Budget debacle that left Coalition floundering

Here's my annual political review of the year, published in this morning's Newcastle Journal.

Until the early months of this year, the Con-Lib coalition that has governed Britain since May 2010 had by and large done so with a fair wind behind it from the public.

Without ever reaching the heights of popularity enjoyed by New Labour as its zenith, David Cameron’s government appeared, at the very least, to have earned the benefit of the doubt, particularly when it came to the economy.

All that changed on Wednesday 21 March – the day Chancellor George Osborne delivered his third Budget.

To say it was the pivotal moment of the political year would be something of an understatement. In terms of its impact on public opinion, it may well prove to be the pivotal moment of the entire five-year Parliament.

In the space of a 59-minute speech, the Chancellor announced a package of measures which seemed almost deliberately designed to alienate as many sections of the electorate as he could find.

He slapped VAT on hot food and caravans, froze the age-related tax allowance for pensioners, removed a tax break on charitable giving that would have hit hundreds of good causes, and topped it off with a cut in the higher rate of tax worth £42,295 to anyone earning £1m a year.

It was the ‘pasty tax’ rather than the top rate cut which proved the most politically toxic, playing as it did into the ‘Tory toffs’ narrative which had increasingly started to dog Messrs Cameron and Osborne.

In the end, the plan was ditched following a campaign by this newspaper among others – one of a series of budget U-turns which left the Chancellor’s credibility seriously damaged.

From there on in, even though the festivities around the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London 2012 Olympics provided useful temporary distractions, the government struggled to get back on the front foot.

And the slide in its opinion poll ratings was accompanied by increasing tensions within the Coalition itself – notably over Europe, welfare cuts, gay marriage and, most of all, Lords reform.

With his dream of a new electoral system shattered in the May 2011 referendum, deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was pinning his hopes of achieving lasting political reform on securing an elected second chamber - but the Tory backbenchers were having none of it.

The Lib Dems retaliated by scuppering the Tories’ plans for a review of Parliamentary boundaries that would probably have gained them 20-30 seats at the next election

Frustrated in his attempts to regain the political initiative, Mr Cameron resorted to the time-honoured tactic of a reshuffle, but some of his new appointments soon began to unravel.

He shunted Justine Greening out of the job of transport secretary on account of her opposition to a third runway at Heathrow only to see London Mayor and would-be leadership rival Boris Johnson rally to her cause.

His appointment of Andrew Mitchell as chief whip also swiftly backfired when he was involved in an altercation with police officers at the entrance to 10 Downing Street.

However in what has surely been the most interminable and convoluted political story of the year, Mr Mitchell now looks likely to have the last laugh, after it emerged that a police officer may have fabricated evidence.

In the North-East, the regional political agenda continued to be dominated by the fallout from the government’s spending cuts.

Newcastle city council responded to the spending squeeze by taking the axe to the arts budget – reminding those of us with long memories of the antics of so-called ‘loony left’ councils in the 1980s.

Yet at the same time, the year saw something of a rebirth of regional policy, driven by Lord Heseltine’s ‘No Stone Unturned’ report which was explicitly endorsed by Mr Osborne in his autumn statement.

The mini budget also saw the Chancellor forced to back down on plans to introduce regional pay rates following a fierce campaign by the unions.

The year ended with increasing speculation that the Coalition may not, after all, go the distance to the planned next election date of May 2015.

With the government seemingly stuck in a trough of unpopularity, the need for the Liberal Democrats to assert their separate identity from the Tories is growing.

Mr Clegg’s decision to make a separate Commons statement from the front bench on last month’s Leveson report into press regulation was unprecedented, but may well prove to be the start of a trend.

If 2012 was the year the Coalition lost the public’s goodwill, 2013 may prove to be the one that sees it splitting asunder.

A renewal of vows? Pull the other one

There is a school of thought that says that once a government gets itself into a position where it needs a relaunch, the brand is probably already so badly tarnished as to render the whole exercise pointless.

To be fair, the Coalition is probably not at that point yet. It is only two years into its existence, and governments of a far older vintage have come back strongly from similar periods of mid-term blues before now.

