The Chairman Mao resembling, Monarchy hating, threat to Britain, Labour Party thread

[one_ian_taylor]

On 09/11/2022 at 16:42, markavfc40 said:

This is quality from Yvette Cooper. I have been unfortunate enough to meet Gary Sambrook and he is as big a prick in person as he comes across as in parliament. 

 

He eats big dinners too

[Demitri_C]

Starmer saying he wants toa bolish the house of lords and reform it. He feels voters shoudl decide who goes in not politicians.  I like this alot 

[Hobsons Choice]

3 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

Starmer saying he wants toa bolish the house of lords and reform it. He feels voters shoudl decide who goes in not politicians.  I like this alot 

I see what he's saying, but if the public decide it will be Lord Ant and Lord Dec. I don't think anything good can come of complex and dangerous policies passed by the house being debated and (not) vetoed by Lord Olly Murs.

 

[LondonLax]

18 minutes ago, HKP90 said:

I see what he's saying, but if the public decide it will be Lord Ant and Lord Dec. I don't think anything good can come of complex and dangerous policies passed by the house being debated and (not) vetoed by Lord Olly Murs.

 

Most countries with an upper house elect those representatives, it’s pretty weird the way the U.K. does it but I guess it’s a bit of an anachronism. 

[ml1dch]

7 hours ago, LondonLax said:

Most countries with an upper house elect those representatives, it’s pretty weird the way the U.K. does it but I guess it’s a bit of an anachronism. 

I don't really see how the problems with the Upper House magically get fixed by electing them.

The current system is shot to bits, but the two good things it has going for it is the notion (one that's been dragged through the mud by several Governments now) of experience providing scrutiny to policy, and the lack of any future political career afterwards meaning that people aren't taking their positions to curry favour with the Government of the day.

A big problem with our current House of Commons is that is contains far too many people who have experience of life in a political party, how to get elected and little else beyond that. A second chamber, filled with broadly the same type of people and divided along broadly the same party political lines as the first isn’t actually performing any useful function.

[LondonLax]

5 minutes ago, ml1dch said:

I don't really see how the problems with the Upper House magically get fixed by electing them.

The current system is shot to bits, but the two good things it has going for it is the notion (one that's been dragged through the mud by several Governments now) of experience providing scrutiny to policy, and the lack of any future political career afterwards meaning that people aren't taking their positions to curry favour with the Government of the day.

A big problem with our current House of Commons is that is contains far too many people who have experience of life in a political party, how to get elected and little else beyond that. A second chamber, filled with broadly the same type of people and divided along broadly the same party political lines as the first isn’t actually performing any useful function.

We don’t have much to go on to analyse the proposal but it sounds like Labour might be proposing an Australian style upper house with proportional representation and seats based on larger geographic regions. Could be a positive step forward compared with the current arrangement for the House of Lords.

[fruitvilla]

8 hours ago, Demitri_C said:

Starmer saying he wants toa bolish the house of lords and reform it. He feels voters shoudl decide who goes in not politicians.  I like this alot

While I get this ... who should choose the "senators"? Bearing in mind people voted for Brexit etc. Ideally, the house of lords should be filled with intelligent people who are not political hacks. On the whole, I don't get the sense we have enough 'qualified' candidates for MPs never mind senator types.

But it would be good to get rid of the bishops though.

[sidcow]

9 hours ago, HKP90 said:

I don't think anything good can come of complex and dangerous policies passed by the house being debated and (not) vetoed by Lord Olly Murs.

I hear he's a proper troublemaker. 

[ml1dch]

38 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

We don’t have much to go on to analyse the proposal but it sounds like Labour might be proposing an Australian style upper house with proportional representation and seats based on larger geographic regions. Could be a positive step forward compared with the current arrangement for the House of Lords.

Yeah, that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. 

It strikes me that the problem they've identified and are trying to fix isn't "how do we get better legislation to improve the country?" but "how do we keep the Labour Party's hands more firmly on the levers of power once we get there?"

[LondonLax]

6 minutes ago, ml1dch said:

Yeah, that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. 

It strikes me that the problem they've identified and are trying to fix isn't "how do we get better legislation to improve the country?" but "how do we keep the Labour Party's hands more firmly on the levers of power once we get there?"

It seems wild to me that you’d rather the current arrangement for the upper house over a democratic upper house.

Reform of the lower house is a whole other thread discussion.

