Elections 2010

Labour to unveil plan to change the UK into a democracy!

Plans for abolition of House of Lords to be unveiled Plans to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a 300-strong, wholly elected second chamber are to be unveiled by ministers in a key political move ahead of the general election.


Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, is this weekend consulting cabinet colleagues on a blueprint which would represent the biggest change to the way Britain is governed for several decades.
The proposals, which have been leaked to The Sunday Telegraph and which are expected to be announced soon, would sweep away centuries of tradition and set ministers on a collision course with the current 704-member House of Lords, which is resolutely opposed to having elected members.


Ministers are ready to announce their plans, which follow years of fruitless cross-party discussions and several votes in the House of Commons, in a bid to wrong-foot the Tories with polling day less than two months away.
Labour's plan is to provoke elements inside the Conservative Party to object to the reforms – which would allow it to paint David Cameron as wedded to old ideas of privilege.



The proposed changes also follow various House of Lords-related controversies, including the recent furore over the admission by Lord Ashcroft, the Tory deputy chairman, that he was a "non-dom."
Members of the new-style chamber will have to be both UK residents and domiciled here for tax purposes.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...-unveiled.html

Whoa...elected, have to pay taxes in the UK - a virtual Revolution says I!

Originally Posted by Louis VI the Fat

Labour to unveil plan to change the UK into a democracy!


Whoa...elected, have to pay taxes in the UK - a virtual Revolution says I!

Pretty certain Labour has been promising Lords reform since 1997. The closest it got was the removal of most hereditary peers which doesn't really make much of a difference when the peerage system means that political parties basically give a peerage to those who donate kindly to them. That being said, I don't think the Lords does a particularly bad job as it is, I just think there's a few people with peerage status who really shouldn't have it.

As for this latest proposal, nothing will probably come of it. Here's what normally happens with the Labour government around election time Louis, Labour promises all these great things on face value in it's manifesto and broadly speaking fails to deliver on a majority of them. Both Lords reform and electoral reform aren't new ideas within in British politics, they've been floating round for years. Labour itself has promised both in past election manifestos and hasn't delivered it. Therefore why would I be inclined to believe they'll deliver this time. There electoral reform went down the pan too. Sure, they promise a referendum on it next year but I'm not sure the proposed system will be any better than our current one.

I don't think I nor any one else can deny that some labour promises, minimum wage for example which have been implemented have been anything but beneficial to British society but the fact remains that Labour like to promise the world in their election manifesto yet deliver on a pathetic proportion of said manifesto.

Gah! You're probably right. Such a shocking overhaul of the political system would not be unveiled out of the blue two months before an election.

It's more about embarrasing the Tories, I suppose. Get them to defend the Lords, defend Ashcroft and his NonDom status. Paint Cameron as the defender of privilige.

I think the whole idea of having a second elected house in the UK is absurd quite frankly. The whole point of the House of Lords is that it's meant to act as a balance to the election-focused Commons. The problem with it now is that it's those same election focused politicians that decide who should go to the Lords. I say take the power away from the politicians completely and let a totally independent committee run by the monarch decide who deserves to sit in the Lords. Then you have the elected Commons with a mandate from the people to create laws and an independent Lords to make sure those laws are remotely sensible.

The current system isn't really viable long-term but more elections isn't the answer in my opinion.

So just to re-cap. The bi-cameral system has worked pretty well for 300 years or more. The nasty party get in power back in '97 and decide that what isn't broke needs fixing after all. They then reform the upper house filling it with apparachniks, shysters and corrupt supporters, as you do, and then when the whole rotten edifice is exposed as a sham they then say that the upper house isn't working now, at least not as well as it did before we pissed about with it, so now we intend to abolish it!

Sounds like something from the Frankfurt Marxist school on destroyng a democracy.

It seems to be getting more difficult to get people to bother to vote for someone to sit in one house, how many people are going to want to vote for another?

Originally Posted by InsaneApache

So just to re-cap. The bi-cameral system has worked pretty well for 300 years or more. The nasty party get in power back in '97 and decide that what isn't broke needs fixing after all. They then reform the upper house filling it with apparachniks, shysters and corrupt supporters, as you do, and then when the whole rotten edifice is exposed as a sham they then say that the upper house isn't working now, at least not as well as it did before we pissed about with it, so now we intend to abolish it!

Sounds like something from the Frankfurt Marxist school on destroyng a democracy.

I agree that Labour's reform has been the usual ideologrical driven mess they like to produce. But at the same time, the Lords has been far from unchanging since 1707. In reality, our system is best called 'weak bi-cameralism', ever since 1911 the Lords has always been by far the inferior chamber. And then further weakened in 1949. The change has been gradual and probably in reality inevitable.

