House of lords

Monday’s night defeats for the government over tax credits in the House of Lords put into lights a problem that many of Cameron’s allies have been worrying about for months, the fact that they keep losing votes in the upper house. Since the election, the government has lost more than 70 per cent of divisions there. There isn’t anything simple that it can do to solve this problem. On Monday night they turned out more Tory peers than they had in a decade but they still couldn’t hold the line. One thing is clear, the government has no desire to get into a major scrap with the House of Lords. Inside

An enjoyable aspect of parliamentary rules and conventions is that almost no one understands them. This has become acutely true in an age when the media no longer regularly reports proceedings in Parliament. So when the House of Lords threatened to derail the government tax credit cuts this week, no one, that I spotted, foresaw what actually happened. Knowing that the measure came forward as a statutory instrument, not a Bill, and was therefore (in both Houses) unamendable, its opponents in the Lords voted not to reject it but to delay considering it. They set conditions which had to be met before they would do so. Thus they defied the government

On Monday night the Tories were narrowly defeated in the Lords by 289 to 272 on their plans to cut tax credits. With not even Lord Lloyd-Webber’s last minute flight across the pond to vote enough to prevent the government’s defeat, it only adds insult to injury to note that a number of the newly appointed Tory peers were not introduced into the house in time to have a say. As William Hague is one such peer, the former foreign secretary has been left seething at the result. Writing for the Telegraph, Hague has launched a scathing attack on the Lib Dem peers who voted against tax credits. In a cutting remark he likens them

It is difficult to exaggerate the fury in the Tory party at the House of Lords after last night’s double defeat. MPs I have spoken to today want swift and damaging retribution from the government for the Upper Chamber’s behaviour that goes far beyond what ministers are likely to propose, with some suggesting that the bishops should be the first to take the hit because they should understand the constitutional delicacies involved in votes like this given their ‘privileged constitutional position in the Chamber’. Mind you, the Bishops weren’t as turbulent last night as they could have been: only the Archbishop of York supported the Baroness Hollis amendment that delayed

Tonight has not been a good one for George Osborne, with peers refusing to take his word that he was in ‘listening mode’ about tax credits. He didn’t look particularly happy about the matter when he gave a pooled clip to broadcasters a few minutes ago. He complained about an unelected group of Labour and Lib Dem lords voting down a matter passed by the House of Commons, and added: ‘I said I would listen and that’s precisely what I intend to do. I believe we can achieve the same goal of reforming tax credits, saving the money we need to save to secure our economy while at the same

Presumably Britain has some sort of policy on immigration, asylum and refugees, but instead of struggling to understand it, you can save time by following its media presentation, since that is what seems to concern the government most. Essentially, the line is that Labour lets them all in and the Tories don’t and won’t (‘No ifs, no buts’). When, as at the last election, it turns out that net immigration has been rising under David Cameron, he apologises shyly and sounds tough again. He was sounding very tough until last week, when the photograph of the dead boy on the Turkish beach suddenly turned him all soft. This Monday, his

In this year’s dissolution honours, the Liberal Democrats were awarded 11 peerages, three more than their total number of MPs. Since this brought the party’s roll call of Lib Dem peers to 112, sceptics have been quick to point out that this number appears to be at odds with the party, which had previously prided itself on reforming the ever-growing House of Lords. Happily the whiffs of hypocrisy haven’t stopped Lib Dem peers from grumbling about the crowded upper house. Yesterday Lord Rennard — the Lib Dem peer who was readmitted to the party last year after facing suspension over allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards women — decided the time was right to call for

In my business, there’s a lot of fretting about the idea of representativeness. Pollsters put questions to, say, a thousand people – and take them as a sample of the country. How to be sure that you have the right sample? You need the right number of men, women, northerners, middle class, Lib Dem voters etc – but that’s the easy part. Your method of selection matters hugely, and it can skew the sample in other, less tangible ways. Every pollster is vulnerable to this so-called ‘selection bias’ . If you survey people on high streets, for example, you’ll get people tend to be out-and-about – rather than at home. If you survey