[ml1dch]

30 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

It seems wild to me that you’d rather the current arrangement for the upper house over a democratic upper house.

I'm happy to be convinced. And I think significant reforms to the current system are needed. I just don't see that electing people fixes anything that is going wrong, other than ticking a box that says "more democracy".

It depends on what you want the purpose of the upper house to be. I think the benefit of the current system is that people with experience of their field are involved. You should have former Generals scrutinising defence policy. You should have former Trade Union leaders scrutinising employment law. You should have former judges and KCs looking at how written law would actually be implemented. I have no solid theory on how to do it, but I think the reform that needs to happen is to put people with the experience of the sector being legislated upon in the position to offer the necessary scrutiny. 

I'm yet to hear a convincing argument why two elected chambers wouldn't just see two or three very similar groups of PPE graduates simply blocking or rubbing-stamping whatever is put in front of them based on nothing more complicated than where we are in the electoral cycle and their future career prospects in their party of choice.

[Demitri_C]

Whatever the outcome, im sure we can all agree the house if commons is infkated with far too many people. It needs significantly reducing and alot of people there shouldnt be anywhere near.

 

[LondonLax]

Just now, ml1dch said:

I'm happy to be convinced. And I think significant reforms to the current system are needed. I just don't see that electing people fixes anything that is going wrong, other than ticking a box that says "more democracy".

It depends on what you want the purpose of the upper house to be. I think the benefit of the current system is that people with experience of their field are involved. You should have former Generals scrutinising defence policy. You should have former Trade Union leaders scrutinising employment law. You should have former judges and KCs looking at how written law would actually be implemented. I have no solid theory on how to do it, but I think the reform that needs to happen is to put people with the experience of the sector being legislated upon in the position to offer the necessary scrutiny. 

I'm yet to hear a convincing argument why two elected chambers wouldn't just see two or three very similar groups of PPE graduates simply blocking or rubbing-stamping whatever is put in front of them based on nothing more complicated than where we are in the electoral cycle and their future career prospects in their party of choice.

Well a bicameral system works best when the two chambers are different from each other. That is true of the House of Lords but hereditary titles are an abomination (imo) and the current arrangement of granting peerages for favours is also awful.

Taking Australia as my main knowledge base, the upper house is voted on differently to the lower house. It’s a proportional representation system and each state gets a certain number of representatives so there is a different set of constituents rash minister is representing. Compared with the AV system used for the lower house and local electorates. 

In addition the senators get a six year term where as the lower house is voted every three years. 

This means the Senate is very often a significantly different make up to the lower house with different objectives and a different electoral cycle. 

It is very rare that a government in the lower house also happens to have a majority in the upper house to pass legislation and typically compromise is required. 

[fruitvilla]

53 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

you’d rather the current arrangement for the upper house over a democratic upper house.

Personally, I would prefer to have intelligent qualified "senators" rather than a partisan free for all. Somebody that will look beyond regional politics, party and have a longer time horizon than the next election.

[ml1dch]

12 hours ago, LondonLax said:

Well a bicameral system works best when the two chambers are different from each other. That is true of the House of Lords but hereditary titles are an abomination (imo) and the current arrangement of granting peerages for favours is also awful.

I don't think that anyone is suggesting that those are the bits that need to be kept. 

12 hours ago, LondonLax said:

Taking Australia as my main knowledge base, the upper house is voted on differently to the lower house. It’s a proportional representation system and each state gets a certain number of representatives so there is a different set of constituents rash minister is representing. Compared with the AV system used for the lower house and local electorates. 

In addition the senators get a six year term where as the lower house is voted every three years. 

This means the Senate is very often a significantly different make up to the lower house with different objectives and a different electoral cycle. 

It is very rare that a government in the lower house also happens to have a majority in the upper house to pass legislation and typically compromise is required. 

Which as I said, does nothing to improve legislation or the country, it just means a bunch of very similar people with very similar views and very similar life experiences judging stuff on nothing more than whether it is being proposed by their party or not. I said in a previous post, the discussion needs to start with what the purpose of the second chamber is. And it seems that the main selling point of the elected version isn't much more than "it would be able to block stuff that they don't like the Government doing". And while individual flavours of Government are obviously going to be unpleasant, broadly speaking I think if a Government is elected by the people to do stuff, the machinery of state should probably be set up to help them do that.