But the largely negative reaction to this week’s relaunch, with Wednesday’s Queen’s Speech at its centrepiece, does suggest that the government’s current difficulties go deeper than merely a run of bad headlines.

Coming in the wake of a disastrous Budget, a dismal set of local election results, and the continuing slow drip of damaging revelations from the Leveson Inquiry, it seems the Coalition is currently suffering from a bad case of the political Reverse Midas Touch.

Three major criticisms have been made of the legislative package announced by Her Majesty in what, for her, was surely the least eagerly-awaited public engagement of this her Diamond Jubilee year.

The first was that, with only 16 Bills, it was ‘too thin,’ but for my part, I wonder whether this was not in fact a point in its favour.

Over the past two decades, we have been subjected to an increasing deluge of legislation, for instance the 21 criminal justice bills spewed out by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s administrations over the course of 13 years.

A Conservative-led government, committed to reducing the burden of regulation and shrinking the size of the state, should perhaps have made more of a virtue of this year’s relative paucity.

The second most oft-heard criticism this week was that there was little or nothing in the programme specifically directed towards tackling the country’s current economic difficulties or producing a programme for growth.

But this, surely, is a category error.  Budgets, not Queen’s Speeches, are where you set out your economic policy, and Labour leader Ed Miliband should perhaps have known better than to make the main focus of his attack.

The third main criticism of the Speech – and the biggest one as far as most Tory backbenchers are concerned – was that it concentrated too much on Lib Dem hobby-horses such as House of Lords reform and not enough on issues that mat

Again, this depends on your point of view.  A second chamber elected by proportional representation from region-wide constituencies could well provide a stronger voice for regions such as the North-East – but I can well understand why the Tories, in particular, would not want that.

For me, the most fundamental flaw in Wednesday’s speech was not that it was too thin, too lacking in economic content or too Liberal Democrat, but that it lacked a unifying narrative which would give people a reason to support the government.

Say what you like about Mr Blair, his Queen’s Speeches never suffered from this deficiency, even if, as time went on, they tended to be more about protecting people from nightmares than giving them dreams of a better future.

Perhaps the reason it lacked a unifying theme because it was less the product of one man’s over-arching vision and more the product of compromise between the government’s two constituent parties.

In this respect, the most interesting political story of the week was not the Speech, but Prime Minister David Cameron’s interview with the Daily Mail in which he bemoaned his lack of freedom of action to do the things he really wanted.

What was especially notable about this is that, while Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg loudly and often complains about the Conservatives, Mr Cameron very rarely does the same about the Lib Dems.

Yet here was the Prime Minister saying:  “There is a growing list of things that I want to do but can’t…..there is a list of things that I am looking forward to doing if I can win an election and run a Conservative-only government.”

This week’s relaunch had been billed in advance by some cynics as the Coalition’s “renewal of vows,” but Mr Cameron’s interview shows this to be well wide of the mark.

In truth, it seems to be heading all the more rapidly for the divorce courts.

Nothing gets politicians so worked up as a Boundary Review

THIS week, The Journal reported that there had been more than 900 objections lodged with the Boundary Commission over its plan to alter the face of the region’s one real rock solid Tory enclave – the parliamentary seat of Hexham.

The plans, drawn up last September as part of the government’s proposal to reduce the size of the House of Commons by around 50 seats, would see historic country boundaries crossed in the name of ‘equalising’ the size of constituencies across the country.

If the proposals go ahead, the North-East will see its overall representation in Parliament fall from 29 to 26 with no part of the region unaffected by the changes.

For some of the region’s MPs, it is likely to mean the end of the political road, while those that survive are will find themselves standing for re-election in constituencies almost unrecognisable from their existing ones.

In nowhere than Hexham has the opposition to the government’s plans been more intense.

All three main parties – including the Conservatives and their sitting MP Guy Opperman – have come out against the proposals, with the 950 letters of opposition equalling the number received in all the other 28 North East constituencies put together.

What the opponents of the changes find particularly galling is the fact that the proposed new constituency will breach the historic county boundary between Northumberland and County Durham, with Haltwhistle moving into a newly-created seat of Consett and Barnard Castle.

