Government accused of ‘waging war’ on Parliament by forcing through key law changes without debate
![Sunset on democracy: The Conservatives are trying to push through major changes to UK law without debate in Parliament [Image: Getty].](https://voxpoliticalonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/160119sunsetondemocracy.jpg)
Sunset on democracy: The Conservatives are trying to push through major changes to UK law without debate in Parliament [Image: Getty].
Ministers are being accused of “waging war” on Parliament by using a little-known device to push through profound and controversial changes to Britain’s laws without proper debate or scrutiny.
Since the election the Conservative Government has used a parliamentary procedure called a statutory instrument to try to introduce swathes of significant new laws covering everything from fracking to fox hunting and benefit cuts without debate on the floor of the House of Commons.
On Tuesday, Labour will take the rare step of attempting to annul a statutory instrument that was used earlier this month to remove maintenance grants from around half a million of the poorest students in England. The changes will mainly hit disabled, ethnic minority and older students.
The policy was not included in the Conservatives’ election manifesto and was nodded through by an obscure Commons committee without the substance of the change being debated.
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Criminals the lot of them, they consider all but themselves as idiots let’s hope Labour can prove them wrong for all our sake’s, devious odious cretins.
Labour is deciding to fight back against the Government’s growing use of Statutory Instruments (knowns in Westminster and Whitehall as ‘SIs’) to give effect to its legislation. Today, after an Opposition Day debate, it will take the rare step of moving to annul an SI that will remove maintenance grants from around half a million of the poorest students in England.
The Indy splashes on a wider story about the reliance on SIs (particularly under the Coalition) to get things through without proper scrutiny. Baroness Smith, the Shadow Lords leader, has an arresting quote on the combination of SIs, FoI curbs, boundary changes and party funding: “You could be forgiven for thinking that we’re starting to enter the realms of constitutional gerrymandering.”
The Waugh Zone
The Tories in the EU are voting allies of the ultra-right Poles, who appear to be exercising similar tactics in their own country. I wonder, just a bit, what they talk about over their packed lunches…
The UK government has become rather fascist. Not Nazi like Hitler – no death camps and the like, at least not for now, but more like Mussolini-style fascism. Ruling without Parliament is a fascist thing to do.
There are no death camps because the Conservative Government is trying to engineer deaths at arm’s length, in order not to be associated with the results of its policies. Hence the ‘chequebook euthanasia’ of the work capability assessment, for example.
What else would you expect from the new nazi party that are currently in charge of us all, they’ll try to push through anything without any resistance, and that’s how they like it!
It is quite obvious that what Conservatives claimed in their manifesto and what they intended are almost diametrically opposite. In other words the Tories lied. What’s all the fuss about, they lied to us into 2010 breaking 10 out of 12 of their “pledges to the people” and still got voted back in. Perhaps if Labour had acted as they are doing now, with Jeremy Corbyn and Corbynomics at the fore, in response to so much the Tories are “procuring by fair means or foul” the outcome of the election might have been very different.
Most people didn’t vote for Labour as they knew it was “New Labour”. Labour had been hi-jacked but Tony Blair. Most of us didn’t want to vote for the Blairites they made our skin crawl. Look up how many of the ” New Labour” have shares in the privatised parts of the NHS!