Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in the House of Commons on Tuesday: “Mr James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con): Does the Deputy Prime Minister think that the proposed new House of Lords will cost more or less than the existing one? The Deputy Prime Minister: We want to reduce the number of people in the reformed House…
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg last week appeared before the Constitution Committee as part of its inquiry into the process of constitutional change. You can watch the session here or read the transcript here. He was asked about the Government’s proposals for the future of the House of Lords. I pursued him on the implications for…
I have two thoughts on the ripples spreading from the granting of injunctions to protect the privacy of celebrities. One is that the judiciary should not be subjected to pressure by politicians to interpret the law in a certain way, except through the passage of new legislation for them to apply. Parliament makes the law (in the situation…
Further to my post below, there was a statement in the Lords yesterday (or an urgent PQ repeated from the Commons to be precise). http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/text/110523-0002.htm#11052325000213 A joint committee made up of six members of the Commons and six from the Lords is to look into the state of the law following the recent publicity. A number of…
Last week during a rather tense debate on Police Reform, a distinguished Crossbencher mentioned that he spoke from the ‘relative neutrality of the Cross Benches’ at which some peers snorted – a touch derisively. In the last Labour administration I was called in by the Front Bench to “explain the role of the Crossbenchers” which unfortunately…
I think I am going to do some hard thinking about the growing problems relating to privacy. In the past I have resisted a law on privacy because of the way it limits investigative journalism but that is less likely now that we have the counter balance of freedom of speech enshrined in the European Convention. The…
Leaving aside the issue of electing peers, everyone is agreed that there are too many of us at the moment and that some way needs to be found to reduce the numbers, e.g. a retirement age. I cannot resist drawing attention to this new suggestion made, I think by Armando Iannucci, on The News Quiz on Radio…
Ken Clarke must have been astonished at the hoo-hah over his entirely accurate comments that all rape is not the same. No-one denies that rape is a serious crime, one which can have terrible long-term psychological sequelae for the victim but there are degrees of severity that the courts and the sentencing guidelines have always…
Whatever our views on the merits or demerits of the Coalition Cabinet’s White Paper on Lords Reform I hope we are going to stick to factual evidence, rather than the cab drivers’ gossip, in our pre-legislative scrutiny. For example, let’s get the facts straight on costs. At present about 450 Peers (out of a potential…
