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And to the Lords it goes…

20 February 2017

By Lauren E. White

Today peers in the House of Lords are to begin debating the Brexit bill and are expected to vote on it tomorrow night.

After MPs in the House of Commons backed the law to allow Prime Minister Theresa May to trigger Article 50 and begin the process of leaving the European Union, now the Lords have to begin debating the new law.

The Lords have the power to block any bill for one year unless it was in the government’s manifesto. It is unlikely that they will block triggering Article 50 entirely, but it is expected that they will not allow this bill by May’s government to sail through without proper scrutiny. Instead, it is more likely that they will require the government to look at it in further detail and assess their position on a number of different issues.

Once the Lords have done this and made amendments to the bill, it goes back to Parliament for them to debate and so on until a consensus is reached.

A record 191 peers will speak in the debate with a number of amendments they wish to make. The government doesn’t have a Tory majority in the Lords, so they should probably bolt the doors of Number 10 – there’s a storm coming.

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