The London Times Lords Expense

The British? House of Lords expenses thanks to English tax payers: they now get a massive £21,000 a year per Lord although this is nowhere near as detailed as the receipts from the House of Commons the house of Lords members have published only some their bent expenses and10 Downing Street has announced its new list of British leeches’ 54 new life peers all to which will be living the high life at England’s tax payer cost.

Under the new British coalition British government since the beginning of October this year the House of Lords members who are not paid a direct salary “But able to claim a flat rate attendance allowance of up to £300 per day, of course they all claim and a lot more besides, they could choose not to claim but with their greed of cash that’s never going to be the case, And what do you get for your £300 pounds per day? What you get nothing but sitting on the fat backside playing at being back a public schools? Making a lot of clatter which amounts to nothing but noise pollution.

Previous to this, the Lords could claim for overnight accommodation, a contribution towards the expense of the day spent working, office costs, travel and postage. All of these expenses were caped but it still does not stop them claiming through the back doors which they do.

Today, the member's expenses for the last financial year and the first quarter of this year have been published. There is also a history of Lords' expenses stretching back to 2001 should anyone care to extract those tables from the PDFs files on the Parliament website but as we all know all these statistics are just inputs on a computer.

The total costs are very interesting which include overnight and day, travel, office and postage costs the total for the last financial year was £16 million pounds for the 763 Lords. Not all these Lords attended meetings, but this works out as an average cost to England’s tax payers of £21,000 a year for each Lord.

Tell The London Times what you think of the Lords £12,000 pa and where you think this money could have been better spent.

Other English News.

The British government is to follow the lead of X Factor a television programme and allow the public to decide on legislation to be put before MPs, “which was in fact not an X Factor brain children at all but was the idea of Sir Michael Black-Feather the English First minister (English MP) who came up with the idea over 10 years ago when he put this to the then British PM Tony Blair and was rejected as delusional idler.

But now in an attempt to reduce what is seen as a disconnection between the public and the British parliament, ministers will ensure that the most popular petition on the government website Direct.gov.uk will be drafted as a bill. It is also planning to guarantee that petitions which reach a fixed level of support  most likely 100,000 signatures will be guaranteed a Commons debate Sir Michael wanted to go further and his view was that anything that effected England and its people the people should hold a vote on such matters whether it be to laws or public spending.

English and British Ministerial sources acknowledge that the proposals have the potential to cause headaches for the British coalitions because populist causes such as a return of capital punishment and England’s withdrawal from the European Union both are of which many of England’s people want, and know doubt would be  at the top of grate the list.

The leader of the Commons, Sir George Young, has signalled he wants to press ahead with government by petition in the New Year.

There would be no guarantee that the British government would support any of the most popular proposals but, subject to discussions, there would be an agreement that the issues would be converted by parliamentary draftsmen into a bill which really means most likely all words and nothing done as normal, it not what the English people want it’s what the British want?

The new e-petition reforms have the support of Downing Street strategists anxious to make politics more relevant to people's daily lives or confuse them even more. The plans will require consultation inside parliament, and represent a fulfilment of the ideas promoted in the Conservative manifesto but if like many ideas that where promoted by the Tories then that means nothing but just a load of wind.

Part of the proposals, the British government plans to close down the e-petition part of the Downing Street website, established in the era of Tony Blair, and reopen it in a different format on the Directgov website, so making e-petitions the responsibility of all government departments which makes is easier to pass the buck when things go wrong on to some scape goat.

Catch 22 efforts will also be made to ensure that those people petitioning the new website are registered voters rather than what are described as "super users", the kind of people that repeatedly back a petition on an issue so what this also means is that you will need to register with your details another way of keeping track of who’s Who and where you are and what you do?.

The British government is also looking at how petitions can be converted on to Facebook and other social media sites so petitioners can keep in touch with one another as they campaign for a particular issue to be taken up either by ministers or backbenchers which is just another open door for security services to take a peek at you not that their not already doing that on many of the so called social media site.

A Whitehall source said: "We applaud the principle of the old No 10 website, but it became a not very edifying way to promote some particular issues rather than really lobby the government or reflect public opinion.

"We hope to have found a more efficient and mature way for the public to engage with the British government and parliament."

The idea that the petition with the most support will be turned into a bill is probably the most radical attempt so far to give the public greater direct access to British parliament. There had been suggestions at one point that a petition would require a million signatures before it could be considered for legislation, but government sources said they recognised this large minimum threshold was unrealistic.

A government source said: "It may well mean that we see some difficult issues raised, such as withdrawal from the European Union, but that would put the onus on parliamentarians to convince one another of the many benefits of staying inside the European Union. You would have to win the argument but in all honesty there is no real benefits for England being in the EU just a cost to England’s tax payers along with a load of rubbish laws that they don’t ahead to but enforce on the English people."

Of course another catch 22 there might also be difficulties about proposals that breached the gone mad human rights law, were deemed impractical or had already been recently discussed by parliament when these so called rewritten human rights laws should come under the laws of common senses.

British government sources said they were looking at ways in which the newly elected backbench business committee might be given responsibility for ensuring a bill found a sponsor, as well as for ensuring e-petitions found time to be debated, either in government or backbench time.

It is likely that any petition converted to a bill would have to go through the private member's bill route, rather than be seen as a government bill just another long winded load of tosh.

At present it is very easy for a small minority of well-organised backbenchers to block private members' legislation, but the all-party procedure committee has been looking to reform the system so that majority opinion in the Commons can force a bill on to the statute book changing the laws to suit the British needs.

Back in 2008/9 a procedure committee session had looked at introducing an e-petition system in the Commons, but the cost was put at close to £5m, deemed to be prohibitive at a time when parliament's budget was due to be cut by 17% but they are quite happy of pay the Lords and MP’s expenses which make the 5m look very small but use this sum to block the idea.

Under the old Downing Street petitioning system set up by Blair's spin strategic communications unit, anyone who signed a petition that reached more than 500 signatures by the time it closed would be sent a government response by email. The most popular with 1.8m signatures was a call for the scrapping of "the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy." A one-word petition calling for the prime minister to resign received more than 70,000 signatures, with only a slightly smaller number calling for him to be replaced by Jeremy Clarkson or Sir Michael Black-Feather of course the e petitions where just another spin stunt leading all those that signed them up the garden path in actually thinking something might be done and that they were being listen to and you all know now it was just a stunt that went know where ?.