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You've sat through 14 days of it. And be afraid. There are three more days of the this week. Labour has conclusively demonstrated that it can delay the bill beyond 16 February, the deadline by which it has to be law, in order for the promised referendum on switching to the Alternative Vote system in general elections to be held this May.

Labour's objection to the bill is not so much to the AV referendum (which was promised in their election manifesto last year) but to the proposals for cutting the number of MPs in the Commons. The Coalition contends that the current pattern of constituencies means Labour is over-represented, because many inner city seats with small-modest sized electorates are Labour strongholds, so it takes far fewer voters to elect a Labour MP.

The solution, embodied in this bill, is to insist that Commons seats should be within 5% of a standard size - the "electoral quota" reached by dividing the total electorate by the number of MPs. And because this is then combined with a cut in the number of MPs, Labour fear the bill could deal a fatal blow to their chances at the next election.

I rehearse all this because the key event on Monday, when the fun resumes, will be an amendment from the convener of the crossbench or independent peers, , re-instating public inquiries into the process of redrawing constituency boundaries. The Coalition had wanted to drop them, to ensure that the new boundaries were in place in good time to allow the parties to select candidates before the next election - in other words by 2015. Putting inquiries back in could make that a rather close run thing, but I understand there may be strict time limits as well.

The underlying thought is to demonstrate that genuine compromise is possible, to penetrate the increasingly poisonous atmosphere and to move the bill on, without provoking the Coalition into attempting to ram it through with a timetable motion. Further compromises could then follow: there may be a bit of movement from the Coalition on the idea of having a commission after the next election to revisit the issue of just how big the Commons should be - by which time, if the bill goes through, it will consist of 600 MPs. The real test may be if compromise can be reached on the key issue of how far seats will be allowed to vary from that "electoral quota".

Meanwhile the Leader of the Lords, , is said to be on the brink of attempting to bring in a timetable motion. Commons style guillotining of debates is an anathema to their lordships, but Lord Strathclyde is running out of options. It may be that a motion is tabled, and lurks menacingly on the agenda, without actually being moved. We shall see. But negotiations between the parties will doubtless continue through the weekend.

So let us turn to the Commons, where MPs will be dealing with other matters as their lordships battle on. On Monday, the week kicks off with Defence Questions, followed by the Health and Social Care Bill - Andrew Lansley's monumental set piece on the future of the NHS.

On Tuesday, William Hague will be answering Foreign Office Questions; possibly an update on the extraordinary events occurring in Egypt. Then MPs are back to discussing the European Union Bill; it's day four of a committee of the whole House.

We'll have some fascinating select committee proceedings too: the on prisoner voting and the looking at complaints and litigation in the NHS. The Health Committee's panel of witnesses include patients and their personal stories could make some powerful points.

The will also be taking evidence on student visas and the government's review of counter-terrorism. The kicks (sorry) off its inquiry into football governance with academics and FA insiders. And the witness list at the session on rebalancing the economy (to promote export-led growth) reads like a who's who of top British executives. Meanwhile the publishes its first report of the new Parliament - on behaviour and discipline in schools.

Wednesday's PMQs precedes a Ten Minute Rule Motion from Tony Lloyd on a High Pay Commission, then an Opposition Day Debate on the performance of the Business Department and forests in England. The latter has been the subject of huge controversy, with celebrities and protesters signing up against plans to change the way England's forests are managed.

On committee corridor, the Education Committee will be hearing from the Chief Schools Adjudicator Sir Ian Craig who's warned the government against its plans to simplify the admissions code for schools.

The will be looking at the Scotland Bill, which received its second reading on Thursday, and the will be questioning Vince Cable on the Green Investment Bank plan. And if your (energy) bills have gone through the roof, you might want to watch the , which will be talking to the big six energy providers about the state of the electricity market.

It's conceivable that by Thursday, we may know what their lordships have decided in relation to the Parliamentary Voting Bill. Certainly, they will be switching their attention to debates led by Lord Northbourne on early parenting and public funding for the arts led by Early of Clancarty. Lord Northbourne's debate will be the subject of a joint effort by the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and the House of Lords; all next week ´óÏó´«Ã½ Have Your Say and Democracy Live will be asking for views and experiences of early parenting, that Lord Northbourne and other interested peers will use to fuel the Lords' debate.

In the Commons, after Environment, Food and Rural Affairs questions and the Business Statement, there will be two backbench debates: a motion relating to the Consumer Credit Regulation and a debate on the reform of legal aid.

Defence Secretary Liam Fox will be answering questions from a on UK-French defence.

Finally, it's a sitting day in the Commons on Friday, with private members' bills including Anna Soubry's Anonymity (Arrested Persons) Bill. And with that, another week ends - the biggest question undoubtedly being, what will have happened in the House of Lords?

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Despite having never set foot in the Commons in an intermittent career as an MP, which goes back to 1983, the Sinn Fein Leader, Gerry Adams, has found it harder to get out of Parliament than it was to get in.

And, it has to be admitted, a lot of MPs rather enjoyed the rather Gilbert and Sullivan-esque contortions which followed his decision to quit the UK Parliament (insofar as he had ever been in it) to seek election to the Irish Parliament, the Dail.

Bizarrely, despite frequent talk of MPs "resigning their seat", there is, in fact, no direct way of doing so. They can die, or be expelled or be disqualified. So MPs who want to leave, by tradition, apply for a nominal office of profit under the crown - the two usually used are the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds or the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead. Departing MPs take turns applying for either office - and both are completely nominal, yielding no salary or privileges of any kind. And there are about 20 similarly vestigial feudal jobs which could also be applied for, should an exiting MP with a suitable sense of whimsy wish to do so....

[pdf].

The origins of all this lie back in the 17th Century, in the great parliamentary clashes with the King in the build up to the Civil War. A Commons resolution in 1624 laid down that membership of the House was a sacred trust which could not be voluntarily relinquished. The strains of Parliamentary life in that era, and the far from distant prospect of being beheaded, or worse, had caused a rash of resignations - and the Commons wanted to make it harder to depart. A couple of generations later, in 1680, MPs were clearly worried that the Crown had found subtler ways of influencing them, and passed a resolution making the holding of "an office of profit under the Crown" incompatible with membership of the Commons - which created a mechanism by which MPs could self-disqualify.

