This government has launched an assault on our democracy. It is trying to discourage opposition voters reaching the ballot box with Voter ID; it is giving the police the power to ban protests that create “more than minor” disruption; and it is trying to by-pass parliamentary democracy by handing more power to Ministers. Continue reading “Assault on democracy”
This is an appeal to the Labour front bench: please talk to some constitutional lawyers urgently about my Fatal Motion, or even Gordon Brown, who produced such an expert report on reforming the second chamber. It appears that Emily Thornberry MP, Labour’s Shadow Attorney General hasn’t had the full picture explained to her. In a tweet the other day, she argued:
“Labour doesn’t vote in the House of Lords to kill a bill, that’s the Commons’ job. The constitutional position is the unelected Lords is a revising chamber only. If a precedent was set, the Tories could easily use their majority in the Lords to do the same to a Lab govt’s laws.”
Continue reading “An appeal to Labour’s frontbench: save parliamentary democracy”
Only a few weeks ago the Government lost a vote in the Lords on the Public Order Bill to change the interpretation of “serious disruption” of other people’s day-to-day activities to mean “anything more than minor” and now the government are now trying to reinsert this change via secondary legislation which has less Parliamentary scrutiny and can’t be amended in any way. Baroness Jenny Jones has tabled a fatal motion to stop their proposal from becoming law.
Continue reading “My petition to defend rights and democracy”
We had three significant government defeats on amendments to the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill
After the success in the Lords of my Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill I’m very happy with the warm cross party support for my new Anti-corruption Bill (thank you Mr Starmer). When adopted it will reverse the damage done by over a decade of corporate lobbying and political donations to the Conservative Party.
| Here is the latest news about what Natalie Bennett and Jenny Jones have been doing recently and a few highlights of 2022 working full time as the Green Party’s representatives in the House of Lords |
This is clearly rubbish legislation. For example, there is a lack of a definition of “serious disruption”, what about arresting the Government for serious disruption to the NHS over the last 12 years? I would support that. The criminal courts in this country are crumbling and cannot cope with the number of cases that they have at the moment. Yet here the Government will insist on more cases which will clog up the courts even more. This is so right-wing; it is not an appropriate Bill for a democracy. Continue reading “Public Order Bill committee stage day 1”
Times Radio have obtained figures that show more than a hundred members of the House of Lords attended parliament fewer than ten times in the most recent parliamentary session.
“Only two peers attended parliament on all 156 days it was sitting: Lord Moylan, a Tory peer, and the Green Party peer Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb.
The Lords deleted nearly 18 pages of the most draconian restrictions on the right to peaceful protest from the Policing Bill, but the government are now trying to bring them back. This must be opposed.
The government want to stop any protest that might get noticed and be effective. They have already got the right to ban noisy protests, now they want to clamp down on all the other forms of peaceful, non violent protest that people use to get attention. And that’s the crucial point – protestors are just people. People who work, pay taxes, study, or collect the pensions they have earned. People who see something wrong and want it to stop. People like you and me.
This was a bad week for democracy and our freedoms in the UK. We lost the right to protest noisily, and effectively, to vote without ID, and to have an independent electoral commission. Parliament also allowed the government to break international law by deporting refugees to Rwanda, along with giving the Home Secretary the power to arbitrarily deport several million people born in this country (dual nationals) with no right of appeal prior to them losing their citizenship.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb 