A Place to Stand

Plans for reform of the House of Lords will cost more than £1 billion by the end of the term of office of the first peers to be elected, according to new figures.

Labour peer Lord Lipsey, former Economics Editor of the Sunday Times - who has made calculations of the cost of the proposed shake-up - said Leader of the Commons Jack Straw refused to put a cost on the plans unveiled in a White Paper last month. This was on the grounds that it could not be worked out until Parliament decided the exact shape of the change.

However, Lord Lipsey said he has used official figures and plausible assumptions to estimate the cost at £1.092 billion..........

the cost per member of the Lords amounts to only £149,000 by comparison with £726,000 for each member of the Commons. Which would people rather their taxes went on - nurses and hospitals, teachers and schools or yet another gang of expensive politicians?".......

Mr Straw's White Paper is the third on Lords reform since Labour came to power in 1997. It calls for a slimmed down "hybrid" Upper House of 540 members ....

From the Guardian among others
-----------------------
He seems to be working on the assumption that the Lords 540 members X £726,000 x 4 years = £1,57 billion (we may perhaps assume slightly less per person for the Upper House). This seems credible & the government's refusal to produce different figures makes their assurances unconvincing.

This persuades me. A billion is a lot of money to keep an institution which serves no real purpose but which has been there forever. There are occasions - many occasions - when it is better to prune than to reform but we have got into a state of mind where getting rid of any aspect of government is heresy. Replace it with a written constitution & constitutional court & our liberty would be much better defended. One billion could give us 100 X-Prizes, equivalent to the one that produced Spaceship One or a Forth Bridge or 100 km of road tunnels across Britaim.

Incidentally the Commons at £726,000 x 646 MPS is £469 million a year & no great shakes either.

By comparison Holyrood, with 129 members, at £73 million a year seems to be relatively OK for once.

Having pushed for the encouragement of prefabicated mass produced housing I was very pleased to hear:

Ikea flatpack home deal is signed


A £200Million housing project using Ikea flatpack homes is to be launched in Glasgow today.

The scheme will see 1200 family houses built over the next five years in Drumchapel.

As exclusively revealed by the Evening Times last year, around 40 of the properties will be Ikea flatpacks, the first time the Swedish company's prefabricated homes will have been used in Scotland.

advertisementSmart-living "Boklok" homes are a big hit in Scandinavia with their open-plan designs, high ceilings and large windows.

Today all the partners involved in the project were signing off the contracts in a ceremony at Glasgow City Chambers.

Summerhill councillor Paul Carey said: "Today we are giving the green light to the largest single regeneration scheme in Scotland."

On the other hand, since similar Norwegian houses sell at approx £40,000 (excluding installation) I was a little surprised at how much that is costing the corporation. £200 million for 1,200 homes comes to £166,000 each.

According to Boklok's site "BoKlok is aiming to sell homes in the range from a one-bedroom flat for under £100,000 to a three-bedroom house for under £150,000" - this is fully installed because "Will BoKlok homes be available to buy as flat packs from IKEA stores? ---
No. You will not be able to buy a flat pack house from IKEA". A not unreasonable position when there are so many rules in this country & councils knock down houses which, while well constructed, haven't done their paperwork acceptably.

Without such rules it would be perfectly possible to put one of these up for £40,000 for the unit & £20,000 installation.

Channel 4 Thursday 8 March at 9pm
This will be the first time British TV has ever seriously reported on the warming sceptic case.

The film argues that the earth's climate is always changing, and that rapid warmings and coolings took place long before the burning of fossil fuels. It argues that the present single-minded focus on reducing carbon emissions not only may have little impact on climate change, it may also have the unintended consequence of stifling development in the third world, prolonging endemic poverty and disease.

The film features an impressive roll-call of experts, including nine professors – experts in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, environmental science, biography and paleoclimatology – from such reputable institutions as MIT, NASA, the International Arctic Research Centre, the Institut Pasteur, the Danish National Space Center and the Universities of London, Ottawa, Jerusalem, Winnipeg, Alabama and Virginia.

The film hears from scientists who dispute the link between carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures.............

Finally, the film argues that restricting CO2 emissions could actually be damaging for people in the developing world. A respected Kenyan development expert says: 'The rich countries can afford to engage in some luxurious experimentation with other forms of energy, but for us we are still at the stage of survival.

'I don't see how a solar panel is going to power a steel industry, how a solar panel is going to power a railway network, it might work, maybe, to power a small transistor radio.

'The thing that emerges from the whole environmental debate is the point that there is somebody keen to kill the African dream, and the African dream is to develop. We are being told don't touch your resources, don't touch your oil, don't touch your coal; that is suicide.'

