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TORY plans to strip peers of their powers to veto new regulations will do nothing to address the hypocrisy of retaining an unelected upper house, campaigners argued yesterday.
A review by Conservative grandee Lord Strathclyde, commissioned by Prime Minister David Cameron, recommended that a new law should be passed which would ensure that the Commons had the “final say” over secondary legislation.
The move comes in the wake of the Tories’ humiliating tax credits defeat.
Labour and Liberal Democrat peers infuriated ministers in October by combining to block Chancellor George Osborne’s plans to slash tax credits for low-paid workers.
Democracy campaigners attacked the way the review had been conducted and said that the recommendations missed the point.
Electoral Reform Society head Katie Ghose said: “If the government accept the recommendations of Lord Strathclyde, they will be scrambling in response to the politics of the day, rather than implementing real, lasting and democratic changes.
“If the government is planning to go to the trouble of passing a law to reform the Lords, they should stick to their official party policy and pass the one reform people really want — an elected second chamber.”
Labour MP Graham Allen criticised the closed nature of the review and also suggested that it ought to have looked again at the question of whether the House of Lords should be fully elected.
“Major alterations in our system of governance should not be the product of a closed and narrow internal process, backed up by party discipline,” he said.
“It is clearly time that we took a wider look at a whole constitutional system,” Mr Allen added, calling for the issue to be considered by a specially convened body “comprising representatives of all parties and none and members of the public.”