And on his side of the argument, Gerry Adams can look back to the century-old insistence by Sinn Fein that it did not recognise the authority of the British Crown in Ireland - which is why Sinn Fein MPs have never taken their seats in the Commons. It is not just about having to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen, but about implicitly accepting the legitimacy of British authority in Northern Ireland. This is the imbroglio which resulted in Mr Adams and his colleagues receiving pay and funding while refusing to sit in Westminster - and many MPs rather enjoy the sight of him being crowbarred into the title and dignities of a brutal medieval rent-collector, in order to exit an institution he never quite entered.

(Incidentally there's also a rather good pub quiz question struggling to get out of this little bit of history: the first woman ever elected to the Commons was Sinn Fein's Countess Constance Markiewicz, an Irish aristocrat who married a Polish count. She was elected in 1918, but never took her seat - which is why the first woman MP to take her seat was Lady Nancy Astor, after a by-election a year later.)

But some MPs are slightly alarmed by the mechanism of Mr Adams' removal. His letter of resignation was taken as an application for an office of profit under the Crown - and he was appointed forthwith to the Manor of Northstead by the Chancellor, George Osborne.

Apparently, there is a precedent, in the form of an MP called Gordon Thompson, in 1972. His letter of resignation was similarly interpreted as an application for one of these jobs - and off he went. Several MPs now want to ensure that they can't be appointed to some unwanted sinecure and removed from parliament at the whim of the Chancellor - so there may be some kind of rule tightening in due course. In the meantime, chortled Tory backbencher Richard Bacon: "We'd all better keep on the right side of George."

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Finally, there seems to be a bit of movement in the slow-motion constitutional crisis. It looks as if there may be an attempt to lay some kind of timetabling motion to prevent further spinning out of debate on Monday.

The motion - which would have to be presented as a one-off fix for pretty unique circumstances - would then be debated on Tuesday. But whether the Upper House would swallow a profound change in its normal mode of business is still a difficult question.

One way of reassuring peers that they were not heading for a brutalist Commons-style guillotine procedure, where debate was simply cut off and large chunks of bills might be left unexamined, would be for the timetable to be devised and proposed by a neutral source. I blogged below about the possibility that the Lord Speaker could take on that role; another possible source would be the crossbenchers.

Either way, I think peers would still need a lot of persuasion and reassurance.

Behind the scenes, the Lords has been seething with plot, counter-plot and general angst as the deadlock rolls ever onward. But after 14 days of committee stage "debate" on the , with three more days set down for next week (and three further days being kept clear for the week after) a feeling that "something must be done" is crystallising. David Cameron and Ed Miliband have both met crossbench peers to try to enlist their support - and I'm told the PM was given a rough ride when he suggested timetabling further debate on the bill was now necessary.

Senior figures like the Convener of the Crossbench Peers, Lady D'Souza, are now worried that the Upper House itself could suffer lasting damage, if there is a heavy-handed intervention to change its normal ways of working - she talks of the Lords "unravelling". The mood of bitterness and mistrust is quite unlike their lordships normal collegiality. And even if the current crisis is solved next Tuesday, it will take quite a while for the scars to heal.

And the surgery necessary, if it takes the form of a timetabling procedure, could leave the patient rather disfigured.

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Is this now a job for the Lord Speaker? Day 13 of the on the Parliamentary Voting and Constituencies Bill saw the go-slow continue...and things are getting ridiculous.

The government can't get its legislation through, and the normal Lords backchannel negotiations have not provided a solution to the deadlock. The normal workings of the Upper House rely on consensus and co-operation between the parties; and now they have broken down there is no obvious way to push the bill through, while Labour peers continue to make extraordinarily long speeches and slow proceedings to a snail's pace.

Some palliative measures are open to the government: it can allocate more committee days - and three days next week have indeed been kept clear for that very contingency. It can reduce the normal interval between the different stages of the bill, and could probably secure the consent of the House for that, under the current circumstances. But neither of those options alone would break Labour's open filibuster.

What would be a game-changer would be some measure of timetabling - and Downing Street is now briefing that the government is actively looking at that possibility. The trouble with that is that time-limiting debate would utterly change the way their lordships do business. I'm not sure that even on the Coalition side there would be universal acceptance of timetabling and it could only happen if the crossbench or independent peers were also ready to accept it. (One Coalition source claims they're now so irritated that many might - remember the crossbenchers are not a party and never have any kind of agreed line.)

Even then, brutal guillotining in the style of the Commons looks like a no-no. But perhaps there is an alternative, that a timetable power of some kind is placed in the hands of the Lord Speaker - as a neutral figure elected by the whole House - who exerts a certain quiet influence behind the scenes.

It would be a vast extension of the Lord Speaker's rather limited powers. At the moment Lady Hayman presides over proceedings, but does not moderate the debates in the way that her opposite number does in the Commons. The words "order, order" have never passed her lips. But a power exercised by her, rather than by the government, might provide a way out of the current impasse. Constitutions evolve at moments of crisis and in its quiet, polite way, the Lords is going through a profound crisis at the moment.

A self-evidently reasonable timetable allowing sufficient time for proper debate could be an answer - but it would be a sharp departure from their lordships traditional self-regulation. That may be the price of the current ructions.

Dipping in and out of the debate yesterday, I noted a few highlights of the continuing Socratic dialogue - Lord Harris of Haringey discussed the propensity of north Londoners to go south of the river. And Lord Howarth of Newport continued the disquisition on the importance of rivers, with reference to Dickens. And Newport. And the silting up of the Great Ouse in King's Lynn, and the lack of rivers in Birmingham...

It's constitutional debate, Jim, but not as we know it.

