Posted By Halina Ward
on 19 May, 2011
The House of Lords Reform Draft Bill and accompanying White Paper were presented to Parliament by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on Tuesday 17 May.
The documents set out long-awaited options for a reformed House of Lords.
The Bill is grounded in a smaller, 80%-elected House, retaining (controversially) the Bishops. The White Paper indicates that a 100% elected upper House has not been ruled out.
One striking feature of the proposals is that they have nothing at all to say about the functions of Westminster’s upper house. In fact, the White Paper’s summary of the proposals states that …
Posted By Halina Ward
on 12 May, 2011
The UK Coalition government’s approach to sustainable development looks increasingly like a Potemkin village. Its smart websites and fine rhetoric hide the misery of the social fallout from cutbacks in our age of austerity, slow progress on environment, and the impoverishment of democracy.
Most recently, the coalition government’ s Red Tape Challenge makes utterly laughable its aspiration to be ‘the greenest government ever’; its reassurance that sustainable development will be mainstreamed across government; and the forgotten second pillar of the coalition’s government alongside the Big Society: a ‘new horizon’ to eliminate political short-termism.
It’s long, so I’ve also posted …
