Labour Party campaign
In the run up to the election in the UK, the Labour Party has begun to announce the themes it will run on.Brown promises big changes to House of Lords
Britain's House of Lords, normally a sleepy and little-noticed chamber of privilege and wealth, has exploded into the heart of an undeclared but close-fought election with a proposal by Prime Minister Gordon Brown to abolish the 700-year-old institution and replace it with a U.S.-style elected Senate.
If the election promise were carried out, it would make Canada part of a dwindling group of nations, most of them small island states, that still have completely appointed upper legislative chambers…
“The time has now come to make it legitimate in the only way that a legislative assembly can be legitimate in the modern world, which is to be elected,” declared Lord Andrew Adonis, the government's Transport Minister, who would lose his appointed seat in the new scheme...
The proposal calls for a 300-seat house modelled after the U.S. Senate, except that members would be elected through a proportional-representation vote by the public. Seats would be up for election every three parliamentary terms, which means senators would typically sit for 12 to 15 years…
A poll by ICM for the Sunday Telegraph found the Conservative lead narrowing to 7 points for a vote expected to take place May 6, with 38 per cent of voters saying they'd cast their ballots for the Tories and 31 per cent for Labour. That result, like most polls in the past two months, would give the Tories a “hung” or minority Parliament for the first time in four decades...
Britain's third-place party, the centrist Liberal Democrats, have already promised to introduce an elected Senate. This is significant because a minority Parliament could result in a coalition between the LibDems, as they are known, and one of the major parties...
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Labels: elections, politics, UK
posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:24 AM
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