Rebellion by Lib Dem peers helped carry an amendment that marks a major defeat for the coalition on its first anniversary The government suffered a major defeat in the Lords when a rebellion by Liberal Democrat peers helped carry an amendment that could bury the government’s central policy of elected police and crime commissioners. In an apparent show of the “muscular liberalism” Nick Clegg had promised would mark a new phase in the coalition as it enters its second year, Lib Dem peers threw out the plans to introduce American-style elected commissioners. It marks a serious defeat on the coalition’s first anniversary, including for Clegg, who at the last minute sent whips round to convince his party’s members to back the bill. Some 188 peers voted for the amendment, which knocked out plans for elected commissioners, to 176 opposing it. The vote carried with backing from 13 Liberal Democrat peers including Lord Oakeshott; some also defied the government by abstaining and allowing the amendment to squeak through. Clegg had indicated support for a rival amendment that would have shelved the plans for three years to allow time for pilots, but that was passed over in favour of the stronger change which, in effect, removes the policy of elected commissioners from the legislation. The police reform bill will return to the Commons, where it is more likely to pass, paving the way for a lengthy period of “ping-ponging” between the houses. Ministers insisted they would try to overturn the amendment. A Home Office spokesman said: “The election of police and crime commissioners is a clear coalition agreement policy. So while we will consider the debate in the Lords, we will look to redress this in the Commons.” Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said: “The Lords today have ripped the heart out of this deeply flawed flagship bill. The Tory plans for American-style elected police commissioners without any checks and balances are deeply flawed and un-British. David Cameron and Theresa May need to now recognise the strength of hostility and ditch the plans now.” The defeat is also a serious blow to May, the home secretary. Lib Dem peers won the backing of senior police officers, including three former Met commissioners in the Lords. The first elections for police commissioners in each force area outside London had been expected to be held in England and Wales next May. Their introduction would have meant the abolition of the police authorities who currently provide police oversight. The amendment was tabled by the Lib Dem peer Lady Harris, the vice-chairman of the Association of Police Authorities. Her warning that their introduction risked “irreparable damage” to the police service was echoed by the former Met commissioners, Lord Blair, Lord Condon and Lord Imbert, who attacked them as potential commissars. The Association of Police Authorities said of the successful amendment: “The government will now have to think again about the whole policy.” There was some confusion over whether the amendments simply scrapped the policy of police commissioners, or made provision for an appointed commissioner to sit alongside a wider membership police commission. One factor in the defeat was the decision by Baroness Neville-Jones, the minister who had been in charge of the bill in the Lords, to step down on Monday. Her replacement, Baroness Browning, was regarded as a more emollient figure in last night’s debate. The defeat came as Clegg and David Cameron sought to put distance between their two parties. Cameron last night issued a direct challenge to Clegg when he dismissed claims by the Lib Dems that they had used their influence to pause the legislation introducing the government’s controversial NHS reforms. In a sign of a new, scratchier relationship at the highest levels of the coalition, the prime minister told Tory MPs that he was solely responsible for the decision to pause the legislation. At a meeting of the Conservative backbench 1922 committee, at least one MP challenged the PM over reports that he was planning to stabilise the position of Clegg, who suffered poor results at the polls last week, by offering the Lib Dems a series of concessions on the NHS and other areas. Cameron denied that he was planning to change tack as a result of Lib Dem pressure. One Tory source said: “We are not going to let the Liberal Democrats pose as the moderating influence in the coalition. We are the party of the NHS. The pause was the prime minister’s idea not the deputy prime minister’s.” One factor in the defeat was the decision of Lady Neville-Jones, the minister who had been in charge of the bill in the Lords, to step down from the Home Office job on Monday. Her replacement, Lady Browning, was regarded as a more emollient figure in debate but that was not enough to save Theresa May from humiliation. Cameron and Clegg will attempt to highlight their joint commitment to the coalition today when they make a joint appearance to launch an initiative to help ease youth unemployment. The policy initiative on an economic matter is meant to show that the two parties are still working together on the fundamental issues. But Clegg also signalled a new approach in a speech and a round of