Other proposed new constituencies in the region – for example Newcastle North and Cramlington – will see the traditional divide between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas breached, although, perhaps surprisingly, these seem to have aroused much less opposition to date.

But the ongoing debate over Hexham could prove to be a microcosm of a much larger battle over the government’s proposals which could yet influence both the timing and the outcome of the next general election.

In my column last week, I speculated that Nick Clegg’s proposals for House of Lords reform could ultimately prove to the rock on which the Coalition founders, with Conservative peers, who want to maintain the second chamber’s built-in Tory majority, threatening to derail his plans.

What does that have to do with Parliamentary boundaries, I hear you ask? Well, potentially quite a lot.

For the Lib Dems are threatening to retaliate against the potential loss of their leader’s cherished Lords reform plans by scuppering the Tories’ attempts to reduce the number of MPs.

Now at first sight, you might think this was yet another ill-judged policy intervention by the Lib Dems that is likely to prove about as big a vote-winner for them as their support for the Euro.

Years of mounting public cynicism about politicians – capped by the MPs’ expenses scandal – have created a climate in which any party advocating a reduction in their numbers is likely to be on pretty firm electoral ground.

But politicians are never so exercised as when their own jobs are under threat – and for that reason alone, a Lib Dem revolt against the boundary review proposals could have a very real prospect of success.

A small number of Tory MPs affected by the changes – some of them only elected for the first time in 2010 and whose parliamentary careers face being cut off in their infancy – might even be persuaded to join such a rebellion.

This is not just about the Lib Dems getting their own back on the Tories, though. There is undoubtedly an element of calculation in the party’s stance.

It is estimated that the boundary changes will be worth an extra 20 seats for the Conservatives at the next election – some of which will undoubtedly come at the expense of their Coalition partners.

The changes will therefore make it much more likely that there will be a majority Conservative administration next time round, and correspondingly much less likely that the Lib Dems will again be in a position to hold the balance of power.

Killing off the boundary review might yet be the Lib Dems’ best hope of hanging onto their ministerial limousines. And it might even win them a few votes in Hexham.

The Coalition will not last five years

In last week's column, I suggested that the key strategic task facing the Liberal Democrats as they gather for their spring conference in Gateshead was to find a way of winning back the support that has deserted them since they joined the Coalition in 2010.

And doubtless there will be plenty of ideas floating back and forth at The Sage this weekend as to exactly how they should go about it.

They could, as some argue, stop the Health and Social Care Bill in its tracks. The Guardian commentator Polly Toynbee is among those warning this week that if they don’t take what may be their last opportunity to do this, it will seal their fate as a party.

Or they could, as Business Secretary Vince Cable has suggested, use their influence to help shape next month’s Budget, taking everyone earning less than £10,000 a year out of tax and introducing a ‘mansion tax’ for the super-rich.

Their leader, Nick Clegg, certainly wants to see the party getting on the front foot and proclaiming its successes in the Coalition rather than apologising for being part of it.

“Now it is time to move on. To stop justifying being in government and start advertising being in government. To stop lamenting what might have been and start celebrating what is. To stop defending our decisions and start shouting our achievements from the rooftops,” he said yesterday.

But whichever way they turn, will it make the slightest difference to the party’s electoral prospects?

Well, if history is any guide, no. The plain facts of the matter are that involvement in a Coalition is almost always disastrous for the smaller party, whatever political achievements it manages to extract from it.

The most recent example was the Lib-Lab pact in 1977/78. This was perhaps the most enlightened and humane period of government in my lifetime, but it still ended up doing the then Liberal Party terrible damage.

Far from emerging strengthened, their vote went down at the subsequent general election in 1979 and several of their most high-profile MPs, including the deputy leader John Pardoe, lost their seats.

Further back, the 'National Liberals' who joined the Tory-dominated National Government in the 1930s ended up simply becoming absorbed by the larger party.

And David Lloyd George’s 1916-22 Coalition, in which the Tories also held a numerical majority, likewise ended disastrously for the Liberals and their leader despite victory in the First World War.

It is partly for this reason that I have argued from the outset of the Coalition that, while the Lib Dems probably had no choice but to join it, they also needed to find a way of getting out of it alive – preferably well before the next election is due.

The Health and Social Care Bill, on which the Lib Dem rebels are more in tune with public opinion than the government is, would have given them a plausible pretext, although the party activists’ last-ditch bid to halt the Bill now looks unlikely to succeed.

Europe, by contrast, would not be a good reason for the Lib Dems to try to collapse the Coalition, for the simple reason that on this issue, it is the Tories who are much closer to the mainstream public view.

One less widely-canvassed possibility is House of Lords reform – not the sexiest of issues, for sure, but one on which the Tory ‘backwoodsmen’ seem almost certain to thwart Mr Clegg’s well-meaning attempts to drag the British Constitution into the 21st century.

The last time I discussed the possibility of the Coalition ending before its due-date of 2015, a commenter on my blog reminded me that the government has already passed legislation to bring in five-year fixed-term Parliaments.

My view, however, is that this could turn out to be no more than a quaint constitutional notion, given that the legislation also allows for a two-thirds majority of MPs to dissolve Parliament ahead of its term.

Let’s just suppose that David Cameron decides he wants an election. Would Labour MPs, in such circumstances, really vote to keep him in office until 2015?

It stands to reason that the Coalition will not last five years. It will, rather, last just as long as both of its partners want it to.

The big, unanswered questions

Who will be the next Speaker? Will there be an October election? And will we get proportional representation? Just some of the many unanswered questions that have arisen from the MPs expenses scandal. Here's today's Journal column.

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For most of the past two years, the biggest unanswered question in politics has been whether Gordon Brown will survive to lead Labour into the next election, and it is a question that is still awaiting an answer.

But seldom can any week in politics have thrown up as many unanswered questions as the last one, a week which has seen the first defenestration of a House of Commons Speaker for 300 years and talk of a “quiet revolution” in our political system.

Several careers besides those of Michael Martin have already ended. Several more are hanging by a thread. And the pressure for a wholesale electoral clear-out of the "Duck Island Parliament" is growing.

We now know the true, appalling extent of the scandal over MPs' expenses. What we can still only guess at at this stage is its longer-term impact.

First, there are the small-to-middling questions, mainly concerning individuals. How many more MPs will be forced to stand down at the next election? Who will lose their jobs in the next reshuffle? Who will be the next Speaker?

Then there are the slightly broader questions. How will the public’s anger at the behaviour of the political classes feed through into voting habits? Will the “incumbency factor” that has always favoured sitting MP go into reverse? And will the next election herald a new wave of independents?

Then of course there is the question of when that election will finally be held, and whether Mr Brown will pay the political price for failing to reform the system until it was too late.

Finally, perhaps the most far-reaching question of all. Will the expenses scandal ultimately result in an historic reshaping of our parliamentary democracy, or alternatively bring about its final demise?

In terms of the questions around the futures of individual MPs, the North-East is as good a place as any to start.

Will Tyne Bridge MP David Clelland, controversially reselected in preference to neighbouring MP Sharon Hodgson, now fund himself deselected after claiming for the cost of buying out his partner’s £45,000 stake in his London flat, despite his very full and frank explanations of the reasons behind the move?

Will Durham North’s Kevan Jones and other “squeaky clean” MPs who voluntarily laid bare their expense claims be rewarded for their candour, or will they find themselves tar-brushed along with their sleazier counterparts?

And will Sir Alan Beith crown a notable career of public service by achieving his ambition of the Speakership - or will the fact that both he and his wife, Baroness Maddock, claimed second home allowances on the same property ultimately count against him?

On that last point, I have to say it would give me great pleasure to see the long-serving Berwick MP in the Speaker’s chair, although if he were not standing down from Parliament, Sunderland South’s Chris Mullin would be an equally admirable choice.

If the truth be told, the North-East should have had the Speakership last time round. The region had three candidates in Mr Beith, David Clark, and John McWilliam, all of whom would have done a better job than Michael Martin – though some would argue that is not saying much.