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Oh dear Lord, they're back. Monday sees Day 12 of the Lords committee of the whole house on the , with no sign of an end to Labour's Go-Slow. More late nights (and early mornings) are promised if a compromise can't be reached to end of this marathon stand-off - and as I write the word is that there's no deal in prospect.

Lib Dem Deputy Leader of the Lords Tom McNally told me on Today in Parliament that Labour were throwing their toys out of the pram, and wanted to be rewarded with a sweetie. Labour's Lord Falconer insists his side are not going to budge, and it's hard to see any procedural fix that allows the government to deliver its promised referendum on the voting system in May - short of capitulating to Labour's demands.

And there could be more committee stage fun just over the way in the Commons chamber, where MPs embark on three days discussing the in a committee of the whole house - see the post below about some of the rebel amendments on offer. The has criticised the bill in its latest report and the pressure group Open Europe has spotted another issue it hopes MPs will take up - the government must decide by 2014 whether a whole raft of EU police and justice laws agreed before the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, including the European Arrest Warrant, will continue to apply in the UK. Under this arrangement, if the government opts out of any one of the existing laws, it has to opt out of the entire lot. Open Europe is calling for the EU Bill to be amended to require a referendum or at least a vote in Parliament.

Oh, and earlier on Monday, Theresa May will be taking Home Office Questions, facing her new opponent, Yvette Cooper. Ms Cooper's husband, Ed Balls, has, of course, moved to shadow George Osborne. She's the unlucky one amongst the newly-promoted shadow ministers - none of the others have to face departmental questions this week...although they may be needed to fly the flag for Labour in urgent questions or ministerial statements.

On Tuesday, there's more of the EU Bill in the Commons after Health Questions. In the Lords, peers will be examining the Public Bodies Bill - a bill that has been neglected of late, with the storm surrounding the Parliamentary Voting Bill.

Down on committee corridor, all eyes will be on the who are looking at the matter of hacking MPs' mobile phones. What with the news about the resignation of the prime minister's spokesman Andy Coulson, the former editor of the newspaper implicated in the scandal, the News of the World, and the announcement earlier this month that the CPS has ordered a review of the case, it is The Hot Topic of discussion at Westminster once again.

Another unusual session will be the hearing - they've called back Metropolitan Police Commander Bob Broadhurst to explain why he said there were no undercover cops at G20 protests, given that it has now emerged that there were. The , meanwhile, will be launching into an interesting-looking inquiry into tax simplification.

During Wednesday's PMQs, David Cameron is sure to face taunts about Mr Coulson's departure - but equally Ed Miliband is vulnerable given recent movements on the Labour front bench. MPs will be looking forward to that - and then (oh joy!) to another day of discussion on the EU Bill. The will be putting the government's proposal to replace the current complicated web of social security benefits with a simple "universal credit." This is the Coalition's flagship proposal for reforming social security.

The Lords are back in harness with day 13 of the Parliamentary Voting Bill. Will fatigue overcome pride? Or will it be more of the same? Many shrewd observers think this session would have to be the final committee day on this bill, if it is to become law in time for a May referendum.

The will be talking to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, former UK ambassador to the UN, about the role of the Foreign Office in UK government: may be some insights into the silent world of the mandarin?

Finally on Thursday - there's no sitting on Friday this week - MPs will be looking at another big constitutional measure, the Scotland Bill, after the usual Business Statement from Sir George Young. In the Lords, after questions on DEFRA and Zimbabwe, there will be debates on military veterans their post-service welfare, the value of tourism to the UK and the military covenant. The could be a good one to watch: MPs will be discussing UK Financial Investments Ltd, the holding company through which the British taxpayer now owns a large chunk of the banking industry.

Oh - and there's another small coup for the select committees. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has agreed that his final choice for the chairmanship of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Board of Trustees should have to appear before the before their final appointment. The trend towards confirmation hearings for top quangocrats continues...

It may not be long before the protocol on this flips over and it ceases to be a case of secretaries of state graciously deciding to allow these hearings, and they have to start showing cause why key appointments should not be subject to Parliamentary scrutiny and consent. The hearing for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ boss may be some time away, but, whoever it is, it should be fun - for everyone but the subject, anyway.

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Has a humane killer just been applied to the bill to reform the law on dangerous dogs?

The Lib Dem peer Dog Control Bill was due to have its committee stage debate in the Upper House this afternoon - on the informal understanding that no amendments would be put. But now, I'm told, the Labour peer has put down amendments, and may well have put down the bill in the process.

Private members' bills are always fantastically vulnerable to procedural problems - and finding debating time is always a nightmare.

Lord Redesdale (best known for his attempt to exterminate gray squirrels) has made for potentially dangerous canines. Among other things he argues that the costs to the public of his system would be far smaller than the current system, as well as genuinely reducing the number of serious attacks on human beings.

UPDATE: The bill has been dropped from today's Lords debates. I don't yet know whether time will be found for it on some future Friday.

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Is coup brewing over Mr Speaker Bercow? No.

To be sure the Speaker has enemies, and he has well-publicised clashes with them, sometimes in the Chamber. But short of a "no confidence" vote, there is no mechanism for unseating him before the vote which will be held after the next election. More than that, there's no appetite in the government to organise or even acquiesce to any such vote before then.

Ministers are mostly resolved to endure the occasional irritations which follow from having an unusually high-profile figure in the Chair. And Mr Bercow's critics will doubtless continue to invent disobliging terms with which to describe him. But I don't get a sense of anything coming to a boil, however hard they try.

And meanwhile, he continues to proceed with a considerable reform agenda - discussed at some length in a speech to the ultra-wonkish think-tank, the . He suggested that there should be more questions to ministers in the chamber, and fewer written questions, noting that most of those were devised not by MPs but by their researchers.

He questioned the value of big, unfocused, set-piece debates on general subjects like "foreign affairs" and he queried the effectiveness of the Commons current system of "line by line" scrutiny of legislation. He noted the improved performance of the select committee system under its elected chairs, lavishing considerable praise on Treasury Committee Chair Andrew Tyrie. And he pointed to his own role in speeding up question time, so more MPs had a chance to put their points to ministers, and in allowing more urgent questions - many more than his predecessor.