television interviews distancing himself from the Conservatives. “I totally accept that … if you are a Conservative voter, one of the things you are accustomed to is the Conservative party to go into government and cut public spending,” he said in a speech at the National Liberal Club. “Some Conservative voters might even both demand it and like it. If you are a Liberal Democrat voter, you don’t like it. I don’t like it. I didn’t come into politics to kind of announce great cuts and savings. You do it out of necessity.” An independent poll, meanwhile, has suggested that the government has failed to convince the public that coalitions are good for the country, and more than two thirds of people now believe the government is weaker, less decisive and “confused” about what it stands for. Only half of people believe the Lib Dems have had an influence in the coalition and most people think the Tories have got the best deal. Clegg should stop trying to be an overarching deputy prime minister and take on a major government department if he wants to improve his powerbase, the Institute for Government (IFG), which commissioned the poll, said. “It is very difficult to exert serious political authority sitting in the cabinet office without a portfolio,” Lord Adonis, the former Labour transport secretary and director of the IFG said. The coalition had failed to convince the electorate of its efficacy, he said: “Their experience of coalition over the past year seems to have turned them decisively against it.” The IFG poll found that 63% of people think it is a bad thing that no party won a majority at the election – up from 55% a year ago. Some 68% think that coalition has created a weaker government, 73% believe government is less decisive and 80% say the government is “more confused” with a coalition. House of Lords Liberal Democrats Liberal-Conservative coalition David Cameron Nick Clegg Police Polly Curtis Alan Travis Nicholas Watt guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …So now that you know where Prince William and Kate Middleton are reportedly spending their honeymoon , the next question is: What’s the tab? Over at the Daily Beast, Lauren Streib takes a closer look at the private Fregate Island resort, where all the food and spa treatments are organic and…
Continue reading …Michelle Obama invited rapper Common to the White House for a poetry event tonight, reports the Chicago Tribune, and conservatives are none too happy about it. Why? Well, to start, Common, AKA Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr., has a song that apparently tells people to “burn” George W. Bush. Tucker Carlson’s…
Continue reading …The body of beloved Brooklyn jazz musician Stanley Wright was found stuffed inside a trunk in the basement of his home several days after he had last been seen. Police searched the Brownsville home of the 61-year-old, who performed under the name Suleiman-Hakim and was last heard from on Thursday,…
Continue reading …A Puerto Rican militant has been arrested 28 years after he allegedly took part in one of the biggest bank robberies in American history. Norberto Gonzalez Claudio, 65, is accused of participating in the $7 million armed robbery of a Wells Fargo truck in Connecticut in 1983, AP reports. Claudio,…
Continue reading …As you may have heard, Christian group Family Radio is going around warning the country that Christ is returning on May 21, 2011 . “Folks, this means there are only 11 shopping days until there are no shopping days,” noted Stephen Colbert last night . Colbert likes this particular End Times prophecy…
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Burgess’s Manchester archive houses many short stories, film and theatre scripts and musical compositions as well as the original screenplay for A Clockwork Orange At least 20 unpublished stories by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, have been discovered by researchers sorting through his papers at a research centre in Manchester, the city in which he was born. The short stories, unproduced film and theatre scripts and hundreds of musical compositions have emerged from the contents of three houses in London, Monaco and Italy, bequeathed to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation after the death of his widow, Liana, four years ago. Burgess died in 1993. Among the archive are 50,000 books and 20,000 photographs, symphonies, poems and unfinished or rejected scripts for television and film projects, including lives of Atilla the Hun, Sigmund Freud and Michelangelo and a play about Harry Houdini that he collaborated on with Orson Welles, another frustrated creator of unproduced projects. Will Carr, the deputy director of the research centre, said: “We are discovering things all the time. There is a lot of stuff, and we are still unpacking cardboard boxes. “He was a good short fiction writer and, particularly early in his career, he would write these things and then put them away and forget about them. They have never been read or published. The stories are very good, very funny and pungent. You can see how his writing developed.” Burgess published 33 novels in a prolific career and was also a critic, broadcaster, scriptwriter and composer. Among the