Originally Posted by Boohugh

I think the whole idea of having a second elected house in the UK is absurd quite frankly. The whole point of the House of Lords is that it's meant to act as a balance to the election-focused Commons. The problem with it now is that it's those same election focused politicians that decide who should go to the Lords. I say take the power away from the politicians completely and let a totally independent committee run by the monarch decide who deserves to sit in the Lords. Then you have the elected Commons with a mandate from the people to create laws and an independent Lords to make sure those laws are remotely sensible.

The current system isn't really viable long-term but more elections isn't the answer in my opinion.

thoroughly agreed!

Originally Posted by Louis VI the Fat

Labour to unveil plan to change the UK into a democracy!


Whoa...elected, have to pay taxes in the UK - a virtual Revolution says I!

I wouldn't mind being a democracy, but I object violently to the idea of a Republic. Tony Blair's outing as a quasi-president who sold peerages for cash has only reinforced this position.

Why not scrap it have a unicameral system its practically one anyway

on the directionless opportunism of the lib-dems:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/da...ending-or-not/

Do the LibDems want to cut spending or not?

By Daniel Hannan Politics Last updated: March 13th, 2010

I still can’t make out what the LibDems want to do about the debt crisis. They say they will be more radical than the Conservatives, closing the deficit wholly through spending cuts rather than through a combination of spending cuts and tax rises. But, at the same time, they say they will avoid “Tory butchery”.

Vince Cable promises that any cuts will be the subject of consultation with those directly affected. Yet those directly affected are surely the one set of people who, by definition, can’t be objective, and who will oppose the reduction of their budgets whatever the national interest.

Most worrying of all, the LibDems now say that they would oppose any fiscal tightening this year. Yet it is precisely because Labour keeps deferring the cuts that we are in this mess. Gordon Brown is behaving like Nick Leeson, doubling and doubling in the hope of putting off the worst of the pain until after polling day. As a result, we have the same level of deficit as Greece, despite the additional trillion pounds seized in taxation since 1997. The agony will come soon enough, and will be far more severe for having been postponed.

You think I exaggerate? Then ponder this. In the time it has taken you to read this blog post, our national debt has risen by around 380,000 pounds. 390,000 now.

Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy

Why not scrap it have a unicameral system its practically one anyway

Then there would be no opposition from within the government; we would be a Tyranny of the Ruling Party.

Would the tories be stupid enough to take Straws idiotic plan for constitutional tinkering of the lords and run with it?

apparently they might:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ge...ng-parliament/

Forget the Lords – it's the Commons the public intends to neuter by electing a hung parliament

By Gerald Warner Politics Last updated: March 15th, 2010

Jack Straw’s vacuous plan to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a 300-member “Senate” demonstrates that, to the bitter end, Labour is obsessed with the kind of constitutionally illiterate vandalism that has characterised its 13 disastrous years in office. We already have a completely superfluous Supreme Court, on the American model; now Straw wants to add a Senate. American institutions are first-rate – for Americans. They are totally alien to Britain.

The reason for this persistent constitutional tinkering is that Labour (and now its Vichy Tory clones) thinks that such synthetic constructs are more “modern”. A favourite claim is “No other developed nation has a House of Lords”. That reflects the cultural masochism that leads “progressives” to imagine that every other society is superior to Britain. Most “developed” nations have contrived paper constitutions, cobbled together after the overthrow of their monarchies and other evolved institutions provoked periods of revolution, civil war, totalitarianism, general unrest and instability.

We have the inestimable advantage of an organic, evolved constitution that was traditionally the envy of the world. Yet, because it is enveloped in the trappings of past eras, despite its enduring efficiency and adaptability Labour and Tory modernisers want to smash it. It is a characteristic of modern Lab-Con Britain that everything that is unbroken is gratuitously mended, while the many things that are indeed broken are left unrepaired.

It is also significant that Straw’s plan is expected to include mechanisms for gerrymandering the Senate in favour of the usual suspects – women, “faith groups”, etc – as has already been done in the Commons via all-women and other forms of rigged candidate selection lists. The voter is being deprived of choice and is increasingly an extraneous cipher in the process of engineering an appointed parliament in both chambers.

It is widely assumed that Straw’s plan will not progress: but do not underestimate the potential for the Tory traitors to pick it up and run with it. What could “detoxify” a gang of Etonians more impressively (in their own demented imagination) than abolishing the House of Lords? It typifies the decadence of our times that the only section of the membership in the whole of Parliament that has not been mired in expenses and corruption scandals – the hereditary peers – is the one element that is designated for expulsion.

The implications of all these incoherent attempts to ape less mature and successful constitutional models is ultimately republican. The monarchy is the eventual target of the so-called modernisers. Pomp and pageantry are anathema to them. The grey-suited, serially corrupt apparatchiks of the European Union are their role models – and don’t forget what a plum the office of President would offer to a succession of retiring expenses junkies.