There's no question that Speaker Bercow has made the Commons a better, more effective institution. So why don't MPs love him? He attracts a startling degree of loathing from many Conservatives, partly because of his ideological journey from uber-Thatcherite to borderline social democrat, and partly because he is accused of toadying to Labour to get the speakership. (It is, of course, unheard of for MPs to manoeuvre for office...)

Some have criticised him over the performance of IPSA, the MPs' hated expenses watchdog, noting that the Speaker's Committee on IPSA has not met for ages. But that committee exists solely to rubber-stamp the appointment of the top IPSA-ites - it was never intended to be a supervisory board, because the whole point of having IPSA was that it was not controlled by MPs.

And then there are the personal clashes. Simon Burns, Patrick McLoughlin, and most recently Mark Pritchard.

A couple of these were recorded for posterity on TV, but where they were not, I think it is always wise to take third-hand accounts with a pinch of salt - there is a tendency towards embroidery and dramatisation in the retelling. But Mr Speaker does seem to be getting into scrapes with unfortunate regularity. I'm not sure what he should, or can, do about the personal enmities he has built up but there must be a limit to the quantity of baggage he can comfortably haul around.

As for the policy stuff - a Speaker who goes out into the world and gives regular speeches is bound to stray into controversy a bit - it's pretty unavoidable, particularly when taking questions. On Tuesday, Mr Bercow expressed some reservations about cutting the number of MPs, while maintaining the number of government ministers - thus tilting the balance of Parliament a little towards the executive. It may be controversial - but it does relate to the functioning of the Commons, and Mr Bercow carefully phrased his comments. He said he would be "concerned" if the relationship between Parliament and government was "skewed". His conversion to opposing hunting - revealed in a letter to a constituent - smacks more of cock-up than conspiracy, but does upset Conservatives, who're mostly, but not exclusively pro-hunting.

An interesting question is quite how many MPs would convict Mr Speaker of the charges on that bill of indictment, and replace him with someone else. Doubtless there are plenty, but I hear tales of a dinner for new Conservative MPs at an eatery in Horseferry Road, around the corner from Parliament, where plenty of the diners were delighted that they had a real chance of being called at Question Time and in debates, because the Speaker was forcing the pace.

And remember, Mr Bercow ran for the speakership, and won, as a radical Commons reformer. His removal could presage a clampdown on the Commons current "Prague Spring". In the Q&A after his IfG speech, he quipped that he doubted the party whips had been holding street parties to celebrate the democratisation of the select committees and the creation of the Backbench Business Committee (he had warm words for its chair, Labour's Natascha Engel). The removal of this Speaker could open the way for the watering down of reforms that the government is beginning to find a real irritant.

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With a Commons confrontation looming on the proposal to give prisoners the right to vote, the has added a handful of spice to a cauldron that is already bubbling nicely.

Following an ECHR judgement on the case of a British prisoner called John Hirst who had been convicted of manslaughter, which ruled that the voting ban was incompatible with the Human Rights Act, the (previous) government was set a deadline to change the law by August 2011 - and the Coalition is reluctantly proposing to give the vote to prisoners serving sentences of less than four years. That proposal is now to be tested in a backbench debate in the Commons, secured by former Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw, and senior Conservative David Davis.

And the that an Italian prisoner, Franco Scoppola, serving a 30-year sentence for killing his wife and injuring his child, should have the vote - and awarded him 26,000 euros in damages (but not costs).

This extract from the judgement is particularly intriguing:

"41. As regards the right of prisoners to vote, the Court recalls that having considered the law of the United Kingdom providing for the restriction of voting rights for all prisoners in detention is "a blunt instrument, which strips the right to vote, guaranteed by the Convention, a large number of individuals, and does so indiscriminately. This provision imposes a blanket restriction on all convicted prisoners serving their sentences and apply them automatically, regardless of the duration of their sentence and irrespective of the nature or severity of their offense and their personal situation. Must be assumed that such a blanket restriction, automatic and indiscriminate a right enshrined in the Convention and of crucial importance goes beyond acceptable margin of appreciation, however wide it is, and is incompatible with Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 "(Hirst v UK (No. 2) [GC], § 82). "

Now, the four-year limit would allow considerable numbers of serious criminals to take part in elections. To pass even that limit will require a determined gritting of Conservative teeth, and Tory backbenchers may insist on a lower threshold. But maybe even four years would not be acceptable to the ECHR. I'm not a lawyer but the key issue seems to be the imposition of an automatic voting ban...but that's what the government is proposing.

So what does Parliament do if the proposed solution doesn't stick? A big round of elections is due in May - and it is rumoured that solicitors are already drumming up compensation claims from convicts which they can confidently expect to be upheld in the European Court, landing an unwelcome bill on the taxpayer.

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Some major mood-swings in the House of Lords - but as yet no deal to end the confrontation over the . As I write, peers are shuffling back into Westminster, still bleary-eyed after the marathon sitting on Monday-Tuesday. And most seem to expect a repeat performance tonight.

The deep animosity that set in during the interminable committee stage debates earlier in the week seems to have given way to something a bit closer to the Lords' normal collegiality.

The footsloggers clearly hope a solution will be reached, which will mean they all get home at a reasonable hour - but their hopes don't seem to be based on anything very concrete. They pounce on possible compromise-ettes: a loosening of the strict requirement that Commons constituencies can vary from a standard size by no more than 5% either way, an on-line consultative process to consider objections to the boundaries of the new bigger constituencies that will be needed if there are to be fewer MPs.

None of these sound like game-changers to me, but then I've been getting home in time for Hollyoaks this week, rather than snatching a few hours of slumber in the small hours in some makeshift dorm, surrounded by snoring colleagues.

Perhaps there have been some behind the scenes talks - but the murmur is that the Coalition high command wants to see off the challenge from Labour's filibuster, fearing that its whole agenda could be subject to the same tactics, if they succeed on this issue. There's also considerable animosity towards the filibusterers-in-chief, who, I'm regularly reminded, are (sniff) ex-MPs.

