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67% want an English Parliament

An ICM Poll commissioned by the CEP shows support for an English Parliament stands at 67%.

Help hold this Government to account

The UK Parliament dates back to the mid-13th Century and is the highest legislative authority in the United Kingdom - the institution responsible for making and repealing UK law. It is made up of three constituent parts: The House of Commons, the House of Lords, and the Crown. It is also known as the Legislature

E-petitions: Why nothing happens?  What happened to democracy?

More than 255,000 people have signed a petition on the Downing Street website

against any plans to build Britain's biggest mosque in East London.

The petition, currently the most popular on the No 10 site, calls for the "mega mosque" to be scrapped as it will "cause terrible violence". But ex-London mayor Ken Livingstone said it was part of a "vicious" campaign to spread untruths about the scheme. No 10 is expected to respond when the petition closes on Wednesday.
It has resisted calls to remove the petition from its site, amid claims racist language had to be removed from the list of signatories. The row centres on plans by Tablighi Jamaat to build a 12,000 capacity mosque on land in West Ham.  Downing Street has said any planning decision will be down to the local authority but Newham Council is not expecting to receive a planning application for a mosque "in the near future".
'Inaccurate' Tablighi Jamaat has said it is pushing ahead with the scheme and last week appointed architects Allies and Morrison, whose previous projects include The Royal Festival Hall and the BBC's White City media village.
The development will include the largest mosque in the UK, with a capacity of 12,000 but it will also include a new school and conference centre," said Abdul Sattar Shahid, of Tablighi Jamaat, in a statement.
The Downing Street website was once a rather sedate corner of the internet, mainly devoted to guided tours of Number 10 and lengthy reports of official briefings. But over the past year it has found itself in the eye of a political storm.
A new service allowing citizens to submit petitions to the prime minister has taken off in a way nobody - least of all those in Downing Street in charge of running it - expected. More than three million people - or about 7% of the British population - have now signed petitions on subjects ranging from inheritance tax to calls for Spandau Ballet's Gold to be made the national anthem. One petition - calling for an end to road pricing trials - was famously signed by 1.8 million people. But with the project approaching its first birthday, some are asking if - rather than providing British citizens with a powerful new voice - it has all been a waste of time.

'Spurious consultation'
Professor Stephen Coleman, of Leeds University, one of the UK's most influential advocates of e-democracy, believes the site may be guilty of raising expectations it cannot fulfil.

Although the spiel says that petitions with more than 200 signatures will be responded to, people who vote are lucky if they get any response at all. The usual is in the form of a statement on government policies. Anyone with more than half a brain would naturally come to the conclusion that Nobody in government is reading these petition results and no-one in government gives a 'tinckers cuss' about what the public think.

The awkward squad Labour wants rid of upstairs

By Donald Shell  edited highlights

The government continues to muddle along on the question of second chamber reform. It’s latest lurch has been to establish a joint select committee to consider how to codify what it describes as the ‘key conventions’ governing the relationship between the Lords and the Commons.

The four ‘conventions’ it refers to are the Salisbury/Addison agreement not to vote down manifesto bills, the practice of not voting down statutory instruments, acceptance that t…

Here lies one of the main tests for Brown. The Treasury, where he has spent the past ten years, could be seen as the epitome of centralising government. One of the lines of the Tory critique as soon as Brown comes to power will be - already is - that enormous sums of money have been spent to little effect, because the state is not the vehicle to deliver true reform. So when Brown talks of the state becoming the servant of the people, not only must he mean it, but he must show how it can happen.

Public services should be reformed to follow what I call the two ‘Ps’ - People and Participation; welfare reform needs to concentrate on prevention and early intervention, rather than only upon a safety net.

Brown has already started to go Green, and delivered an impressive speech on climate change in early March. He will need to preside over a wholesale greening of the Labour Party. Climate change, and the environment more generally, coupled with problems of energy security, will be dominating issues on the political agenda for the next ten to twenty years. We should not just be asking how we can combat global warming, but how sustainable is our current way of life.

There is a whole new set of concerns in politics today centered upon life-style and life-style change. Labour must not cede the ‘well-being’ agenda to the Tories, but on the contrary develop detailed policies in this area. There is a political topic I hear debated more often than any other. It centers on this question: when Gordon Brown says that he is intent upon ‘governing in a different way’, does he really mean it? For here is a politician derided by his own former Treasury Permanent Secretary, Lord Turnbull, for his ‘Stalinist’ tendencies. Brown now presents himself as a proponent of collective government, objective policy-formation, and an enhanced parliament.

Brown’s intention is to repeat for the constitution the kind of ‘big bang’ he achieved upon arriving at the Treasury in 1997, when he announced independence for the Bank of England. There are certain issues which he may have difficulty in addressing, for instance the voting rights of Scottish MPs in Westminster, a genuine anomaly given the existence of the Scottish parliament, albeit one seized upon by the Conservatives for partisan gain.

Dr. Andrew Blick is co-author with Professor George Jones of a paper on the History&Policy website, entitled ‘The “Department of the Prime Minister” - should it continue?’ at  click here