Continue reading “Our right to strike and the Lords right to block”
Category: democracy
The start of a new Parliamentary session
After 13 years of Tory Britain, you can spend three years in prison for erecting a climate crisis banner while sexual predators are quietly fast-tracked for release to help with prison overcrowding.
We all know who is not facing jail time: the water company CEOs who fleeced customers for billions of pounds, filled our rivers with sewage and are now asking for our bills to go up so they can take even more of our money; the Conservative Party members who benefited from the billions handed out via the PPE fast-track scheme and numerous other scams; the Tory donors from the oil and gas industry who have had their payback through tax breaks, new licences and delays in the net-zero policy. Those are climate criminals who are costing us a fortune now and costing future taxpayers billions to clean up the mess and mitigate the damage caused by flooding, wildfires, food shortages and other climate catastrophes. Continue reading “The start of a new Parliamentary session”
Government plan to brand anyone ‘undermining’ UK as extremist
Baroness Jenny Jones was on the Met Police database for domestic extremists, while serving as an elected politician on the Metropolitan Police Authority, voting on their budget and holding them to account. The Observer story relates how “Government officials have drawn up deeply controversial proposals to broaden the definition of extremism to include anyone who “undermines” the country’s institutions and its values,”
Continue reading “Government plan to brand anyone ‘undermining’ UK as extremist”
Parliamentary convention
The unelected House of Lords is an outdated institution and recent decisions by Labour Party Lords are pushing its constitutional role to breaking point. Continue reading “Parliamentary convention”
Assault on democracy
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”
An appeal to Labour’s frontbench: save parliamentary 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”
My petition to defend rights and 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”
3 Big government defeats on EU laws Bill
We had three significant government defeats on amendments to the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill
My Anti-corruption 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.
Seasons Greetings
| 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 |