Ultimately Mr Martin fell not because of shaky grasp of Commons procedure or even last week's ill-judged attacks on backbench MPs, but because his continual attempts to block the freedom of information request over MPs expenses caused this whole debacle.

Just imagine for a moment that Dr Clark had got the job. Would he have fought the provisions of the freedom of information legislation that he himself pioneered? Of course not, and our Parliament would now be much the better for it.

But enough of the ancient history. What on earth will happen to the House of Commons now?

One oft-heard prediction this week is that we will end up with a chamber full of Esther Rantzens, Martin Bells and toast of the Gurkhas Joanna Lumley, and it's certainly one possibility.

We are living through such an extraordinary period of “anti-politics” that there could even be a return to the situation that existed before the rise of the party system in the 19th century – the “golden age of the independent House of Commons man” as one historian called it.

But while celebrity politicians may well play a part, I think the next election is just as likely to throw up more “local heroes” like Dr Richard Taylor, who defeated an unpopular Labour MP over hospital closures and is now himself even being mentioned as a possible Speaker.

Should that election now take place sooner than spring 2010? Well, there has to be a very strong argument for saying that, just as the Speaker who resisted reform for so long has had to go, so too should the Prime Minister who failed to grasp the nettle.

When a Parliament has lost moral authority to the extent that this one has, a clear-out becomes almost a democratic necessity, and Cromwell’s words to the Rump Parliament – “In the name of God, go!” - once more have a certain resonance.

Against that, there is a case for allowing passions to cool. In the words of one commentator: "If an election were called next week, Britain might well end up with a Parliament for the next five years that is defined entirely by its views on claiming for bath plugs, rather than on how to get the country out of the worst recession in 70 years."

Mr Brown will no doubt still try to hang on until next May, but in my view an autumn 2009 election has become significantly more likely in recent days.

As far as the longer-term implications of the scandal are concerned, there is already talk of radical constitutional reforms including an elected second chamber, fixed-term Parliaments, more powerful select committees, and even proportional representation.

I'll believe it when I see it....but if a consensus does emerge that radical parliamentary reform is the way out of this mess, it stands to reason that the party that will most benefit will be the one that has consistently advocated such reform for the past 40 years.

The Liberal Democrats have long been the recipients of the "anti-politics" vote, and on this issue as well as that of the Gurkhas, their leader Nick Clegg has looked over the past fortnight like a man whose time has come.

Sir Alan Beith is not the only Lib Dem for whom this crisis may prove an historic opportunity.

State of politics is snow joke

Has inability to deal with a few inches of snow turned Britain into an international laughing stock? No, but there's plenty of other things which should have done. Here's today's Journal column.

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For those of us of a certain age, it has become an inevitable source of amusement that whenever a few inches of snow falls in Britain these days, the country's entire transport infrastructure invariably appears to grind to a halt.

The country that survived the Blitz and which was once a by-word for phlegm and indomitability now seemingly crumbles at the slightest onset of bad weather.

To some extent it's a reflection of environmental change, and the fact that winter snow has become such an increasing rarity in some parts of the UK that we are less and less prepared for how to deal with it.

It’s also a reflection of trends in modern society - for instance, the tendency of people to live further away from their places of work, and the consequent pressure this places on an already fragile transport system.

Few will ever forget the “wrong kind of snow” excuse trotted out by what was then known as British Rail the last time the country had a “snow event” as serious as this week’s.

Mayor of London Boris Johnson duly paid homage to it this week with another memorable bon mot: “It's the right kind of snow, but unfortunately it's the wrong kind of quantity."

But while it’s fair game to laugh and joke about this sort of thing, we probably ought to keep a sense of perspective.

There is probably a legitimate debate to be had about whether we could have been better prepared for this week’s events, but to argue, as some did, that this makes us the “laughing stock of Europe” is a trifle OTT.

Much of the blame for the failure to grit the roads will, as ever, fall on local councils, but in my experience, if local government is failing to do something, it’s invariably because central government has cut its budget.

Either way, my view for what it’s worth is that while we undoubtedly could have done some things differently, we shouldn’t spend too much time and energy holding a national inquest about it.

The bottom line is that the snowstorms provided most of us with an opportunity for some much needed chilling-out – in more ways than one.

