I have spent some time reading the comments on the post concerning home education. I still have some more background reading to do but it has been useful. I think that some of the comments are unnecessarily aggressive and do not add to the argument. Hotly disputed issues like this need cool heads. I will…
The Phoenix bird of Egyptian mythology rose many times with youthful freshness from the ashes of its own self-destruction . Do you think that Parliament might also achieve this emblem of resurrection? If not, it won’t be for want of trying. Certainly, never has Parliament reached such levels of disrepute but neither have there ever been so…
What do peers do during the recess? For me, it provides relief from the horrors of commuting on the train and the underground, a two and a quarter hour journey from door to door, and from living out of a suitcase for two or three nights a week in London. I know many people do…
This week’s quiz is on peers who have previously sat in the House of Commons. The House has just under 180 members who have been MPs. As usual, the first two readers to supply the correct answers will be the winners. 1. I am a former Labour minister who later became leader of the SDP…
I’ve been on holiday for the last week, see picture left. Anyone guess where it is? I’ve been following the general mess that the Government has got into over the personal social care issue, the hole gets deeper every day and I’m looking forward to a good old ding-dong in committee next Monday on the Personal…
The issue of travel expenses for parliamentarians is again in the news. At the moment, members of both Houses are entitled to travel first class. I always travel by train – I use it as a travelling office – and the value of first class is the availability of a table. It is also possible…
I have previously commented on the breadth of material we receive in our parliamentary mail. My postbag now includes Kennel & Cattery Management. This comes courtesy of one of our regular readers. I did read through the latest issue it in case it covered the recent research that found that graduates were more likely to be cat lovers than dog…
I recently tabled a question to find out how many pageviews the House of Lords website gets each month. It is a question I now tend to table annually. The figures reveal that the number of pageviews is fairly modest – over 30,000 in a good month and less than 10,000 in a quiet month. …
For this week’s quiz, I was tempted to ask which well known television quiz programme, broadcast last night, asserted that Michael Martin was the first Speaker of the House of Commons to be forced out of office since 1695. (Oh dear.) Anyway, here are this week’s questions. As usual, the first two readers to supply…
