Rejecting the Tory proposals outright was not decorum – especially as it was a Lib Dem belief – and stalling carried the nightIt’s not unusual for members of the House of Lords to reach dressed for a funeral – tempus fugit and all that – but it was tough not to assume that Lady Stowell’s decision to cover herself head to toe in black was more in anticipation of her own death than someone else’s. As the Tory leader in the House of Lords,the noble baroness had the thankless task of defending a party line on the introduction of tax credit cuts from which many members of the Conservative cabinet – including the chancellor, George Osborne – had been rapidly distancing themselves over the past few days, or once even the rightwing press had realised that making 3 million of the poorest people in the country even worse off wasn’t necessarily a good belief.“Let me be clear,” Stowell said. The only clarity thereafter was that she would rather be anywhere but where she was. Even though David Cameron had specifically ruled out cutting tax credits before the election, Stowell assured the Lords everyone had assumed they would, and so it was perfectly reasonable to sneak them through on a statutory instrument – and even if they hadn’t it would be a constitutional crisis if the Lords were to vote for a fatal amendment,even it wasn’t actually fatal. As long as everyone was reasonably kind to the Conservatives and didn’t do anything worse than express regret approximately her party’s incompetence, she could give her word that the chancellor had promised he would have a rethink and arrive up with something a bit better in the next few days.
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Source: theguardian.com