New peer plan raises questions about Labour’s Lords abolition intentions

Good morning and happy solstice. Back in the Commons today like a bad smell is the minimum service levels bill. The TUC estimates that the bill is a threat to the right to strike of one in five British workers, and calling the bill “pernicious” and “spiteful”, TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said: “Today, MPs on all sides must stand up for working people and for our fundamental right to strike. No one should be sacked for trying to win a better deal at work.”

Meanwhile, despite the party’s stated intentions being to abolish the House of Lords, Labour plans have emerged to create “dozens” of new peers. The reasoning here is that Labour’s current team in the upper house is comparatively small and, critically, old. Fair enough: boosting powers of legislative scrutiny sounds like a good thing, generally speaking. Eyebrows have already been raised about the scope of Labour’s constitutional ambition, and comments by a source close to the leadership in the Times calling Lords reform “hardly mission critical” to the first three years of a Labour government will inevitably spark fears of another U-turn.

Also in parliament today, Labour will use an opposition day debate to force a vote re-introducing the animal welfare (kept animals) bill that the government dropped last month.The party has promoted it with an op-ed in the Mirror by Shadow Environment Secretary Jim McMahon, who slams “Tory indifference towards animals”. The article is illustrated with a big picture of McMahon holding a small, fluffy dog. Given that the Great British public are Singer-ist freaks who arguably like animals more than they like people, this seems like a very smart political move, and the Guardian reports that a number of Tory MPs are likely to side with the opposition later today. Who knows, maybe we can make Pen Farthing one of those new working age peers, to make up for the fact that Keir Starmer said he would personally put a gun* to Geronimo the debatably diseased alpaca(*citation needed).

New inflation figures out this morning reveal that food prices are spiking at disproportionate rates in the UK – growing 20% faster than in France and almost 30% faster than in Germany. The Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves said a Labour government would have a “relentless focus on the cost-of-living crisis” but that “this Tory government can’t get a grip of this problem because they are the problem”. The public would seem to agree; new polling out today from Savanta shows Labour with an 18-point lead over the Conservatives.

On LabourList today we’re continuing our coverage of the race for conference arrangements committee, the elected body which oversees the running of party conference. My colleague Katie has an overall round up of where things stand at the moment here, and you can read the pitch from Labour to Win-backed candidates Alice Perry and Phil Wilson here; the pitch from their rivals, Centre Left Grassroots Alliance-backed candidates Chris Saltmarsh and Jean Crocker, is available here.