Happy New Year. For the first quiz of the year, I thought I would focus on departed friends – the law lords. They left the House of Lords for the Supreme Court – just across the road in Parliament Square – in 2009. They had carried out the judicial role of the House of Lords…
I spoke this evening to the all-party parliamentary group on the constitution. My subject was parliamentary reform. My thesis was that we rarely discuss parliamentary reform, even though we think we do. We discuss changes to one or other House, sometimes at length, but rarely look at Parliament holistically and do not define what we mean by reform. …
The report from the Home Affairs Committee on Drugs: Breaking the Cyle is a serious contribution to the debate about tackling drug use. It deserves to be read and it certainly does not merit a knee-jerk response from Government. I particularly welcome the recommendation (para. 132) for a Royal Commission to examine the issue. As regular…
For the first time in the history of the blog, I have managed to devise a quiz that has stumped the readers. Dave H got the answer to one of the questions, and he and Rich came close to getting the answer to a second. However, no one was able to come up with the…
My views on press regulation are encapsulated in a letter to The Daily Telegraph, signed by over eighty parliamentarians. I am one of the signatories. You can see the details here. I am wary of state regulation and very much take the view that the problem at the moment is not so much the absence…
