Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt D
Labour did plan on introducing legislation enabling life peers to resign, as part of the recent Constitutional Reform Bill. IIRC some people did allege at the time that perhaps it was aimed at enabling Mandelson to resign his peerage and get back in the Commons...
However, the Bill was dropped in the run up to the dissolution of Parliament.
So Mandelson is stuck with his life peerage and barred from entering the House of Commons...
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Peerages have often been given to trouble makers to keep them out of the commons, Thatcher often used that technique to keep non-conformists quiet and I always considered that was why Mandelson was given his.
I'm fairly happy about the coalition, not because I thought Gordon Brown did anything particularly bad - this country was, up until the bank crisis, in pretty good shape and many economists considered him to be our best Chancellor for a very long time, but in truth Chancellor was probably the best place for him, he was never made to be a Prime Minister with all the attention and media gouging that job brings. I'm happy for a couple of reasons, the alternative would have been a coalition between many competing interests removing focus from the target of stability, the Tories economically tend to be fairly reliable if a little naive and short-sighted and maybe this time they'll understand a little more of the meaning of social cohesion and how to avoid being as divisive as they have in the past - doubtful I know. The second reason being we finally may have a change to the voting system that allows everyone to feel like their vote means something and hopefully increase turnout as a bonus, assuming it is a PR system as opposed to an AV system which would simply replace a two party dictatorship with a three party version.
I suspect the Lib-Dems will blunt some of the sharper, more extreme edges of the Tories, most of which get hidden below election-time duvets, and if they can't I'll expect the BBC to re-use their dust-free sets for Election 2011.