To give an example, let's say that Labour are elected in a 150 seat landslide in 2024 and start doing trying to do stuff that they believe will fix the country. However, the upper chamber still has two hypothetical  years left of a comfortable majority of Johnson-inspired, diamond-hard Brexit aficionados because that is the way the country was at that point when the music stopped. 

So now what? Irrespective of their mandate and manifesto promises, Labour is only permitted to carry out policy that Get Brexit Done types approve of? It strikes me as an opportunity for twice as many elections, every single one of which is fought exclusively on "they stopped us from doing this stuff that you asked to do", and complete stagnation. 

[LondonLax]

2 hours ago, ml1dch said:

I don't think that anyone is suggesting that those are the bits that need to be kept. 

Which as I said, does nothing to improve legislation or the country, it just means a bunch of very similar people with very similar views and very similar life experiences judging stuff on nothing more than whether it is being proposed by their party or not. I said in a previous post, the discussion needs to start with what the purpose of the second chamber is. And it seems that the main selling point of the elected version isn't much more than "it would be able to block stuff that they don't like the Government doing". And while individual flavours of Government are obviously going to be unpleasant, broadly speaking I think if a Government is elected by the people to do stuff, the machinery of state should probably be set up to help them do that.

To give an example, let's say that Labour are elected in a 150 seat landslide in 2024 and start doing trying to do stuff that they believe will fix the country. However, the upper chamber still has two hypothetical  years left of a comfortable majority of Johnson-inspired, diamond-hard Brexit aficionados because that is the way the country was at that point when the music stopped. 

So now what? Irrespective of their mandate and manifesto promises, Labour is only permitted to carry out policy that Get Brexit Done types approve of? It strikes me as an opportunity for twice as many elections, every single one of which is fought exclusively on "they stopped us from doing this stuff that you asked to do", and complete stagnation. 

There is no requirement to have a second chamber of course but it does seem to produce more compromise between the parties in my view. 

In the deadlock scenario you talk about above if the Australian government feels the Senate is unreasonably blocking its legislation it has the option to call a ‘double dissolution’ election whereby every seat in both houses is up for election and a whole new makeup is produced. If the public feel the upper house was blocking the mandate of their recently elected lower house they may feel inclined to take the opportunity to vote for a clear out of the senate. On the other hand there is a risk to the sitting government to call such an election just because they couldn’t get anything done, maybe the public would turn on the sitting government instead?

It’s a fail safe that tends to produce compromise between the two chambers. 

[MakemineVanilla]

Has Starmer finally bitten the bullet and added a bit of blue to the red?

The Spectator seems to think so: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/has-keir-starmer-found-the-sweet-spot-in-british-politics/

"Are the final obstacles in the way of a comfortable Labour victory at the next election being swept away? The dirty little secret of British politics is that there is now a large amount of consensus on most big policy issues between the two main parties: the differences are largely in the detail. "

[bickster]

2 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

Are the final obstacles in the way of a comfortable Labour victory at the next election being swept away?

There were no final obstacles

[blandy]

On 21/11/2022 at 05:06, ml1dch said:

You should have former Trade Union leaders scrutinising employment law. You should have former judges and KCs looking at how written law would actually be implemented. I have no solid theory on how to do it, but I think the reform that needs to happen is to put people with the experience of the sector being legislated upon in the position to offer the necessary scrutiny. 

Most definitely this. The current HoL has 800+ members, around half of which never do anything, but are just people who got titles for donating to whoever, or serving under whoever as an advisor or whatever.

Of the other 400 or so, a number work pretty hard and in much more detail than MPs in scrutinising and such like, the various legislative bills that come their way, and it's that expertise and diligence and detachment which adds real value.

You could probably knock down the numbers of the HoL to just the "active" ones and then perhaps have a system to gradually replace those active members (as they leave) with similar expertise holding people, whether by appointment by a commission, or by election, or by direct appointment by a committee of MPs. Ideally the HoL or 2nd chamber shouldn't really be party political as such, though I guess that's impossible to implement in reality.

[Demitri_C]

1 hour ago, MakemineVanilla said:

Has Starmer finally bitten the bullet and added a bit of blue to the red?

The Spectator seems to think so: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/has-keir-starmer-found-the-sweet-spot-in-british-politics/

"Are the final obstacles in the way of a comfortable Labour victory at the next election being swept away? The dirty little secret of British politics is that there is now a large amount of consensus on most big policy issues between the two main parties: the differences are largely in the detail. "

Starmer can just fart during PMQs every week and he will still win the next election. 

There ia no chance conservatives are winning