‘Reduce power of upper chamber’
Anti-EU UKIP needs new leader: lawmaker
LONDON, Dec 18, (Agencies): The power of the House of Lords, Britain’s upper house of parliament, should be scaled back to let the lower house to have a “decisive role” in legislating, a review commissioned by the government found on Thursday.
It comes after the House of Lords, where the ruling Conservative party does not have a majority, infuriated the government of Prime Minister David Cameron by blocking a plan to cut state support for the low paid in October.
The report recommended that the House of Lords be stripped of the power to veto so-called secondary legislation — laws that are not passed as an act of parliament, and touch for instance on administrative or regulatory matters.
Instead, the unelected chamber of 822 religious figures, hereditary and appointed peers should be only able to “invite the Commons to think again” on this area of legislation, with the lower house having the final say.
The review was led by senior Conservative politician Lord Thomas Strathclyde with a panel of former senior parliamentary officials.
“I believe that my recommendations strike the right balance between preserving the vital role of the House of Lords in scrutinising legislation, and enabling the elected House of Commons to have a decisive role on statutory instruments,” Strathclyde said in a statement.
The review rejected two other options it considered for limiting the chamber’s power: clarifying and coding existing practice or removing the House of Lords’ role in secondary legislation altogether.
Review
“I will consider his recommendations carefully before responding in the New Year,” Cameron said in a statement after the review was released.
A spokesman for the prime minister said the Lords’ snub to the House of Commons in October was “unprecedented” and “raises serious constitutional questions about the primacy of the elected House of Commons”.
It went against convention that the Lords does not go against the lower house on financial matters or on statutory instruments, meaning smaller policy amendments that have a speedier passage through parliament.
Graham Allen, an opposition Labour lawmaker, criticised the proposal as “undemocratic”.
“Major alterations in our system of governance should not be the product of a closed and narrow internal process,” Allen said in a statement, adding that ideas for reform should consider changing the House of Lords to an elected body.
Meanwhile, the anti-EU UK Independence Party needs a fresh face as leader, its only lawmaker said on Friday, highlighting divisions in a party which will play a key role in the campaign for Britain to leave the bloc at an upcoming membership referendum.
Prime Minister David Cameron promised that vote in part due to pressure from the rise in popularity of UKIP, which won 2014’s European elections in Britain and posed a threat to his Conservative Party ahead of May’s national election.
UKIP leader Nigel Farage, has helped turn UKIP from a fringe movement into a political force that came third in May with more than 12 percent of the vote.
But under Britain’s first-past-thepost electoral system it emerged with just one lawmaker and this month failed to make expected inroads in a vote for a parliamentary seat in Oldham in northern England.
“It is not for me to decide who the leader of the party is but I think it is fair to say that we all need to think very carefully as to whether or not we can build beyond the base that we have now got without that change,” UKIP lawmaker Douglas Carswell told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Friday.
“Sometimes a start-up needs to change gear and to change its management if it’s to go the next level and the Oldham by-election to me said, very clearly, that I think we need a fresh face,” added Carswell, who defected from Cameron’s Conservatives last year and has ruled himself out of the top UKIP job.