All this may look pretty bizarre outside the cool panelled corridors which surround their Lordships' House, but annoying though the government doubtless finds this saga, Oppositions need procedural rights to impede legislation and test the political will of governments. Ministers undoubtedly hate having their policies obstructed by parliamentary gamespersonship, but the alternative is a system where every ministerial whim can be tanked through, and ideas dreamed up by some teenage policy wonk in an attic office in Downing Street can become law without anyone asking hard questions.

There's still talk that the government might try to impose a Commons-style guillotine on the Parliamentary Voting etc Bill, which would completely change the character of the Lords. A less explosive alternative would be for the Leader of the House, Lord Strathclyde, to announce that under the circumstances he felt justified in ignoring the usual convention that the different stages of a bill are taken a fortnight apart... and that the report stage of the bill would follow closely on from the current committee stage.

That would give him considerable room for manoeuvre, and would not even involve having to suspend the standing orders of the House, because the fortnight gap is a convention, not an actual rule. If things got tighter still, he might try suspending the standing order that prevents taking more than one stage of a bill on a given day, so that the report stage and third reading could be taken one after the other.

Labour peers are still insisting they'll keep on going - and they may yet manage to delay the bill to the point where the May referendum on changing the voting system becomes impossible. The stakes remain high and no-one wants to climb down.

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Has someone blinked? The epic "till they drop" Monday sitting of the Lords ended at 12.50pm today. Incremental progress had been made in the long hours of the night, and peers have now debated three out of 60 groups of amendments - and Labour has certainly demonstrated its ability to string out the debate on the Parliamentary Voting and Constituencies Bill to the point where it becomes impossible to hold the promised referendum on changing the voting system, in May.

The deadline for completing the bill is 16 February - and in practice that means that Labour peers only have to keep chuntering on for a few more days in order to frustrate the bill. Of course, there are very high-powered matters of huge constitutional import dealt with in this bill, but you can almost hear the butter in the mouths of Labour peers freeze solid as they insist that they're engaged in constitutional particularism, not wrecking tactics.

In the absence of cross-party agreement to get the bill through in reasonable time, it is possible the government might seek to impose some kind of timetabling on the bill. This has never been done in the Lords before, and would certainly amount to a nuclear option. But the deputy leader of the House, the Lib Dem veteran Lord McNally, has taken to making ominous references to the 1887 Criminal Law (Ireland) Amendment Bill, which was frustrated by Irish MPs to the point that the then government introduced guillotine procedures to the Commons for the first time.

It would be a huge step to do the same thing in the Lords, and it would need the support of Crossbench peers to happen - and that support might not be forthcoming. Second, they could do as Lord Trefgarne did last night, and move for a vote whenever they believe a section of the debate has gone on too long. But that might only speed things a little. Last night it took the best part of an hour for the closure motion and then the substantive motion to be dealt with (11.38pm to 12.26am) so repeated motions to close the debate, which are normally used very rarely, provide no answer. In short, Labour has the government over a barrel. But perhaps Nick Clegg has a solution. A couple of minutes ago, at his Commons question time, he insisted the bill will be passed.

If not, it would be a famous victory for Labour - but might it be a pyrrhic one? First, Ed Miliband's charm offensive on Liberal Democrats has been rather undermined by his party's tactics in the Lords - it is an article of faith among many Lib Dems that Labour doesn't take their beloved cause of constitutional change seriously.

Second, the Coalition may well move to clip the wings of the Upper House in their forthcoming bill on its future shape. Third, their tactics are alienating Crossbenchers, who are the crucial swing voters in the Lords. And fourth, defeat or frustration on the timing of the referendum might entail a loss of face for the Coalition, and for Nick Clegg in particular, but it might not prove a strategic disaster. They might even have a better chance of the Alternative Vote (AV) system being approved if the vote was held later, rather than sooner.

As I say, there was no sign of any climb-down visible when Nick Clegg was taking questions in the Commons. Labour has promised to allow the referendum section of the bill through - if the government removes its proposals on cutting the number of MPs in the Commons and equalising the size of Commons seats, so they can be dealt with separately. In practice, this would mean the smaller number of equal sized seats would not be in place by the proposed date of the next election, 2015. Labour suspect they would lose out badly if they were; stopping the equalisation/reduction package would be a big boost to Ed Miliband's chances of being prime minister.

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....Meanwhile in the Commons, an attempt to get the Backbench Business Committee to agree its most contentious debate yet is due at 1pm this afternoon.

A very interesting alliance of former and will be bidding for a debate on the proposal to introduce voting rights for prisoners. The whole "franchise for felons" issue is the product of a series of European Court judgements - and the government wants to have the legislation in place so that it won't be sued by thousands of vote-deprived inmates come the elections this May.

(I wonder if the solicitor for some lag normally resident in Oldham East and Saddleworth isn't already working on a writ based on their client's inability to vote in last week's by-election.)

No-one actually wants to do this, and the last Labour government, mysteriously, didn't get around to addressing the issue before it left office. Interestingly, the necessary legislation will be produced by Nick Clegg's political and constitutional reform people, based in the Cabinet Office, rather than by the Ministry of Justice - having demonstrated some agility in avoiding having to push this one through himself. So another disagreeable task for Mr Clegg's resolutely amiable deputy,

The Coalition whips are doubtless not looking forward to pushing through a measure most Tory MPs loath - and which many have already signalled they will rebel on.

They could well force a substantial watering-down of the current proposal that anyone serving less than four years should be allowed to vote - that's the normal definition of a long term prisoner. Four minutes is the current favoured maximum among the rebels. But there's also talk of excluding those convicted of serious violent or sexual offences - and of lowering the cut-off point to one year.

A backbench debate on the issue could provide an early rallying point for rebels who, remember, would only need about 40 Coalition MPs to switch sides to defeat the government. On this issue, that is not an implausible figure. More alarming still is the alliance of two of the Commons most wily tacticians. They've always been quite matey, and a Straw-Davis axis could emerge as a long term flanking threat to the Coalition's programme.

