Tag: house-of-lords

  • A week after being elected as the House of Lords Parliamentary Party’s representative to the Lib Dem Federal Executive, Chris Rennard has resigned – effectively forced out after Tim Farron publicly called for him to go. Farron’s statement itself followed a demand by more than 200 Lib Dem members for a special conference to debate…

    The Rennard debacle: better to rock the boat than have the tail wag the dog
  • The government rhetoric about the House of Lords’ threat to derail their cherished plan to cut tax credits has been extraordinary over the last few days. To believe it, you would have to think that we are in the deadlocked position Parliament found itself between 1909 and 1911, when the then Liberal government attempted to…

    The anti-people’s budget and the constitutional crisis that isn’t
  • The police are said to be launching an investigation into expenses fraud in the House of Lords a year after the Mirror caught disgraced peer Lord Hanningfield claiming £300 expenses before immediately leaving. This is a year after the Mirror investigation, but the scandal has been well known years before that. My old organisation Unlock…

    Police probe into Lords fraud should start with ex-cop
  • Labour has announced that it would replace the House of Lords with an elected senate. There are reasons why supporters of Lords reform should be cautious about celebrating too hard about this, as Labour’s promises in this area have failed to blossom into meaningful action so many times in the past. But it is progress…

  • I was intrigued by last week’s list of 10 new Lib Dem appointments to the House of Lords. As longstanding readers of this blog will know, I was one of the people who helped develop the Lib Dem system of electing an “interim peers panel” from which the party leader gets to choose the majority…