Labour is going to need to create at least 125 peers if it gets into office
You know who would be one of those too, don’t you?
Deeply, deeply, depressing thought.
Labour is going to need to create at least 125 peers if it gets into office
You know who would be one of those too, don’t you?
Deeply, deeply, depressing thought.
Where’s this “need”? What’s the Parliament Act for if not for getting your programme through.
Wouldn’t it be better to balance the numbers if one simply shot 125 peers? Keep down running costs and perform a bit of class war to enthuse Labour’s core vote.
BiF
Indeed, considering the number of times the previous Labour government used it.
From the comments:
Vote UKIP, get Miligoon. Get Miligoon, get Lord Murphy of Downham Market…
Ljh: applause!
Tim is probably overlooking Sherry Blair, surely a Godawfuller choice.
🙂
Wow. Amazing that so many Labour peers seem to have died – I mean, Blair in his first term ennobled more people than Thatcher and Major put together
Dearieme:
I think you mean Sherry Bleah.
Dear Mr Worstall
This clearly indicates the problem of the life peerage system: it is wide open to abuse, rendering the House of Lords a rubber stamp instead of the brake on loony legislation that it ought to be.
Scrap the life peers and repeal the Parliament Act. Bring back the hereditaries!
DP
DP – exactly.. remove people with Nolbesse Oblige, and reward donors, cronies and tosspots.
Score one for democratic reform.
Is this ‘need’ based on filling the Lords to provide some close approximation to the national vote?
Reminds me of this story: House of Lords could swell to 2,000 to balance ‘immovable block’ of Liberal Democrat peers
“The number of peers in the House of Lords could soar from 756 to around 2,000 after the next election, leaving unelected lawmakers outnumbering elected MPs by three to one, a report by the Electoral Reform Society has concluded.
The huge increase – the opposite of what was intended when plans to reform the second chamber collapsed last year – would come about if people vote in line with recent opinion polls and install a Labour government, while punishing the Liberal Democrats at the ballot box. The report, The Super Sized Second Chamber, says that in this particular scenario the number of peers in an unreformed Lords would need to increase to around 2,000 in order to reflect the new political balance in the Commons.”
Why increase chamber to match?
The numbers of party aligned peers has to match the popular vote? I didn’t know that. I didn’t even know that their party affiliations are a matter in this sense at all.
The current general mess with this, unequal devolution, etc, seems to be a very good reason for saying that politicians shouldn’t be writing the Constitution (and on the fly, too).
Anyway, does not this cause an inevitable ratchet effect in numbers, as every time any party loses support, the others have to have their numbers increased to “compensate”? Could one of our more mathematical commenters calculate the approximate future year when the entire population will have to sit in the Lords?
In fact, if LibDem (or some other party) support falls to zero, doesn’t that immediately require an infinite number of counterbalancing lords from other parties?
“Common Purpose” only need apply. If there were ‘applications’, which there won’t be.
Is his whole calculation based on the notion that the Lib Dem peers should be counted as Tories? Because, y’know, he’s an idiot?
There’s no point in a second chamber if any party holds a majority position. Keep Tories and Labour roughly in line.. and have as many as possible who align with neither.. whether they’re lib dems, nationalists, bishops or penguins is unimportant. Though, ideally, I’d like more penguins.
Everybody would like more penguins. Though plain chocolate bounty bars are pretty good too. And picnic bars.
TTG
Yes, that’s it.
It’s one of these “Murph” calculations (tax gap anyone?), and with the kind of assumptions (as to how to get to 125 Labour peers) that it’s a complete bollocks number anyway.
Different RM thread, but couldn’t resist – apologies!
No prizes…