UPDATE: I'm just back from the Backbench Business Committee, where Messrs Straw and Davis put their case for a backbench debate. The central argument was that this is a constitutional as well as a policy issue - that not only are there serious problems in giving some prisoners a vote, but that the European Court of Human Rights was trespassing into territory which belongs to Parliament, and not to euro-judges.

David Davis, in particular, argued very strongly that backbenchers should seize the opportunity to make a stand on this point. Jack Straw noted that as home secretary he had frequently been forced to swallow ECHR rulings on deportations and similar issues - but this was different because the court was intruding on national policy, when it was normally expected to give nation states some latitude to decide such questions according to their own ethos.

The committee will give its decision later this afternoon, having weighed up alternative bids for debating time. But this is a big moment for them. Will they screw their courage to the sticking place and allow a debate which could result in the government being defeated.

One straw in the wind (no pun intended) was that the chair, Labour's Natascha Engel asked if this might not be a more appropriate issue for an Opposition Day debate. The Straw/Davis thinking on that is that if the Opposition put down a motion on this issue, it would immediately become a polarised party political battle, which would probably stifle the increasing level of backbench dissent developing on the whole question. A backbench debate could result in an alternative, much lower, sentence threshold being accepted by Parliament. One suggestion is that the vote could be given only to prisoners sentenced in magistrates' courts - which have very limited sentencing powers. Straw and Davis were competing for debating time with other proposals on the reform of Parliament and consumer credit regulation.

The committee is meant to choose a motion which has widespread cross party support and which the government and opposition do not plan to debate in their allotted time. The committee's decision will be announced later this afternoon.

UPDATE 2: The committee has now granted the Straw/Davis debate. Their next day in the main chamber has not been scheduled yet - but it will be before the half term break in February.

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No end in sight. Their lordships have debated the through the night and have just rejected a second motion from Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, to take a breather.

Progress continues at snail's pace, despite the taking the highly unusual step, at midnight, of forcing a vote.

As I speak, tempers are visibly fraying, and Labour peers are keeping up a flow of amendments and speeches. And perhaps they believe they're winning. Not winning the votes, but winning the game of spinning out proceedings to the point where the Coalition's objective of holding their referendum on voting reform in May becomes impossible. The unofficial deadline is 16 February, by which time peers must have completed the committee stage debates on the bill, and the report stage and third reading, and settled any differences with the Commons. That cannot be achieved without Labour's co-operation. In the Lords, they don't have guillotine procedures or a Speaker with the power to clamp down on obvious filibustering - and the clock is ticking.

Labour's strategic objective is to break the bill into two - and allow the referendum to go ahead, while requiring the section on cutting the size of the Commons and redrawing the constituency map of Britain to be re-introduced as a second bill. And the funny thing is that defeat may not be a disaster for the Coalition whichever way this titanic procedural battle goes. The plan to cut the number of MPs may turn out to be more trouble than it's worth - as I've blogged before. And not holding a voting reform referendum in May, at a time when some polls suggest it may be close to unwinnable (I know, I know, that's a view plenty of people would dispute) may not be a disaster for the Coalition either.

But the Coalition Agreement, the keystone of the government's legislative programme, is an inflexible beast, and renegotiating key provisions is not a simple exercise.

And meanwhile the sight of the Lords engaged in an extended procedural fandango may embolden the drafters of the forthcoming draft bill on Lords reform.

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Monday is red letter day for fans of Eric Pickles. Not only will the Communities Secretary be on his feet in the Commons answering Communities and Local Government questions; it is also the second reading of the Localism Bill, his department's legislative flagship, which covers everything from giving local people more power over local councils to sweeping changes in housing policy and the kind of tenancies that may be offered for social housing in the future.

But it is the Lords where a real test of political will is brewing. The has been stretched on the rack of committee stage in their lordships house for eight long days, with no end in sight. This is the ninth; and there is talk of a long session, well into the early hours - comfy chairs are being placed in the Peers Library so that noble lords will have somewhere to slump. Toasted sandwiches will be available in the small hours, and the peers-only Bishops' Bar is braced for a marathon opening.

Monday's committee day could be open-ended - a "till they drop" legislative session that will not conclude until some real progress is made. It could even go on 'till Friday, if both sides dig their heels in. Labour wants to split the bill so that the section dealing with redrawing the constituency map of Britain can be dealt with at length - while the part authorising a referendum in May on changing the voting system could go ahead. But the two sections are deliberately yoked together under the Lib-Con Coalition Agreement, and the government will be loath to change the whole deal upon which it is based - or to have to put the constituency section of the bill back in front of the Commons, where MPs know that it abolishes 50 of their number and condemns many more to seek reselection in radically redrawn seats...they hated these provisions when they passed them first time around. The whips may not fancy a second turkeys/Early Christmas exercise.

Nick Clegg will be appearing at his monthly question session on Tuesday; a chance for some Labour mockery following the Oldham and Saddleworth by-election, perhaps? Home Affairs Committee chair Keith Vaz will be proposing a Ten Minute Rule Bill on the succession to the crown; and then we see the remaining stages of the , which sets the parliamentary term at five years. Over in the Lords, after questions we'll perhaps see another day of the Parliamentary Voting Bill at committee stage. This is day 10. Another mammoth session?

Committees get going in earnest on Tuesday; the will be talking to Virgin Money and Santander representatives about competition and choice in the banking sector - an emphasis on the high street, rather than the rarefied world of investment banking as represented by last week's witness Bob Diamond from Barclays.

Also of interest: Keir Starmer, Director of Public Prosecutions, in front of the , on NHS productivity in hospitals, thetalking to Ed Vaizey on the future of the Welsh language broadcaster S4C, on police financing and extradition, and on the future of the much criticised development agency CDC.