It is not the House of Lords that the public would prefer to abolish, but the House of Commons. The loathsome canaille on the slime-green benches – despite the sycophantic vocabulary of journalists such as “dedicated public servant”, “devoted constituency MP” and suchlike crony-guff – are detested by the electorate. They have banned country sports, driven smokers out of pubs, irresponsibly flooded the country with immigrants, handed us over trussed and gagged to Brussels, harassed the nation with “green” tyranny and political correctness, persecuted Christians and remorselessly robbed every taxpayer in the country.

The public knows, however, that there is no means available to it of abolishing this chamber of horrors. So, cleverly, it has opted to neuter it. An opinion poll recently showed that 34 per cent of voters actively want a hung parliament. That provoked spluttering outrage among the political class. Did these clowns of voters not understand that a hung parliament would destroy confidence in Britain’s ability to fix its economy? How stupid could they get?

The voters are not stupid at all. They know what they are doing: reducing the political class to impotence. And not before time. The transparent lie that the markets will trash Britain because of a hung parliament – when most of the countries whose bonds they purchase are in a state of permanent coalition government – impresses the British public as much as global warming scares. The difficulty about securing a hung parliament is the mechanism for engineering it. The only secure method is to deny votes to the three major parties. It is time to put them – not the peers – out of business.

Seems the Conservatives have found some unlikely support from the EU over their economic policy of making big spending cuts early. A European Commission report has said that the UK budget deficit should be cut faster than Labour intend to do it, which certainly makes it harder for Mr Brown to argue the Conservatives are completely wrong on economic policy now.

Edit: In reply to the article Furunculus posted:

It is a characteristic of modern Lab-Con Britain that everything that is unbroken is gratuitously mended, while the many things that are indeed broken are left unrepaired.

Never a truer word spoken!

true, not that i put much store in EU adice over and above that which is available here.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance...-us-were-bust/

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

time to break the unions again?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/da...spending-cuts/

Updating the Lords would be a great idea. But if you are going to do that then you may as well update the commons at the same time. The Lords has been largely powerless since 1911, if we were to make it democratic, then at least give it a powerful role.

Possible Lords ideas: party alliegance should be banned? Fixed term elections? etc..

In reality the commons will never create a second chamber that could possibly hurt them.

first labour was infiltrated by islamists, now it is owned by the unions once more:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...by-Labour.html

being owned by the unions, as was the case up to the 80's, made more sense when 80% of the workforce was a union member, it could claim a national mandate.

now however, when union membership has dropped below a third it looks distinctly more sketchy............

Originally Posted by Boohugh

I think the whole idea of having a second elected house in the UK is absurd quite frankly. The whole point of the House of Lords is that it's meant to act as a balance to the election-focused Commons. The problem with it now is that it's those same election focused politicians that decide who should go to the Lords. I say take the power away from the politicians completely and let a totally independent committee run by the monarch decide who deserves to sit in the Lords. Then you have the elected Commons with a mandate from the people to create laws and an independent Lords to make sure those laws are remotely sensible.

The current system isn't really viable long-term but more elections isn't the answer in my opinion.

In short: No.

Gordon Brown admits: I was wrong on defence spending:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...-spending.html

Gordon Brown has admitted he was wrong to claim that he increased defence spending in real terms every year.

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent
Published: 12:26PM GMT 17 Mar 2010

The Prime Minister said that claims he had made in the House of Commons and in evidence to Sir John Chilcot's Iraq Inquiry had been incorrect.

Mr Brown, who has faced intense criticism over his support for the Armed Forces, had repeatedly insisted that as Chancellor, he made real increases in the defence budget every year.

However, offcial figures from the Ministry of Defence show that, allowing for inflation, its budget fell in five years: 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2002 and 2007.

Challenged about his claim during Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Brown made a rare admission of errror.

"I do accept that in one or two years, defence expenditure did not rise in real terms," he told MPs.

Mr Brown said is now writing to Sir John Chilcot to amend his evidence to the inquiry.

The Prime Minister's admission is a political victory for David Cameron, the Conservative leader, who challenged him about the figures last week in the Commons.

By amending his evidence to the Chilcot panel, Mr Brown may bolster the case for recalling him for another evidence session later this year.

awesome news, defence continues to be newsworthy in the run up to the election. :)

Originally Posted by Furunculus

Gordon Brown admits: I was wrong on defence spending:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...-spending.html

awesome news, defence continues to be newsworthy in the run up to the election. :)

I bet you have your trousers round your ankles and the box of tissues to hand while you consider all the extra weapons that are going to get bought

Originally Posted by Idaho

I bet you have your trousers round your ankles and the box of tissues to hand while you consider all the extra weapons that are going to get bought

Originally Posted by Idaho

I bet you have your trousers round your ankles and the box of tissues to hand while you consider all the extra weapons that are going to get bought

maybe not, i'd just be happy to see the Forces equipped properly for the roles they are expected to undertake, like Gordon not chopping £1.5 billion out the helicopter procuerment budget in 2007 when British soldiers are dieing in IED attacks in Afghanistan because they are forced to use the roads.

to give just one example.

