Hereward Posted January 20, 2011 Share Posted January 20, 2011 I'm willing to reserve judgement. Please, please let it be related to the wikileaks information on on Swiss bank accounts/tax evasion! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ljkeane Posted January 20, 2011 Share Posted January 20, 2011 Considering how unpopular the Tories/Lib Dems are probably going to be be by the next election Labour are doing a pretty good job at making themselves look unelectable. It's quite impressive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zoë Sumra Posted January 20, 2011 Share Posted January 20, 2011 Vote Green! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hereward Posted January 20, 2011 Share Posted January 20, 2011 Don't we pay enough tax already? :crying: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maltaran Posted January 20, 2011 Author Share Posted January 20, 2011 BBC article here, also reporting Ed Balls to replace him. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Night Watchman Posted January 21, 2011 Share Posted January 21, 2011 Wow, you go for a little nap and the shadow chancellor resigns. Am I the only one really shocked by this? This seems to have just come from nowhere.Also, according to the Guardian his wife was being tupped by a bodyguard so he's resigning for that personal reason. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hereward Posted January 21, 2011 Share Posted January 21, 2011 That was disappointing. I'm feeling a bit guilty over my earlier glee. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lyanna Stark Posted January 21, 2011 Share Posted January 21, 2011 That was disappointing. I'm feeling a bit guilty over my earlier glee.Well, you never know, maybe the Policeman will have a Swiss bank account. Or perhaps he has been obtaining information for Hillary Clinton. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BigFatCoward Posted January 21, 2011 Share Posted January 21, 2011 i think its a bit of a shame that the policeman will be getting into such big trouble over this, it was only a ride. on the other hand would he lay down his life for someone when he is screwing the wife? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Usotsuki Posted January 21, 2011 Share Posted January 21, 2011 And Andy Coulson goes too, he, it seems, needs to work on his relationship with his lawyers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fez Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 Article in the New York Times about the debate in the House of Lords of the proposed election reform bill. Part of the article reads....With the coalition government and the Labour opposition both refusing to compromise on a measure that has severely divided them, the debate had already ground on for 98 hours across several weeks. The peers are not the youngest group of people ever to populate a legislature, and after several all-nighters, some Lords were reaching the outer limits of coherence, patience and stamina.“These are old men and women who are pretty irritated at being here when normally they’d be tucked up in bed,” said a Labour peer, Lord Hart.Fury is more like it. The situation has provoked so much resentment here that Lordly decorum has all but flown out of the chamber’s Pugin-designed stained glass windows. Things are so bad that when the government tried to buoy its members one night by offering a program of midnight entertainment that included talks by the Gosford Park writer Julian Fellowes and the former Olympian Sebastian Coe, members of the Labour Party were strictly uninvited. My question is, when did the House of Lords regain the power to stop a House of Commons bill? I thought they couldn't do that anymore but this article sure makes it sound like the Labour peers are making sure it does. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zoë Sumra Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 My question is, when did the House of Lords regain the power to stop a House of Commons bill? I thought they couldn't do that anymore but this article sure makes it sound like the Labour peers are making sure it does.They can delay it for a year, IIRC. If they do, it would have to pass the House of Commons again, upon which nobody can rely. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mormont Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 Even that is not the aim here, though. The Labour strategy is just to delay the bill so that the government must choose between splitting it in two or rescheduling the AV referendum. Either result would be a massive win for Labour and create the potential for serious splits in the coalition. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thelonious Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 Things are so bad that when the government tried to buoy its members one night by offering a program of midnight entertainment that included talks by the Gosford Park writer Julian Fellowes and the former Olympian Sebastian Coe, members of the Labour Party were strictly uninvited.Baffling sentence. Coe and Fellowes are Tory peers anyway.Mormont has the truth of it. The promise of AV is all that's keeping the Lib Dems going right now (although that's not why I voted for them- I wanted true PR and not this watered-down nonsense). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hereward Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 My question is, when did the House of Lords regain the power to stop a House of Commons bill? I thought they couldn't do that anymore but this article sure makes it sound like the Labour peers are making sure it does.The Lords cannot block a bill that is a manifesto commitment or one which is financial. This bill is neither. Still disgraceful, but there you have it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maltaran Posted January 25, 2011 Author Share Posted January 25, 2011 The Lords cannot block a bill that is a manifesto commitment or one which is financial. This bill is neither. Still disgraceful, but there you have it.I understood the manifesto thing was a convention, rather than a hard-and-fast rule. For example, the fox-hunting ban was a manifesto commitment, and the Lords blocked that.Anyway, as mormont says, the Lords aren't trying to block it, just delay it sufficiently (it has to be passed by the 16th February if the referendum is to take place on the date the government want). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hereward Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 I understood the manifesto thing was a convention, rather than a hard-and-fast rule. For example, the fox-hunting ban was a manifesto commitment, and the Lords blocked that.It is a constitutional convention, but tradition makes that more or less the same thing.PS The fox hunting ban was not a manifesto commitment. The manifesto promised a free vote on the issue, so the ban itself was not government policy as promised by a manifesto and the Lords were therefore constitutionally free to oppose it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mormont Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 The Lords cannot block a bill that is a manifesto commitment or one which is financial. This bill is neither. Still disgraceful, but there you have it.It bothers me little. The bill itself is disgraceful. The reduction in the number of constituencies is an ill-conceived, poorly thought out, gratuitous bit of gerrymandering strapped to the AV bill out of nakedly political calculation, as a sort of human shield to prevent Tory MPs and peers shooting the thing down. If it passes, it will be an act of constitutional vandalism much worse than what the Labour peers have been doing to stop it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Usotsuki Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 How is reducing the number of seats gerrymandering? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eurytus Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 It bothers me little. The bill itself is disgraceful. The reduction in the number of constituencies is an ill-conceived, poorly thought out, gratuitous bit of gerrymandering strapped to the AV bill out of nakedly political calculation, as a sort of human shield to prevent Tory MPs and peers shooting the thing down. If it passes, it will be an act of constitutional vandalism much worse than what the Labour peers have been doing to stop it.How is it gerrymandering? And how is it any worse than some of the redrawing of boundaries that all political parties have engaged in when in power?Reducing the number of thieves seems a good thing to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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