Government wins the vote but looses the argument
I’ll do a detailed analysis once the Hansard transcript is published but the long and the short of it is that despite the Labour Whip meaning Schedule 1 survived the Committee stage, the government totally and utterly LOST the argument.
Diana Johnson trotted out the same lies that we’ve all become so familiar with but they sounded very weak today and she came across more than a little bit whiny. Graham Stuart was all passion in a just cause. David Laws, Nick Gibb and Annette Brooke all argued well. We had the pleasure of seeing one Labour member (Caroline Flint) standing up to say she thought Schedule 1 was a bad idea, not that her commitment carried over into a vote of course. Another Labour MP (Ann Cryer) turns out to be a wee bit of a racist, she’s very worried about people talking something other than English in their own homes apparently. If we had a decent system of government Schedule 1 would have died today … what am I saying, if we had a decent system of government it would never have been drafted.