Originally Posted by Furunculus

maybe not, i'd just be happy to see the Forces equipped properly for the roles they are expected to undertake, like Gordon not chopping £1.5 billion out the helicopter procuerment budget in 2007 when British soldiers are dieing in IED attacks in Afghanistan because they are forced to use the roads.

to give just one example.

Helicopters are overated for a place like Afghanistan you still have to land it and then your fighting on your own instead of with a truck that has a 50 cal on the back and the afgans are well capable of using missle weapons too

Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy

Helicopters are overated for a place like Afghanistan you still have to land it and then your fighting on your own instead of with a truck that has a 50 cal on the back and the afgans are well capable of using missle weapons too

You can mount a GPMG on a helicopter, and they don't need to land anyway, ever heard of rapple lines?

Come to think of it, have you not seen the Air-Cav in any Vietnam film?

Helicopters are essential in a place like Afganistan, you can fly over the mountains, instead of driving through them.

Originally Posted by Idaho

I bet you have your trousers round your ankles and the box of tissues to hand while you consider all the extra weapons that are going to get bought

You don't need a weapons fetish in order to want defence spending to rise during wartime. Wars Labour started, I might add.

Originally Posted by Furunculus

maybe not, i'd just be happy to see the Forces equipped properly for the roles they are expected to undertake, like Gordon not chopping £1.5 billion out the helicopter procuerment budget in 2007 when British soldiers are dieing in IED attacks in Afghanistan because they are forced to use the roads.

to give just one example.

How many lives of British soldiers would these extra helicopters have saved? Five? Ten? Fifty?

That works out to anything from £300 million to £30 million a life. And how many Britons on waiting lists for hospitals can be saved for that amount? Several dozens to several hundreds per life of a soldier? That's not a fair trade-off. The money was better spend in healthcare.


Any MoD always has an infinite appetite. There is always another toy. Then there is the political tendency to always overstretch militarilly. Combine these two, and the military will always be underfunded, no matter how much is spend on it.

Originally Posted by Philipvs Vallindervs Calicvla

You can mount a GPMG on a helicopter, and they don't need to land anyway, ever heard of rapple lines?

Come to think of it, have you not seen the Air-Cav in any Vietnam film?

Helicopters are essential in a place like Afganistan, you can fly over the mountains, instead of driving through them.

First that gibson film tells you staright off that air cav can only do so much the men still have to get out of the helo.

Mounting a gpmg is fine but the helo is far too valuable a battlefield resource to be left hanging on a battlefield where it might get clipped by a missile.

Whats essential in Afghanistan is consent of the locals and a strong mule otherwise forget it

Originally Posted by Louis VI the Fat

That works out to anything from £300 million to £30 million a life. And how many Britons on waiting lists for hospitals can be saved for that amount? Several dozens to several hundreds per life of a soldier? That's not a fair trade-off. The money was better spend in healthcare.

Any MoD always has an infinite appetite. There is always another toy. Then there is the political tendency to always overstretch militarilly. Combine these two, and the military will always be underfunded, no matter how much is spend on it.

if a country is going to send people to die in foriegn countries it needs to properly equip them.

lol, and social security and the nhs does not?
Defence = ~ £33 billion (<5% annual Gov't spending)
Those two = ~ £180 billion
please, no lesson on how voracious Defence is, it doesn't wash.

Originally Posted by Louis VI the Fat

How many lives of British soldiers would these extra helicopters have saved? Five? Ten? Fifty?

That works out to anything from £300 million to £30 million a life. And how many Britons on waiting lists for hospitals can be saved for that amount? Several dozens to several hundreds per life of a soldier? That's not a fair trade-off. The money was better spend in healthcare.


Any MoD always has an infinite appetite. There is always another toy. Then there is the political tendency to always overstretch militarilly. Combine these two, and the military will always be underfunded, no matter how much is spend on it.

Probably closest to fifty, but that's only direct casualties. Increased force projection would reduce casualties because it would increase operational effectiveness.

Originally Posted by Furunculus

if a country is going to send people to die in foriegn countries it needs to properly equip them.

Key factor.

You either equip your troops and designate a decent amount of GDP to the armed forces so that you can perform military operations, or you don't and you surrender your role as a country able to have such capabilities.

I'm not saying I support such a role either way but the fact is if your going to do it, you do it right. Other wise as a nation your only feasible scope of operation in armed conflicts is part of a group like NATO, the EU, UN ect.