The programme's producer Martin Durkin is an intelligent Marxist (ie one who hasn't gone over to the Green side) of whom George Moonbat wrote

In October 1998 a television producer named Martin Durkin took a proposal to the BBC’s science series, Horizon. Silicone breast implants, he claimed, far from harming women, were in fact beneficial, reducing the risk of breast cancer. Horizon commissioned a researcher to find out whether or not his assertion was true. After a thorough review, the researcher reported that Mr Durkin had ignored a powerful body of evidence contradicting his claims. Martin Durkin withdrew his proposal. Instead of dropping it, however, he took it to Channel 4 and, astonishingly, sold it to their science series, Equinox.

Since then the entire breast implant scare has blown over & there is no serious doubt that they do no harm. Moonbat doesn't appear to have written on the subject since.

He has also produced another one on GM called "Against Nature", giving "environmentalists" a going over which again got criticised as being "far right" by Guardianistas & forced an apology from C4. Since then absolutely no sustainable evidence whatsoever of GM causing any physical harm has been found. The BBC, Guardian etc have therefore all been forced to apologise to Monsanto for their accusations - not.

I'm sure Mr Paxman will be watching this since it is clear from his sarcasm that he has great doubts about the warming scare but dare not quite come out & say that the BBC have given up reporting news for making up propaganda.

"I have neither the learning nor the experience to know whether the doomsayers are right about the human causes of climate change. But I am willing to acknowledge that people who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that it is the consequence of our own behaviour," Paxman said, writing in this week's edition of in-house BBC magazine Ariel.

"I assume that this is why the BBC's coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago. But it strikes me as very odd indeed that an organisation which affects such a high moral tone cannot be more environmentally responsible," he added.

The unconscious irony of this official BBC statement is even clearer

For years on Newsnight we've reported concerns about the effects of climate change with caution, due scepticism and balance.... I think we're past that point

I must admit I never saw any of the "balance" but it is certainly over.

Look forward to more complaints from Greenies saying that it is biased to criticise them & that all those who doubt them come "from Mars".

Ming Campbell has made a speech indicating his willingness to do a deal with Labour. Now this is not in itself automatically bad, though I think it unwise to appear to eager & plain foolish to say they would only join with Labour. In negotiations it is always best to keep your options as open as possible.

The real killer is the 5 conditions they would want. Ming does not include PR. Without PR the LDs do not have the permanent electoral base to stay in power permanenty. Without that they are merely reserve Labour players pulled in when Labour can't get a majority on their own & told to piss off the rest of the time. A party which aspires to the reserves is not going to keep many members.

The conditions

WHAT CAMPBELL DEMANDED OF GORDON
1

"End Labour's authoritarian attack on civil liberties. Identity cards will not stop terrorism. They won't stop illegal immigration. They won't stop fraud. And they won't stop crime. Don't spend billions on an expensive, ineffective and unworkable identity card scheme. Spend the money on our police and security services instead."

2

"Grasp the challenge posed by climate change. The environmental efforts in the Chancellor's Budgets have been risible - tax pollution more and earnings less."

3

"Break open the poverty trap. How can it be fair that over two-and-a-half million pensioners live in poverty? How can it be fair that over one-and-a-half million families are on waiting lists for social housing? I want to ask Gordon Brown how can it be fair that in 21st-century Britain, six out of ten children in Glasgow - the city where I was born - live in poverty?

"Give pensioners a proper income without the humiliation of the means test. Give families the opportunity for decent housing. Give our children a proper chance. End the dependency culture. Give people a hand up, not a handout."

4

"Trust the people. Since 1997, Labour has accumulated power when it ought to have dispersed it. Free local communities from the shackles of Whitehall. Scrap the council tax, which penalises pensioners and poorer families and hamstrings local communities."

5

"Britain's foreign policy should not be set in Washington. What do we know about Iraq? We know the president made the decisions, the Prime Minister argued the case, the Chancellor signed the cheques and the Tories voted it through. The British-American relationship needs to be rebalanced.

"There are ominous signs that some in the United States might consider military action against Iran. But strikes against Iran would destabilise the region and put British forces in Iraq at risk.

"So, Mr Brown, announce now that Britain will not support an attack on Iran. And, while you are at it, repudiate the Prime Minister's desperate efforts to lock us into the US plan for a 'son of Star Wars' missile defence system."

require no serious actual activity from Labour with the exception of scrapping id cards, which are clearly going to be an expensive white elephant anyway.

I cannot see anybody who is undecided between the LibDems & any party other than Labour (Tories, SNP, UKIP) wanting to vote LibDem in the knowledge that they will so easily act as a safety net for a failing Labour. Even were Ming to backtrack on this I cannot see them trusting Ming then. This is going to have to be fought out in the party - somebody is going to have to stand against Ming. If it is allowed to stand by default the party is finished as an independent entity.

It also implies that a vote for the LibDems in the Scottish election is, as had been becoming apparent anyway, a certain vote for another McConnell administration.