UK: Plans for abolition of House of Lords to be unveiled
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Plans to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a 300-strong, wholly elected second chamber are to be unveiled by ministers in a key political move ahead of the general election.
By Patrick Hennessy, Political Editor
Published: 9:00PM GMT 13 Mar 2010
Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, is this weekend consulting cabinet colleagues on a blueprint which would represent the biggest change to the way Britain is governed for several decades.
The proposals, which have been leaked to The Sunday Telegraph and which are expected to be announced soon, would sweep away centuries of tradition and set ministers on a collision course with the current 704-member House of Lords, which is resolutely opposed to having elected members.
Ministers are ready to announce their plans, which follow years of fruitless cross-party discussions and several votes in the House of Commons, in a bid to wrong-foot the Tories with polling day less than two months away.
Labour's plan is to provoke elements inside the Conservative Party to object to the reforms – which would allow it to paint David Cameron as wedded to old ideas of privilege.
The proposed changes also follow various House of Lords-related controversies, including the recent furore over the admission by Lord Ashcroft, the Tory deputy chairman, that he was a "non-dom."
Members of the new-style chamber will have to be both UK residents and domiciled here for tax purposes.
More:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandor...
The Labour Party have been talking about this for a while.
They didn't implement it before as they had enough Labour peers.
Gordon Brown even talked about establishing a written constitution in Britain.
That's something we don't have at present. There's blood in the political water. The sharks are circling.
The supposed abolition of HoL may be only time buyer and....
ploy to placate the masses.
The last sentence of the story is most revealing.
"The same year saw a series of votes in the Commons over whether various percentages of the Lords should be of elected members – including one proposal for an all-elected House – but all the proposals were defeated."
Number 1 for the new Constitution:
Abolish surveillance cameras.
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