Naturally I cannot share the glee of fellow contributors to this blog that the Coalition’s Lords Reform plans have been dropped, after neither Labour nor the Conservatives were able to sow sufficient unity among their MPs to implement clear manifesto commitments shared by all three parties. I have been involved in the campaign for reform…
I have been fascinated with the way words have been used – some would say misused – in the Lords Reform debates of recent weeks. No doubt both sides have been guilty. Some of the reformers have got very muddled up in their descriptions of the proposed electoral system. Some of the opponents have tried…
I know that it suits some other Peers to pretend that that the Bill to reform the House of Lords is just a Liberal Democrat plot, pursued by Nick Clegg, to take away their jobs. However, since the Cabinet unanimously endorsed the Bill, and the Prime Minister gave it his personal explicit approval, that won’t…
I encountered some 120 teachers of A Level politics and citizenship courses yesterday, brought together by the excellent Parliamentary Education Service. I was nominally leading a discussion about the work of the Joint Committee on the Draft House of Lords Reform Bill, but their questions naturally took us much wider, taking advantage of my previous…
While looking at some online archived footage of the Lords, I noticed a message on the parliamentlive.tv site which stated that the authorities had, since 2009-10, been looking for ways in which they could feed the same video material to mobile devices. Curious as to what was taking so long, I put in a parliamentary…
