Female fightback
The women struck back yesterday, in the behind-the-scenes battle over the Commons debate on International Women's Day. Having seen the debate bumped to the second spot on Thursday afternoon, at last week's meeting of the , its backers managed to reverse that decision this week - but only after some venomous exchanges and a knife-edge vote.
To recap, the debate has been a fixture in the Commons calendar for quite a while, but is now scheduled by the Backbench Business Committee, and some of its members think it is politically correct time-wasting. And when the committee decided to schedule a debate on the coastguard in the first half of the afternoon, supporters of the Women's Day debate smelled a rat. They feared an attempt to spin out the first debate until there was little time left for the second.
So, yesterday, they turned up in force at the committee to argue for the reinstatement of their debate - with Conservative Eleanor Laing accusing some members of the committee of conspiring to frustrate what they saw as a "silly women's debate" and thereby "wind up the women" in a sparky exchange with Conservative Philip Hollobone. Mr Hollobone insisted that the whole rescheduling exercise had been intended to shield the Women's Day debate from losing time to ministerial statements or votes - and he objected to any suggestion of less worthy motives, as did his colleague Peter Bone.
In the event, backers of the coastguard debate got the committee off that hook when they agreed to reschedule their event to later in the month in Westminster Hall, rather than the main chamber. But later there was an attempt to put a debate on the Western European Union in ahead of Women's Day. That was only defeated on the casting vote of the chair, Natascha Engel, and I gather some recrimination followed.
There were recriminations outside, too. The SNP's Angus MacNeil raised a point of order today, to complain about the postponement of the coastguard debate: coastguard cuts are a major constituency issue for him - and the whole fandango highlighted the fact that the smaller parties are completely unrepresented on the Backbench Business Committee. The rules may have to be changed to ensure they have a voice.....
I'm Mark D'Arcy and I'll be writing about what goes on in the chambers and committee rooms at Westminster.
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