Wednesday sees David Cameron and Ed Miliband duelling once again at PMQs - a more even-tempered session this time? Pundits' verdicts were fairly united that ; but Mr Miliband will have a by-election victory to gloat over. After that, it's an Opposition Day Debate on the Educational Maintenance Allowance and the evening will see former deputy Speaker Sir Alan Haselhurst returning to the shop floor to introduce an adjournment debate.

Guess what their lordships are up to? Yes, it is - theoretically, at least - day 11 of the committee stage of the Parliamentary Voting Bill. If it's not beginning to feel like Groundhog Day, we could see some end in sight. Certainly, day eight of the committee stage of the Public Bodies Bill is pencilled in for Wednesday too - an oasis at the end of a legislative Sahara for their lordships?

Wednesday's slew of committees includes an inquiry by the into the UK Border Agency and the termination of a contract with Glasgow City Council to provide housing for asylum seekers; a decision which is going to have a huge impact on that city.

The will be talking to a number of important civil servants about "accounting officer accountability". This could be a fascinating committee session: chair Margaret Hodge has the chance to ask Sir Gus O'Donnell (Cabinet Secretary, head of the Home Civil Service) and Sir Nicholas Macpherson (top civil servant at the Treasury), as well as two representatives of the Cabinet Office about the dry-sounding issue of civil service accountability. Unusually these include a minister - Francis Maude. The PAC does not normally take evidence from politicians - and this could be an important precedent. Mr Maude will be supported by Lord Browne, who is leading the Efficiency and Reform Board. And the will be talking to that veteran bruiser Ken Clarke in its annual session on justice.

Then on Thursday, Culture Secretary Jeremy (ahem) Hunt will answer questions in the Commons, where the News International bid for complete ownership of Sky TV seems bound to feature, followed by the usual Business Statement; and then Backbench Business on a motion relating to the future of the horse racing levy and improving life for disadvantaged children.

If they're not too exhausted by now, the Lords will be holding a debate on the constitutional and Parliamentary effect of a coalition government, proposed by Baroness Symons. Their lordships obviously haven't had enough constitutional meat to chew over this week.

On Friday, both MPs and peers are sitting again: the Commons to discuss private members' bills. In the Commons, Procedure Committee Chair Greg Knight will be attempting to tidy up anomalies in the law of inheritance, including what happens when the person who should normally inherit property killed the person who owned it.

Another bill on the order paper deals with the sale of tickets for sporting events; and the Lords debate the Marine Navigation Aids Bill and further bills on the rehabilitation of offenders and dog control.

A couple of dogs not barking this week are the and . Foreign Affairs are putting the finishing touches to their potentially very contentious report on Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Defence are holding a series of private briefings while they plan their future activities. Both plan to be back in action fairly soon.

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Euro-rows in the Commons resume a week on Monday, and continue for three whole long days on the floor of the Commons.

MPs will spend Monday 24, Tuesday 25 and Wednesday 26 January on committee-stage debates on the European Union Bill.

And "sovereignty amendment" will not be the last occasion for euro-rebellion. Another Conservative backbencher, , has put down a series of amendments intended to toughen up the "referendum lock" the bill is supposed to provide on further erosion of UK and parliamentary sovereignty.

At the moment the bill provides for ministers to approve the transfer of non-significant powers to EU decision making (would it really be sensible to have a British referendum on changes to the rules around the pensions for members of the EU Court of Auditors, they ask). Mr Clappison wants the Commons to be able to confirm (or deny) ministerial decisions on what is or isn't significant enough to merit a referendum.

The bill excludes referendums on European treaty changes which simply allow the accession of a new member state - although there would still be a referendum if an accession was bundled together with "significant" wider issues. Mr Clappison thinks there should at least be a vote in Parliament. And the same goes for any decision to opt into EU policies in the "freedom and justice" area, where the UK currently has an opt-out.

Spookily enough, it seems these amendments might come up for debate on Tuesday 25, when Mr Clappison, and awkward squaddies Chris Chope, Edward Leigh and Graham Brady are due to be in Strasbourg for a meeting of the European Council. I'm assured that even the allure of Strasbourg's fine cuisine won't keep them from flying back.

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As the parliamentary career of Eric Illsley stutters to its inglorious end, Westminster suddenly realised that it was - at least technically - possible for a convicted expenses cheat to remain in the Commons, if they were sentenced to less than a year in clink.

The idea of zombie MPs, discredited and shunned, shuffling around Westminster for years after their release from prison is an appalling prospect for those labouring to rebuild the reputation of Parliament.

The Commons does have a rarely-invoked power to expel members but the Coalition agreement also includes a promise to give the voters a power of "recall" for use against errant MPs. It promises a power to trigger a by-election where an MP is "found to have engaged in serious wrongdoing" and 10% of constituents were to sign a petition. Of course, that brief paragraph raises any number of questions - but we may soon be seeing the government's answers to some of them, in a draft bill which is expected to appear in the next couple of months.

For a start, what constitutes "serious wrongdoing"? Are we just talking about financial/criminal matters? Or could voters recall an MP for doing something with which they strongly disagreed. Certainly, a recall power could well be used on an expenses cheat who was sentenced to lees than a year of custody - removal is pretty well automatic for MPs sentenced to more than a year. But what about an MP jailed for participating in a demonstration or an act of civil disobedience, like ex-Labour MP Terry Fields' refusal to pay the poll tax? Would that constitute "serious wrongdoing"? And most important, who decides?

The lurking worry here is that recall could become a mechanism for jerking the chain of MPs who take an unpopular stand against the grain of constituency opinion - civil libertarians worried about anti-terror laws, sceptics about climate change, whoever. The spectre of hovers over this issue. He was the Conservative MP for Lancaster in the early 1960s, but made himself very unpopular by simultaneously supporting the legalisation of homosexuality and the abolition of hanging. He wasn't recalled, but an unhappy constituency association couldn't bring itself to campaign for him with any enthusiasm, and he lost in the 1964 election, and found himself unable to secure a candidacy in Lancaster or elsewhere.