Schoolkids who are being tested and assessed within an inch of their lives got a chance to go out and play – remember that? - while their mums and dads were able to spend some quality time with them for once instead of fretting over computer screens.

In any case, if we want to avoid being an international laughing stock, there are far more pressing things we should be addressing.

Take, for instance, the House of Lords. It is outrageous enough that there is still a part of our legislature which is chosen by patronage, and in a few cases by accident of birth, rather than by election as in most other civilised countries.

But if that were not enough to make us an international joke, four Labour peers were recently tape-recorded suggesting they could help with amending legislation in return for cash.

All four have denied any wrongdoing, but even if the ongoing inquiries result in a traditional British whitewash, it has scarcely improved the image of an already deeply flawed institution.

Inevitably, the allegations have led to renewed calls to ban convicted criminals from membership of the Upper House – but on the subject of international jokes, is it not even slightly laughable that this hasn’t been done already?

It is not just well-known convicts like Lord Jeffrey Archer and Lord Conrad Black whose continued entitlement to sit in the British legislature makes a mockery of our system of government.

One Labour peer, Lord Watson, was convicted by a Scottish court a few years back of wilful fire-raising after deliberately setting a pair of Edinburgh hotel curtains ablaze while drunk.

Since being freed on 23 May, 2006, he has attended the Lords on at least 102 occasions, and claimed £37,538 in attendance allowances.

Then of course there are those who, with monumental hypocrisy, continue to sit in the British Parliament while simultaneously refusing to pay tax to the British Treasury.

Last week, in a debate on reforms to both Houses of Parliament, the government put forward an amendment which would prevent so-called “non-doms” from sitting in the Upper House.

The move would potentially lead to the exclusion of major party donors on both sides of the chamber, including Tory Lord Ashcroft, and Lord Paul, a large funder of the Labour party.

It’s doubtless a welcome sign of the government’s determination to rebuild trust in politics, but once more, why is it even necessary in the first place?

And if the continued existence of the House of Lords isn’t enough cause for international mirth, how about our Prime Minister’s repeated boasts about his handling of the UK economy?

As I pointed out last week, Mr Brown’s claims to have left Britain better prepared for the economic downturn have received a belly-laugh not just from the public, but from the International Monetary Fund itself.

Then there’s the spectacle of seeing a British Foreign Secretary reduced to defending the decision of an American government to threaten refuse to share intelligence with us if allegations that a British resident was tortured were made public.

It is this kind of thing which causes cinema audiences to burst into spontaneous applause when fictional Prime Ministers make speeches about how bad the “special relationship” has become.

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of things we can be proud of in this country –but much of which we should be rightly ashamed as well.

Our inability to deal with a bit of snow, amusing though it may be, is not one of them.

The Louse of Whores

Like the UK Daily Pundit,I am snowed under at the moment - in my case trying to deal with the impact of the recession on the regional press industry - so blogging will continue to be light, though not non-existent, over the next few weeks.

I wish I had had the chance to post this week on the latest in the long and growing line of British political corruption scandals, and what it ought to tell us about the current method of choosing members of the Second Chamber, but you'll have to make do with this cartoon from Slob instead. Visitors of an overly squeamish disposition should perhaps look away now.

Blair's nemesis

Lords reform - and how Tony Blair's failure to address it seriously in his first term has now come back and bitten him on the bum - is the subject of my latest podcast which can be heard
HERE or alternatively read HERE.

"There is surely a bitter irony in the fact that had Mr Blair done the sensible, democratic thing and brought in a fully-elected Second Chamber back in 1997, the whole cash-for-peerages affair would never have happened, but in his lack of radicalism and loss of nerve lay his nemesis. It is as good a summary of the Blair years as any."

A lame duck government cannot reform the Lords

...but Gordon's Government maybe can.

It is a savage indictment of the Blair Government's loss of reforming nerve that it has taken them 10 years to come up with a plan for a 50pc elected Second Chamber. But such is its shortage of political capital that even implementing this timid proposal is likely to prove beyond it.

