If you’re British and interested in politics, you’ll know that that we have recently had two bye-elections to the House of Commons:\u00a0Rochester and Strood, where UKIP took the seat from the Conservatives, and\u00a0Heywood and Middleton, where UKIP narrowly failed to take the seat from Labour.<\/p>\n
Even if you’re obsessive about British politics, it’s unlikely that you know that in recent months there have also been two bye-elections in the House of Lords. The possible candidates (hereditary peers) and the electorate (all current Lords members) are pathetically tiny. Sound crazy? It is. You can learn more in this blog posting and comments<\/a>\u00a0and read the experience of one of the voters<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you’re British and interested in politics, you’ll know that that we have recently had two bye-elections to the House of Commons:\u00a0Rochester and Strood, where UKIP took the seat from the Conservatives, and\u00a0Heywood and Middleton, where UKIP narrowly failed to take the seat from Labour. Even if you’re obsessive about British politics, it’s unlikely that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15865"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15871,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15865\/revisions\/15871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}