Unelected and unelectable!

PM slams peers and Labour for delaying cuts

DAVID Cameron hit out at Labour yesterday for forging an alliance of the ‘unelected and the unelectable’ to overturn his welfare cuts in the Lords.

It came after Labour and Liberal Democrat peers humiliated the Government on Monday by defeating George Osborne’s plans to slash tax credits.

Tory peer Lord Strathclyde, who the Prime Minister has appointed to lead a review of the powers of the Lords, said yesterday the Upper House had acted ‘deplorably’ by overriding the views of elected MPs on a financial matter.

He suggested rules to restrain the Lords and prevent a repeat of the tax credit vote will be published by Christmas.

At Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Mr Cameron declined six times to give Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn a ‘cast-iron guarantee’ that no one would lose out from tax credit cuts when they are reviewed next month.

Instead, he went on the offensive, saying MPs had voted for the measures five times. In a jibe at Mr Corbyn and the unelected Labour and Liberal Democrat peers who defeated the Government, he said: ‘In British politics we have got a new alliance: the unelected and the unelectable.’

It is expected that Lord Strathclyde’s committee will recommend new rules to restrict the ability of peers to vote down government policy on a wide array of issues, including financial matters.

He told BBC Radio 4’s World at One yesterday the Lords ‘behaved wrongly, deplorably and unnecessarily’, voting ‘gleefully and capriciously… to engineer this semi-crisis’.

He said his review would ‘try and give clarity to the conventions that have existed’. No government since the Second World War would have put up with the Lords ‘ destroying or stopping in its tracks a major piece of legislation to do with financial matters’, he added.

But he rejected the option of creating hundreds of new Tory peers to give the party more voting power in the Lords.

‘That is not one I would recommend,’ he said. ‘That would be the wrong thing to do.’

It also emerged last night that Government plans to extend free childcare to parents for 30 hours a week could be delayed because of a vote in the Lords.

Childcare minister Sam Gyimah warned that peers’ demands for an independent review of funding for the policy could delay the planned start date of September 2017.

He said: ‘It is disappointing that the Labour Party are once again putting party politics ahead of parents.’