One of the best sources of information about Parliament is the Parliament website (www.parliament.uk). This now has a mass of useful information and is invaluable not only for learning about the institution but also about subjects debated or investigated by either House or their committees. Just browsing through the official report (Hansard) for each House,…
The purpose of this blog is to inform a wider audience about the role of the House of Lords, hopefully provide some insights into its workings, and encourage interaction with those who read it. For anyone who is interested in learning more about the House, there are a number of valuable sources. There is the…
An academic colleague came to see me at the House yesterday. When a vote was called, he said to me ‘there is still a Conservative majority in the House, isn’t there?’ He is a specialist in British politics! This view appears still to be widely held. I had to point out that, since the House…
No one party has a majority in the Lords. There are three groupings of similar size – Labour with 216 peers, the Conservatives with 202 and the Cross-benchers with 196 – plus 78 Liberal Democrats, the Lords Spiritual (26) and the law lords (12). As a result, the party in government has to engage with…
I commented in one of my posts about the fact that media reports about the House of lords tended to show pictures of the State Opening of Parliament and not the House in action. One or two of those who commented made the fair point that I should be illustrating my post with a picture…