papers is the first completed music he wrote, his original screenplay for A Clockwork Orange – rejected by the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, who eventually wrote the script himself – an unpublished history of London, a ballet score about the life of Shakespeare and a musical about Leon Trotsky. There is even a script for another, unmade, Kubrick movie, which would have been about Napoleon. One of the discovered compositions, A Manchester Overture, is being played by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and the foundation intends to publish a collection of the unknown short stories next year. Andrew Biswell, the foundation’s director and a Burgess biographer, told the BBC: “A lot of the stories are very nasty and tending towards the supernatural – a lot of ghost stories or stories about gods who come down to earth. The amount of material which people don’t know about I think heavily outweighs the known. Even though Burgess was productive and he published a lot, a good deal of what we’ve got here has always been below the waterline. It has never been made available in a public way until now. “I’m staggered by the extent of the collection sometimes. I come down into the basement and I look at it and I think, my God, did this man never sleep?” Carr said: “Burgess has been forgotten about in Manchester, but people are
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Burgess’s Manchester archive houses many short stories, film and theatre scripts and musical compositions as well as the original screenplay for A Clockwork Orange At least 20 unpublished stories by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, have been discovered by researchers sorting through his papers at a research centre in Manchester, the city in which he was born. The short stories, unproduced film and theatre scripts and hundreds of musical compositions have emerged from the contents of three houses in London, Monaco and Italy, bequeathed to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation after the death of his widow, Liana, four years ago. Burgess died in 1993. Among the archive are 50,000 books and 20,000 photographs, symphonies, poems and unfinished or rejected scripts for television and film projects, including lives of Atilla the Hun, Sigmund Freud and Michelangelo and a play about Harry Houdini that he collaborated on with Orson Welles, another frustrated creator of unproduced projects. Will Carr, the deputy director of the research centre, said: “We are discovering things all the time. There is a lot of stuff, and we are still unpacking cardboard boxes. “He was a good short fiction writer and, particularly early in his career, he would write these things and then put them away and forget about them. They have never been read or published. The stories are very good, very funny and pungent. You can see how his writing developed.” Burgess published 33 novels in a prolific career and was also a critic, broadcaster, scriptwriter and composer. Among the papers is the first completed music he wrote, his original screenplay for A Clockwork Orange – rejected by the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, who eventually wrote the script himself – an unpublished history of London, a ballet score about the life of Shakespeare and a musical about Leon Trotsky. There is even a script for another, unmade, Kubrick movie, which would have been about Napoleon. One of the discovered compositions, A Manchester Overture, is being played by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and the foundation intends to publish a collection of the unknown short stories next year. Andrew Biswell, the foundation’s director and a Burgess biographer, told the BBC: “A lot of the stories are very nasty and tending towards the supernatural – a lot of ghost stories or stories about gods who come down to earth. The amount of material which people don’t know about I think heavily outweighs the known. Even though Burgess was productive and he published a lot, a good deal of what we’ve got here has always been below the waterline. It has never been made available in a public way until now. “I’m staggered by the extent of the collection sometimes. I come down into the basement and I look at it and I think, my God, did this man never sleep?” Carr said: “Burgess has been forgotten about in Manchester, but people are
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Burgess’s Manchester archive houses many short stories, film and theatre scripts and musical compositions as well as the original screenplay for A Clockwork Orange At least 20 unpublished stories by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, have been discovered by researchers sorting through his papers at a research centre in Manchester, the city in which he was born. The short stories, unproduced film and theatre scripts and hundreds of musical compositions have emerged from the contents of three houses in London, Monaco and Italy, bequeathed to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation after the death of his widow, Liana, four years ago. Burgess died in 1993. Among the archive are 50,000 books and 20,000 photographs, symphonies, poems and unfinished or rejected