Plumping up House of Lords smacks of a political fix

[muriel_volestrangler]

Ugh. I think I may the one of the most tolerant of the LibCon coalition here, but this goes too far for me.

The "new politics" means there are now 258 peers taking the government whip in the Lords – 188 Conservatives and 72 Lib Dems out of a total of 707. That compares with the 211 Labour peers who supported Gordon Brown's government before the general election. The balance is made up of 186 crossbenchers, 26 bishops and 26 others.

So even before the coalition government has outlined its Queen's speech it already starts the parliament with 47 more peers than the Labour opposition in the House of Lords.

But apparently that is not good enough. The Daily Telegraph says today that the coalition has "agreed to drastically alter the make-up of the upper chamber" because it is "dominated by Labour's 211 existing peers". It is hard to see how a chamber of 707 peers can be "dominated" by a group of 211 – especially as it was a group that suffered more than 350 defeats over seven years – but let us put that to one side.
...
The Labour peer, Lord Toby Harris, says that as none of Labour's 211 existing peers can be removed, this sounds like a proposal, in the short term, to create 96 new Lib Dem peers and 77 new Tory peers assuming that no new Labour peers are created and the number of crossbenchers remains the same. Well we already know that Des Browne and Ruth Kelly are on their way to the upper house in the company of the likes of Michael Howard, so the number of new peers could end up closer to 200.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/17/house-lords-political-fix

No, I don't think this can be justified. Labour peers are only about 30% of the Lords, and they are outnumbered by the combined Tories and Lib Dems. That's fine; the coalition government then needs to make sure that crossbenchers find its proposals at least as attractive as voting with Labour (with a slight safety margin, in fact). And that allows the Lords to act as a brake on change if it's needed, without it being a simple matter of party loyalty. Bring in a few new peers with specialist knowledge, by all means, but don't pack the house with partisan support.

[fedsron2us]

1. Meet the new politics. Same as the old politics

Did not take long did it.

[non sociopath skin]

2. Nope, I don't like it. Wouldn't have liked it ...

... if Labour had tried to pull it either.

The Skin