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Originally Posted by Pierre
Out of interest, as I honestly don’t know. What is the status of the upper house.
We have remainer House of Commons, how so the lords?
I would have thought the same, as the lords are even more on the gravey train than the commons, but less egos.
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The Lords are very remainy because they are drawn disproportionately from the political and business elites who tend to like the EU. Tory Lords are in a minority, as well, but that’s of only passing relevance in these strange times.
The workings of the Lords are sufficiently different that it doesn’t always come down to who has a majority for one thing or another. I imagine that’s why Cameron and May never thought it important enough to create enough Tory peers to redress the imbalance, despite having had 9 years and the absolute power to do so (power to advise HM, who always assents).
It is much more difficult to change the way in which the Lords works in order to fast-track a bill, in the way it was done in the Commons today. The business motion that was put down in order to try to achieve it is subject to the delaying tactics that it seeks to set aside. Those tactics don’t require the support of a majority of members, they just need a core of sufficiently motivated members to collaborate on the production and prosecution of oodles of amendments, which is what they’re doing right now, and also why their lordships have been seen arriving at Westminster with sleeping bags today.
