As it happened: MPs prepare for election as Lords debate bill

Listeners of BBC Radio 5 Live discuss why they're looking forward to an election.

Do you know how to register to vote? Here are the details of what you need to do and where you need to go.

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Boris Johnson clocks up the 100th day of his premiership on Thursday - the same day the UK was originally due to leave the European Union.

But he still has a few weeks to go until he avoids the dubious honour of being the UK's shortest-serving prime minister.

Mr Johnson will pass that milestone on 19 November, when the general election campaign is due to be in full swing.

On that date, he will overtake George Canning, who managed 118 days as PM before his death in 1827, and who currently holds the record for the shortest time in office.

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Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson has been speaking to reporters outside Parliament.

She repeats that she will be standing in the forthcoming election as a "candidate to be prime minister".

Her party, she says, is going into an election with more members and more money "than ever before".

Asked about possible alliances with other pro-Remain parties, she says the Lib Dems will "look to work with other parties that want to stop Brexit".

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"How prepared are we to hold a free and fair election" asks film producer and Labour peer Lord Puttnam.

He says election laws have "failed to keep pace with technological change" and makes reference to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

He warns that allowing the election to go ahead without implementing the Electoral Commission's recommendations "can only help those foreign actors trying to undermine our democracy".

The men of Workington have found themselves in a spotlight of sorts - or a flurry of political headlines at least - after a think tank marked them out as a key election target.

Workington Man is 2019's Worcester Woman. But who is he? And what do men in Workington - a former mining town on the Cumbrian coast - think of the stereotype?

According to Onward - the right-of-centre think tank that gave birth to the creation - Workington Man is older, white and Northern.

The imagined poster boy for "middle England" likes rugby league and Labour. He voted for Brexit and feels the country is moving away from his views.

Read more here.

"This could be the most important election in my political life," says the Lib Dem's Lord Newby.

He notes that conventional wisdom says voters may go for smaller parties in local or European elections but "revert to type" come a general election.

"And like a holiday fling, voters' infidelity of June will be forgotten under the harsh winds of December."

"But I am not so sure," he says, and suggests Lib Dems will win votes from "the millions who marched against Brexit".

John McTernan, a former adviser to ex-PM Tony Blair, says he expects Labour to focus its campaign on the trustworthiness of Boris Johnson and "bread and butter issues" such as housing and the NHS.

He says a key factor will be whether Mr Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn can best "mobilise" the distrust that certain sectors of the electorate have in the other man.

There are "massive character issues" with both, he says, and notes that Mr Corbyn is "not trusted" by working-class voters in the north of England.

He says he expects "not a very nice election" - and says the contest will be "very unstable", with four or five parties fighting each other in certain seats.

Responding for the opposition, Baroness Smith of Basildon says Labour has "an offer that will make a real difference to the people of this country".

However she also makes "a plea for decency and integrity" during the campaign.

"If this election is to truly resolve the divisions, caused largely by the bungling of Brexit, all parties have to seek to heal as well as to win."

The government's Baroness Evans of Bowes Park opens the debate.

"The government did not want an election," she says - but adds "this Parliament has not been able to agree a way forward on the major political issue facing this country."

She says the purpose of the bill is "to give the public their say".

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One of the MPs standing down at the election, Tory MP Sir Alan Duncan, says he is looking forward to doing "some more fulfilling things".

The former Foreign Office minister adds that the full-time nature of being an MP today means "you can't earn money and stay in politics".

He adds that this has meant "people with deeper experience" have left the political arena and "knowledge of the outside world has got shallower".

He says politics is "far less dignified" than it used to be, and the debate is "coarser and ruder".

Debate about the Historical Institutional Abuses Bill winds up, which means the House of Lords now begins debate of the Early Parliamentary General Election Bill.

With Amber Rudd the latest high-profile female MP to announce she is standing down, some are asking whether abuse on and offline is driving women out of politics.

Anecdotally at least, there would appear to be a case to argue, with Heidi Allen admitting just this morning that a particularly "nasty email" was the final straw in her decision to quit politics.

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Ahead of the upcoming general election, the BBC has been answering questions sent in by readers.

One such question is about whether the reigning monarch can vote.

The answer? The Queen does not vote. She "has to remain strictly neutral with respect to political matters" and is "unable to vote or stand for election", according to Buckingham Palace.

However, the monarch is legally allowed to cast a ballot in general elections.

The Queen does not vote "by convention... rather than because of a legal impediment", the Electoral Commission has said.

Read more answers to readers' questions here.

A spokesman for the Labour leader tells the political editor of Business Insider that Jeremy Corbyn would not block a new Scottish independence referendum - unless it came early on in a Labour government.

Government minister Lord Ashton of Hyde says the government "takes very seriously the issues the bill seeks to address".

However, he says, there is "simply not enough time" for the bill to pass through both Houses.

He asks Lord Hain to withdraw his amendment.

Debate of the early election bill had been due to start but Labour's Lord Hain is making an attempt to get the Historical Institutional Abuses Bill passed before Parliament is closed for the election, arguing that "the victims have waited long enough".

A number of peers rise to speak in support of Lord Hain's amendment.

The BBC's Northern Ireland political reporter Jayne McCormack is following the debate: