WELL that didn't take long, did it?
Keir Starmer has scarcely got his feet under the office table Number 10 and he's already pulled off another U turn.
You may remember back at the end of 2022 when Gordon Brown published the long-awaited constitutional review which Keir Starmer had commissioned him to carry out.
The publication was accompanied by excited stories on BBC Scotland that a new Labour government was going to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a new elected 'House of the Nations and Regions' which according to BBC Scotland - which is not remotely biased at all in Scotland's constitutional debate, oh no, and shame on you for imagining otherwise - would give Scotland a powerful new voice in the Westminster parliament.
Of course, despite the puffery of BBC Scotland, it did not take long at all for Keir Starmer to back away from any intention to introduce meaningful reform of the unelected upper chamber.
Naturally BBC Scotland neglected to inform all those viewers to whom it had bigged up Labour's plan to abolish the Lords that abolition and replacement with an elected upper chamber was no longer Labour's plan at all.
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This was just an accidental oversight, surely.
By the time that the General Election came round, the much vaunted plan for thorough constitutional change had been watered down to the point where almost nothing of Brown's original proposals remained.
Starmer was clearly adopting a homeopathic approach to constitutional change.
Instead of an elected upper chamber and an end to the insult to democracy that is the Lords, which is more the institutionalisation of patronage and cronyism than a real parliament, Labour ended up telling us that Starmer would end the right of hereditary peers to sit in the Lords and would compel members of the Lords over the age of 80 to retire.
We were also promised reform of the appointments process, a new participation requirement, new processes to remove "disgraced members", and the complete abolition of hereditary peers.
However, by yesterday's King's Speech even these milquetoast proposals proved to be too radical for Keir Starmer, and in the first U-turn of his government, doubtless the first of many, the plan to force peers over the age of 80 to retire had been abandoned as were all the other proposals for reform of the upper chamber with the sole exception of ending the right of hereditary peers to sit in the Lords.
Much of Labour's promised reforms for the Lords have not come to fruition
There are currently 92 hereditary peers sitting in the Lords, although when Tony Blair was elected on his landslide in 1997 Labour promised to remove the right of all hereditary peers to vote on legislation and to replace the Lords with an elected upper chamber.
It's all so drearily familiar.
Indeed there are reports that far from reforming the Lords, Starmer has plans to appoint a slew of new life peers who will be loyal to him and who will bloat the Lords even further.
Don't say you weren't warned.
Although to be fair you weren't warned by BBC Scotland or most of the media in Scotland.
SNP depute Westminster leader Pete Wishart told The National: "Labour's plans for the House of Lords are the usual bland and insipid platitudes that we have come to expect from them over the last 100 years."
Scottish Green MSP Ross Greer was also distinctly underwhelmed, saying: "We've heard Labour talk about Lords reform for over 100 years, and once again they've managed to offer only the most minor and frankly inconsequential adjustment, something even more disappointing than the weak reforms they were previously suggesting."
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There is a very good reason why no Westminster government, of any political hue, will ever introduce the constitutional reform that the UK so desperately needs.
Labour as much as the Conservatives is addicted to the near absolute and unchecked power that the Westminster system offers to the party which wins a majority of Commons seats, and as we have seen with the recent General Election, a party can win a crushing majority even though it has won as little as a third of the popular vote.
The Prime Minister can then stuff the Lords with his or her pals, cronies and donors.
No British prime minister is ever going to surrender that power.
The power hungry Starmer most certainly won't.
As Ross Greer noted: “It's clear as day that genuine democracy isn't going to come from Westminster.
“Whether it's Labour or the Tories in charge, the UK political class won't deliver the change this country deserves and will instead continue packing the Lords with political cronies."
SNP fosters cross-party support to scrap cruel two-child benefit cap
The SNP has received cross party support for its bid to force a vote in the Commons on an amendment to the King's Speech demanding that the two-child cap on benefits be scrapped.
The Labour government continues to insist that it cannot afford to axe the policy, which is estimated would cost between £2.5 and £3.6 billion.
The SNP’s amendment, put forward in the name of their Westminster leader Stephen Flynn, has the backing of members of Plaid Cymru, the Green Party, the SDLP, the Alliance Party, and Independent MPs, including Jeremy Corbyn.
However, it depends on whether the amendment is selected by the Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, who has previously demonstrated his willingness to accede to Starmer.
This was shown most glaringly in his decision to break precedent in February and block an SNP debate calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The debate threatened to expose divisions within the Labour ranks, with many Labour members deeply unhappy about Starmer's uncritical support for Israel.
Hoyle effectively neutered the debate after a hurried private meeting with Starmer during which Starmer allegedly threatened not to support Hoyle as Speaker following a Labour General Election victory.
Both Hoyle and Starmer deny this happened - well, they would, wouldn't they - but suspicions remain.
Even if the amendment is selected for debate, its chances of passing are zero given Labour's enormous Commons majority.
Will Labour's Scottish MPs prove us wrong and vote to abolish the cap?
Or will they prove that they are craven and obedient lackeys of Keir Starmer?
We all know the answer to that one.
This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
To receive our full newsletter including this analysis straight to your email inbox, click HERE and click the "+" sign-up symbol for the REAL Scottish Politics
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