The next Government, though, will have much more of such capital to expend, and if he becomes Prime Minister, Gordon Brown should make it clear from the start that he intends to go the whole hog and bring in a fuly democratically-elected upper House, and that this will be a Labour manifesto commitment at the next election.

There is no place in a modern legislature for hereditary peers who owe their titles to some past royal service or liaison. No place for bishops who no longer even believe in the God they purport to worship. No place for appointed party placemen and timeserver ex-MPs. And no place either for so-called "representatives" of ethnic communities who are often those with the loudest voices rather than the broadest level of support.

There is, I grant you, a case for involving "experts" from the world of science and academia, of which Lord (Robert) Winston is a good example. But there is no reason why any of those people should not be co-opted as non-voting advisers onto Lords Committees scrutinising legislation without actually making them voting members of the upper House.

But a fully-elected Second Chamber would not only be right in principle, it would also make good politics. By coming out for a 100pc elected Chamber, and making this a manfesto commitment, Brown will accomplish three things.

First, it will give him the necessary authority, under the Salsibury Convention, to push through a fully-elected Second Chamber after the next election irrespective of the inevitable opposition from the peers themselves. Second, it will prevent David Cameron outflanking him on the left by himself coming out in favour of 100pc election.

But thirdly, and best of all, it will enable Brown to draw a line under the sleazy Blair years at a stroke by removing the right of future Prime Ministers to abuse the Parliamentary process by awarding peerages to their political cronies in the way Blair has done.

Indeed, since everyone except John "fucking" Hutton and Charlie "no trousers" Clarke now accept he is going to be the next PM, there is surely nothing to stop Brown coming out and saying all this right away.

They don't learn, do they?

You would think, wouldn't you, that with all the problems it is encountering as a result of the cash for peerages inquiry, Labour would have the good sense to end all Prime Ministerial patronage over House of Lords appointments and support a fully elected Second Chamber.

But, according to The Guardian's Patrick Wintour, apparently not.

Democracy in Iraq? We should have tried it at home first

What's the relationship between the War in Iraq and House of Lords reform? Well, perhaps little, except that they were both in the news last week and therefore provided some of the subject matter for my latest Column and accompanying Podcast.

But is there not a delicious irony in the fact that a Government which has preached so much about the need to export democratic values to other countries cannot, even after nine years in power, bring itself to support a democratically-elected Second Chamber?

"[Jack] Straw's plan for a 50-50 split between elected and appointed peers scarcely seems like a great step forward, especially when a 2003 plan for the Upper House to be 80pc elected came within three votes of gaining Commons approval. But the really amazing thing is that there should be any debate about this at all.

"As one newspaper's leader column put it this week: “The starting point for any debate about any legislature should be that is democratically elected. It therefore ought to be for the opponents of democracy to have to justify themselves.”"

Incidentally, the Lincolnshire Echo version of the column is now no more, having been summarily axed in an email sent out on Friday. Coming soon after the loss of my North West Enquirer column as a result of that newspaper going into receivership last month, it is a not inconsiderable blow.

They say these things normally come in threes, don't they?

Lord Who?

Much of the interest in the new list of working peers will doubtless centre on which of them have donated money to the two main parties - but I have long had a different bee in my bonnet about lists of this kind.

Basically it concerns the issue of the Liberal Democrats nominating former MPs for peerages who have achieved little of distinction in the Lower House.

Iain Dale has touched on this before in a post about Jenny Tonge, a Lib Dem MP chiefly remembered for making an injudicious comment about suicide bombers before later joining the conspiracy to bring down Charles Kennedy.

Now the party has nominated another two of its lesser lights for elevation to the ermine - former MPs John Burnett and Brian Cotter.

New Labour may have perpetrated some shameful abuses of the honours system, but at least it has the decency to nominate candidates who have actually achieved something, like long-serving former Labour MP, MEP and Europe Minister Joyce Quin.

I know the Lib Dems are short of people to nominate as working peers, but it seems wrong to me that you can become a peer simply by virtue of having been elected, for however short a time, as an MP.

The other point is that surely good Liberal Democrats ought to have more self-respect than to prop up what is basically a rotten system.

The sooner we move to electing the Lords the better for all concerned.