He paid the price for being an outrider for many of the big social reform causes of the 1960s...but how many MPs would be prepared to champion such causes if the result might be recall before an election?

Recall may be one of a number of issues dealt with in the forthcoming bill - maybe a new code for parliamentary lobbying might be there too. But the pace at which Parliament digests the proposals may be rather more leisurely than it has been with earlier "Clegg" bills. Unlike the Fixed-Term Parliaments Bill and the Parliamentary Voting and Constituencies Bill the coalition does not think it's against the clock, so expect pre-legislative scrutiny by a committee of massively senior MPs and peers, followed by a second reading in, perhaps, the 2012-13 session.

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They may not have won, but Conservative euro-sceptics are exuding a certain quiet satisfaction over the vote on Bill Cash's "sovereignty amendment" to the European Union Bill.

The benchmark for this Parliament for Tory euro-rebellion is the 37 who defied the party whip over Douglas Carswell's call to reduce Britain's contribution to the EU budget (see my post from October). And on a far less inflammatory and seemingly technical issue there was still a notable uprising.

Mr Cash's attempt to underline that it is the British Parliament that is sovereign in Britain and that EU law is only enacted here by virtue of Westminster's authority, attracted the votes of 25 Conservatives (plus their two tellers, Mr Cash himself and Bernard Jenkin), six Labour MPs and five from the DUP. It might have been worse for the coalition, but for a conciliatory performance by the Europe Minister David Lidington - what the rebels really hate is being dismissed as fetishists or obsessives and he didn't fall into that particular trap, made a point of engaging with their arguments, and offered a micro-concession over the explanatory notes to the bill.

Most of the speakers in the debate were old-guard Maastrictistas - Mr Cash himself, Bernard Jenkin, Richard Shepherd. But they also attracted the vote of "new wave" euro-rebels like Douglas Carswell and new intake members like Steve Baker, Andrew Bridgen, Richard Drax, Zac Goldsmith, Chris Kelly and David Nuttall. Others in the Conservative new intake - Chris Heaton-Harris, Henry Smith - sounded sympathetic without actually rebelling.

So the upshot is that the government was not defeated, or even really embarrassed. But it was reminded that it could not rely on its theoretical Commons majority on some EU matters - if ever a "perfect storm" issue uniting the Conservative rebels with Labour and even Lib Dems should arise. That is not as impossible a contingency as it might seem. All it takes is a bit of opportunism in the right places...

* Meanwhile I'm looking for more accurate euro-terminology. There's now a substantial Conservative faction that dislikes being called eurosceptical, on the basis that they are not in the least sceptical: they are convinced supporters of British withdrawal. Preferably about next Tuesday.

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It's all kicking off in Westminster. As I write the , with Labour's John Mann and George Mudie relishing the chance. Moment of the session so far came when Mr Diamond launched into an account of his past as the son of Scottish-Irish immigrants in the US...leading Mr Mudie to remark that tears were welling up in his eyes and he could almost hear the bagpipes.

Of course, these are the trivial but entertaining moments, but Mr Diamond is facing some fairly searching questions about quite why City institutions feel the need to pay vast bonuses to some of their staff, and about whether it is really true that if the government clamps down on excessive bonuses, the banks will decamp to Zurich and leave the UK economy much the poorer.

Several select committees - including Treasury - have been pretty robust of late, and there are signs that collectively, they are starting to take a much more assertive stance. The Public Administration Committee's withering verdict on the government's quango cull and the Home Affairs Committee's dissection of the way the immigration system has been working are two pretty tough documents. The question now is whether the other committees will follow their example.

Today, the expectation is that 15-20 Conservative MPs will rebel at various points during - the measure which is supposed to provide a "referendum lock" on transfers of sovereignty to Europe - although .

Watch the vote on Bill Cash's "sovereignty clause" which is designed to reassert the primacy of UK law and the UK Parliament over EU law in Britain. A lot of Conservative backbenchers don't regard voting for this as real rebellion - more like useful clarification. That amendment is expected to be called today - the attempt by another Conservative, Peter Bone, to insert an "in-out" referendum into the bill, may not be debated for weeks, if at all. So far, intriguingly, whipping by the government is said to be "light".

Further Tory rebellions loom. The big one will be on votes for prisoners - a flashpoint I noted back in October - a proposal almost no British politician actually wants, but which is needed to avoid more embarrassing defeats at the European Court of Human Rights. Tory MPs, in particular, absolutely loath the idea of providing the franchise for felons. The current proposal to allow prisoners serving less than four years to vote has not sweetened the pill. You don't get a prison term like that for double-parking; these will be fairly serious criminals.

The Conservative backbenches would like the government to either prevaricate (as Labour did for some years before losing office) or limit the right to vote to those serving ultra-short sentences. This particular vote has not been scheduled yet, but there is no doubt there will be some pretty angry scenes when it is. And the increasing habit of backbench rebellion could manifest itself again when the Fixed Term Parliament Bill comes back before MPs.

Meanwhile over in the Lords, the snails' pace progress of the Parliamentary Voting and Constituencies Bill is beginning to rather annoy the coalition. Yesterday saw day seven of the committee stage.

Tomorrow will see day eight. And their Lordships will move on to day nine on Monday. On the government side, there are mutterings that Labour peers are engaging in blatant time-wasting, stretching the Lords conventions of self-regulation to the limit, if not beyond it. This is no mere irritant. If the bill is not passed in good time, then it may not be possible to hold the promised referendum on changing the voting system this May - and that would blow a bit of a hole in the coalition's political strategy.

Coalition peers are hardly speaking at all in these debates - but Labour peers are more than making up for their reticence, throwing themselves into a prolonged Socratic dialogue on their amendments, with the likes of Lord Falconer, Lord Foulkes, Lord Grocott and others clearly enjoying themselves, as they did last night in debating an amendment for three hours, before it was withdrawn.

The government response may come next Monday, when we could see a "till they drop" open-ended committee day, that won't finish until certain votes have occurred. A certain tetchiness is already evident and tempers may continue to fray if the long speeches continue into Tuesday morning.

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