This evening I chaired the inaugural meeting of the All-Party Group on the Constitution, established to help inform debate on constitutional issues. We covered the Alternative Vote (AV) and the referendum. Professor Simon Hix, Professor of European and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics, provided an overview of AV and how it works,…
The past week has been a busy one for the House in considering constitutional issues. On Monday, there was a question for short debate (QSD) on the role of the House in the event of reform. Such debates are time-limited – in this case to ninety minutes – and there were so many speakers that…
Over 100 Chinese writers, lawyers and activist have published a letter appealing to the Chinese government to release Liu Xiaobo who was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. They also called for the release of other political prisoners. I found the following article in the Guardian to be an insightful account of the growing pressure…
The House of Lords has variously addressed how to enhance communicating with the people, enabling people to know what the House is doing and providing the means for those interested in the business of the House to make their views known. Recently, as regular readers will know, the issue was addressed in the report of the Information…
Today 50 peers, including me, made personal visits to Schools on the outreach programme designed to spread the word about what we do in the House of Lords. It was great fun for me; I hope the students enjoyed it too. My visit was to the East Norfolk Sixth Form College in Gorleston near Great…
Yesterday I took part in short question session initiated by Lord McAvoy, who wanted to know what changes he could make to the Parliamentary Voting Systems and Constituencies Bill, which would be significant enough to delay the AV referendum. As I pointed out, there is only one part of the Bill which focuses on this…
In earlier posts, I raised the issue of drug use and whether or not we should consider its decriminalisation. As a result of the many comments made by readers, I came to the conclusion that there was a case to establish a Royal Commission, or a committee of inquiry, to examine our drug laws. I was reminded of…
I intervened on this question because I am very concerned about plurality and quality in the media if Rupert Murdoch and his News International do fully take over BSkyB. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/text/101012-0001.htm#10101246000350 I don’t know what the minister was implying by her comment about the Today programme as I didn’t here the programme yesterday. However I think…
This is an emotive topic and rightly so. I put my supplementary question to Baroness Neville-Jones because both the Liberal democrats and the Conservatives were promising to stop this practice before the election. In fact it is very difficult unless you are prepared to take children into care when they are abandoned here by the…
