UK Parliament / Open data

Strathclyde Review

Proceeding contribution from Graham Allen (Labour) in the House of Commons on Thursday, 17 December 2015. It occurred during Ministerial statement on Strathclyde Review.

It is a pleasure to be in the Chamber today for the First Reading of the Punishment of the Tax Credit Whistleblowers (Lords) Bill. I fully support what you said, Madam Deputy Speaker, in taking to task the shadow Leader of the House when he used the words, “disorganised hypocrisy.”[Interruption.] I meant organised hypocrisy. I have never seen anything more disorganised—other than me trying to make a joke out of it.

Once again, we have crisis management and firefighting instead of a clear strategy on what the Government want to do on democracy and constitutional change. We are in the middle of great change with English votes for English laws, Scottish devolution and the mess around English devolution, and the Government do not quite know what to do, so they are doing it bit by bit. I urge the Leader of the House to bite the bullet and create a constitutional or citizens’ convention that can look in the round at all those issues together—whether they involve the composition of the Lords and how they affect federalism in the United Kingdom and English devolution—and take a strategic view, rather than having this constant piecemeal firefighting.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
603 c1745 
Session
2015-16
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
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