This is part 2 of a series, part 1 can be found here.

Branching on from my last post in this series, I want to start discussing areas of governance and parliament that I feel that needs pressure applying to it to reform or change. In the future I will be bringing some more thoughts about things including electoral reform and consultation in a technological age. Right now, however, I want to talk about debate, legislation and the irrelevancy surrounding it.

Let's make one thing clear to start off with, a debate that leads to no conclusion is worthless. In the blogosphere it is easily argued that debates go to informing others and forming your own opinions, and doing so costs us very little outside of a hosting fee. In parliament it's a different situation though, with too many debates leading to nothing due to insane rules on scheduling and thus costing the taxpayer money in a fake exercise in "democracy".

It's been 2 and a half weeks since I said there was a need to stop dithering on 42 days and the liberal campaign against it. Yet unfortunately we unfortunately still have a significant air of the supposedly most liberal people in the country throwing their toys out of the pram. "It's too late", "I don't want to fight with the Tories" and more of the same are still coming out of peoples mouths, as if liberty is only important if they are the champions of it.

Lynne and people like Sunny over at Liberal Conspiracy, myself obviously included, just simply cannot sit here and let personal ego's, partisan politics and sulky petulant behaviour stand in the way of defeating this legislation. So, as if it needed any more saying, what do we need now?

It was supposed to be nothing to do with Brown. The 42 day legislation was not a test of his leadership they said. Yet by the way the final result fell any chance Brown had of avoiding direct assessment on his own performance and abilities was dashed in to the wind. Prime Ministers and world leaders frequently say that they will never negotiate with terrorists (at least with the public knowing about it), to do so shows weakness and opens to door to manipulation and extortion. By managing to only win this issue through alleged personal involvement in coercing MPs from other parties such as the DUP he has shown in no uncertain terms his weakness, and why "doing the right thing" sometimes means dropping bad legislation and not negotiating on terror legislation.

Unfortunately the bill I have previously asked people to support didn't get a simple hearing on Friday as the timings involved meant that the debate has been delayed. This isn't a bad thing of course, it just means a bit of a wait for the verdict from the MPs interested, the debate continues on the 14th (this coming Friday). So, of course, I urge people to continue to support this trial especially given that we can see from Hansard just how a minority of people seem to be opposed to any positive move for utterly petty reasoning.

On Friday (7th March) comes a very important and exciting bill that I have previously blogged about in some detail, the "Energy Saving (Daylight) bill" that would see us permanently operate on Central European Time rather than GMT for a three year trial.

Every year we have the debate about the seemingly complex issue of winding a clock back an hour when it comes to the winter. There is inevitable coverage on the breakfast news about the concerns over safety and also those that claim that they cannot work efficiently if the clocks don't go back. However the subject seems to be potentially getting a parliamentary revisit almost 30 years after the last experiment with a "constant British summer time" started without eventual success.

For me I have never really thought about the subject and it wasn't until Unity on Liberal Conspiracy posted a list of 20 bills that will attempt to be passed through Parliament in the next few months. So having now thought about it, here is my analysis of the situation.

In this post...

• Why did it fail at the time?
• Why should we revisit the situation?
• Are we too inflexible?