The Red Benches?

Theresa May was on fire against the Assisted Suicide Bill, and the Bishop of London has promised that, if necessary, she herself would table the amendment to deny that Bill Third Reading on principle. The House of Lords is clearly of a mind against this measure. If it nevertheless passed, then we would have a House of Parliament that thought that it could not reject anything that had been approved by the other one. What would be the point of that? Still, despite having nowhere else to be, at least Peter Mandelson has not shown his face. Even if he never turned up, then Labour Peers should refuse the whip while it extended to him. That should have started yesterday. If he ever again set foot in the place, then they should go on strike. Plenty of them have the trade union backgrounds to organise that.

But Labour is now the party of cutting the benefits of the sick and disabled as if that would cure them or find them jobs, of retaining the two-child benefit cap, of withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment last year from most of the people who had been receiving it,  of increasing workers’ bus fares by 50 per cent, of failing to freeze Council Tax, of threatening to abolish the single person discount, of increasing employers’ National Insurance contributions so as to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, and of forcing working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to giant American agribusinesses. No one who objected to any of that has been able to make it onto the ballot for Deputy Leader. Mandelson and the Labour Party are welcome to each other.