The House of Lords could be suspended or flooded with Tory peers if it takes the 'nuclear option' of killing off George Osborne’s tax credits cuts next week, government sources have warned.

Furious Conservatives are threatening retaliation if peers decide to take the unprecedented step of using a so-called ‘fatal motion’ to wreck the Chancellor’s plans to slash the welfare bill.

Their warning comes after we revealed that a cross-party group of peers was set to table a 'fatal motion' to scupper the statutory instrument needed to clear the way for the cuts to come into force next April.

On Monday evening the Treasury also took further steps to face down its critics, releasing analysis which it said showed Osborne's welfare reforms have saved the taxpayer £15bn a year.

Crossbencher Baroness Meacher, seen as the most likely leader of the revolt in the Lords, said today that there was wide-ranging concern over the impact the tax credits changes would have on large numbers of families earning low wages.

'Fatal motions' are used very rarely as unelected peers are wary of overstepping their powers to delay an elected government’s legislation.

Campaigners believe that the usual Salisbury convention, which stops the Lords from blocking a party’s plans, does not apply because the tax credits cuts were not mentioned in the Tory manifesto in May.

But a fatal motion on a financial matter would be unprecedented and Tory sources are determined that the Lords would have to pay a serious political price if the Government is defeated next week.

“If they do this, they will turn this from being a matter about tax credits into a huge constitutional issue of the Lords’ powers,” one insider said.

One option is to simply suspend the Lords’ entire business, and process bills purely through the Commons, while another is to draft a list of new Tory peers to allow the party to get its business through the upper chamber.

SOURCE: Huffington Post

This goes so close to being fascism as to make no difference. I'm just surprised it's so blatent.

Democracy doesn't truly exist - not in the way people think it does.

Its a smoke and mirrors exercise nothing more. An illusion, there are simply greater or lesser degrees of totalitarianism...some at the point of a gun, some under the screen of supposed democratic process....all amount to the same thing. One bunch of dogmatic, ideological, morally bankrupt vested interests manipulating, socially engineering and ultimately controlling you for the benefit of themselves and others..