scripts for television and film projects, including lives of Atilla the Hun, Sigmund Freud and Michelangelo and a play about Harry Houdini that he collaborated on with Orson Welles, another frustrated creator of unproduced projects. Will Carr, the deputy director of the research centre, said: “We are discovering things all the time. There is a lot of stuff, and we are still unpacking cardboard boxes. “He was a good short fiction writer and, particularly early in his career, he would write these things and then put them away and forget about them. They have never been read or published. The stories are very good, very funny and pungent. You can see how his writing developed.” Burgess published 33 novels in a prolific career and was also a critic, broadcaster, scriptwriter and composer. Among the papers is the first completed music he wrote, his original screenplay for A Clockwork Orange – rejected by the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, who eventually wrote the script himself – an unpublished history of London, a ballet score about the life of Shakespeare and a musical about Leon Trotsky. There is even a script for another, unmade, Kubrick movie, which would have been about Napoleon. One of the discovered compositions, A Manchester Overture, is being played by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and the foundation intends to publish a collection of the unknown short stories next year. Andrew Biswell, the foundation’s director and a Burgess biographer, told the BBC: “A lot of the stories are very nasty and tending towards the supernatural – a lot of ghost stories or stories about gods who come down to earth. The amount of material which people don’t know about I think heavily outweighs the known. Even though Burgess was productive and he published a lot, a good deal of what we’ve got here has always been below the waterline. It has never been made available in a public way until now. “I’m staggered by the extent of the collection sometimes. I come down into the basement and I look at it and I think, my God, did this man never sleep?” Carr said: “Burgess has been forgotten about in Manchester, but people are
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Burgess’s Manchester archive houses many short stories, film and theatre scripts and musical compositions as well as the original screenplay for A Clockwork Orange At least 20 unpublished stories by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, have been discovered by researchers sorting through his papers at a research centre in Manchester, the city in which he was born. The short stories, unproduced film and theatre scripts and hundreds of musical compositions have emerged from the contents of three houses in London, Monaco and Italy, bequeathed to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation after the death of his widow, Liana, four years ago. Burgess died in 1993. Among the archive are 50,000 books and 20,000 photographs, symphonies, poems and unfinished or rejected scripts for television and film projects, including lives of Atilla the Hun, Sigmund Freud and Michelangelo and a play about Harry Houdini that he collaborated on with Orson Welles, another frustrated creator of unproduced projects. Will Carr, the deputy director of the research centre, said: “We are discovering things all the time. There is a lot of stuff, and we are still unpacking cardboard boxes. “He was a good short fiction writer and, particularly early in his career, he would write these things and then put them away and forget about them. They have never been read or published. The stories are very good, very funny and pungent. You can see how his writing developed.” Burgess published 33 novels in a prolific career and was also a critic, broadcaster, scriptwriter and composer. Among the papers is the first completed music he wrote, his original screenplay for A Clockwork Orange – rejected by the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, who eventually wrote the script himself – an unpublished history of London, a ballet score about the life of Shakespeare and a musical about Leon Trotsky. There is even a script for another, unmade, Kubrick movie, which would have been about Napoleon. One of the discovered compositions, A Manchester Overture, is being played by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and the foundation intends to publish a collection of the unknown short stories next year. Andrew Biswell, the foundation’s director and a Burgess biographer, told the BBC: “A lot of the stories are very nasty and tending towards the supernatural – a lot of ghost stories or stories about gods who come down to earth. The amount of material which people don’t know about I think heavily outweighs the known. Even though Burgess was productive and he published a lot, a good deal of what we’ve got here has always been below the waterline. It has never been made available in a public way until now. “I’m staggered by the extent of the collection sometimes. I come down into the basement and I look at it and I think, my God, did this man never sleep?” Carr said: “Burgess has been forgotten about in Manchester, but people are
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