Uk politics

MPs have just approved the change to the Commons regulations that will introduce English votes for English laws by 312 votes to 270. The proposals mean an additional stage of scrutiny in the Commons where a grand committee of either English MPs or English and Welsh MPs can consider and veto the proposals. It is not particularly clear how often this situation would arise, and therefore it really does remain to be seen whether this will practically make a great deal of difference to Parliament. The debate on the measure saw Scottish National Party MPs warning of the creation of two classes of MP, and of damage to the Union.

There has been an interesting response in the Tory party to Heidi Allen’s speech in which she criticised the tax credit changes. Many MPs are themselves worried about the changes, and didn’t disagree with what she had to say. But what has really riled them is the way in which she appeared to dismiss the Chamber as largely pointless – and that she spoke against the cuts having supported them once and then went onto vote with the government again on the motion before the House last night (though to be fair, she explained that she wouldn’t vote for the Opposition Day motion because she disagreed with its wording). One

‘I’ve been trying flipping hard to avoid doing it,’ said Heidi Allen today as she started her maiden speech. She hadn’t seen the point of speeches in the Chamber, she explained, because most people in the Commons were already wedded to their side, and there wasn’t much point in her adding to those speeches as they changed no minds. But the reason she had decided to give it during the Opposition Day debate on tax credits ‘because today I can sit on my hands no longer’. She wanted to criticise the tax credit cuts. She wanted to intervene before it was ‘too late’ to stop the changes to tax credits,

Lord Warner has resigned the Labour whip in protest at the direction in which Jeremy Corbyn is taking the party, Patrick Wintour has revealed tonight. Warner was a minister of state at the Department of Health under Tony Blair. Now, Corbyn supporters will be quick to point out that Lord Warner is hardly a household name and that he was at the far Blairite end of the party. Both of these statements are true. But Warner’s departure should still worry Labour. All parties are coalitions and no leader should want to be losing former ministers from the party at any point in their leadership, let alone this early. One footnote

The SNP conference has had to get bigger as the party has grown. Those who’ve been coming for years are a tad unsettled by quite how big and slick this event is. The exhibition hall is much bigger and is packed with lobbyists and big corporate stands, including a McDonald’s stall. The hall is bigger, the fringe events organised by lobbyists, too, and at first glance, it looks rather like a mainstream party conference: not one packed with eccentricities like the Ukip or Lib Dem conferences. That’s unsurprising given the SNP is a party of government and given it has a chunk of MPs in Westminster. But all of the

The SNP didn’t win the independence referendum, but is still talking about the lessons it can learn from what happened a year later. That’s because it wants to win the next one – and everyone at this conference believes that the next referendum only has question marks about when, not if, it will happen. SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson suggested at a fringe organised by The Times this lunchtime that two major lessons he’d learned from last year’s result were that older voters would not be persuaded to vote ‘Yes’ as easily by younger generations than he had imagined they would be, and that the ‘Yes’ campaign failed to communicate

The SNP are very, very happy that they now have 56 MPs in Westminster. But to listen to their conference in Aberdeen today, you’d think they were happiest that Labour is having a miserable time in the House of Commons. It wasn’t just Nicola Sturgeon’s speech, covered here, that showed their joy. It was also the ‘Westminster Hour’ session that the party ran later in the day, featuring a number of newly elected MPs, and the party’s Westminster group leader Angus Robertson and finance spokesman Stewart Hosie. Angus Robertson in particular gave the impression that he was enjoying the misery of the Labour party and the SNP’s hand in that

Over 20 Labour MPs rebelled against their party whip and abstained on the government’s fiscal charter this evening. The Labour party claimed there were 20 abstentions, but the Tories claimed the number was closer to 28. This is the full list of abstentions which didn’t include authorised absences (some of whom would have been would-be rebels who were encouraged to find a speech to make or ailing relative to visit in another part of the country at the last minute) from the Labour whips office: ​​​​Fiona Mactaggart Rushanara Ali ​​​Ian Austin Ben Bradshaw Adrian Bailey Shabana Mahmood Ann Coffey ​​​​Andrew Smith Simon Danczuk Jamie Reed Chris Evans ​​​​Graham Stringer ​​​​Frank Field ​​​Gisela