I have a few questions. Do you live in the UK? Do you use the internet? Do you watch TV? Do you play video games? Do you listen to the radio? If you've answered 'yes' to any of these questions (and I'll be very surprised if anybody doesn't), then something very important is being discussed in the UK Parliament that affects you.

It's called the Digital Economy Bill, and I've suddenly become very interested in the workings of Parliament, that I've started following all of the debates and such that relate to several Bills. I get the feeling that most of you are bored stiff by such things, so I thought I'd use my blog for something useful for once, and explain, in simple abbreviated terms, what is happening with the Bill, and allow you to make your own mind up about it. It's as much for my own benefit as yours, as I'd like to get things in perspective as I follow my first Bill through Parliament.

First of all, what's a Bill? Well, a Bill is a law that isn't law yet. A proposed law, if you like. This particular Bill started out as a very long White Paper (a document detailing what the government will do in future, usually used as the basis for writing a new Bill) entitles 'Digital Britain: Final Report'. I can't be bothered to read this document, as it's over 200 pages long and is merely hypothetical. The real deal is the Bill that came out from it, and I will definitely be giving that a thorough viewing.

I will also be listening to every word said in Parliament on this Bill, and because I'm sure you guys are too busy (or lazy) to do the same, I'll summarise everything on this blog. To use a bit of internet slang, tl;dr. I'll hopefully be able to educate you on the process of getting it through Parliament, just in case you don't understand the devilry taking place within the Houses. I think, therefore, I should begin my coverage with a simple explanation of the passage of a Bill.

Once a Bill has been written, it gets a First Reading in either House (the Commons or the Lords) by a member of the House. This is just a formality: there's no debate, as, generally, nobody actually knows what's in the Bill, because it hasn't been printed. You can't read some Bills until a while after, once they've been printed. Sometimes at this stage the member will give an explanation of the Bill to anyone listening, but often they just read the title and it goes off to be printed, which gives members time to read it and come up with ideas.

Second Reading takes place a bit afterwards, and is the first debate of the Bill. It generally involves numerous members giving pre-prepared speeches on their opinions of the Bill, expressing support or concern over some or all of it. It usually doesn't take too long, unless it's a large Bill which provokes a lot of debate, and the member who introduced the Bill will wrap things up by addressing the issues brought forth by the other members. Nothing happens to the Bill, yet. That comes next.

The Committee Stage is a much more involved process, since now members have the opportunity to amend the Bill. It will probably be clear from Second Reading that several members have problems with parts of the Bill, and so they suggest changes. All of the changes are discussed by members, and this can take a very long time, obviously. Each amendment is either not moved (perhaps they changed their mind, or another amendment has made it unworkable), withdrawn, or agreed. From what I can see of the first sitting of the Committee Stage on this Bill, agreements on amendments are not that common, which I suppose is understandable.

Once everybody can agree on the amendments, it's time to move to the next stage, the Report Stage. This is pretty similar to the Committee stage, and just gives members another chance to debate the Bill and propose amendments, but only to those parts that have already been amended. If you want to debate the original content of the Bill, you had your chance in the last two stages, basically. As far as I can see, this is generally a much quicker stage than the Committee Stage.

The Third Reading is the final part before being sent to the other House. In the Commons, there are no amendments allowed by now, but in the Lords amendments are still possible. Regardless, the Bill has been debated and fiddled with so much that there's little argument by this point, so it generally gets put to a vote and either agreed to or not.

As I said, the Bill gets sent to the other House (the Houses don't refer to each other by name, incidentally: they simply refer to them as "another place") and the whole process begins afresh. One assumes that if it went through the whole process with one House, the process through the other should be relatively simple, though you never know.

Once the second House approves it, any new amendments (if there are any) get considered by the other House, and a Bill can "ping-pong" between the Houses until both agree on a final form of the Bill, which then goes off to the Queen for Royal Assent. Thus, it becomes an Act. Phew.

Okay, after all that explanation, I won't be giving you an awful lot of actual info, yet. I'll just tell you that I'll be referring to a few things for you to check out yourself. The BBC's excellent Democracy Live site puts all of their BBC Parliament programming in easy-to-reference videos on the web. The only real issue is that they divide the footage from the day into lots of little pieces, so unless the thing you want is a big, significant thing, it's hard to find. Still, you can search for stuff that people say in the videos, which is pretty cool.

Also, Hansard is the not-quite-verbatim-but-close-enough record of everything said and done in Parliament, and so that's also a nice reference work, as they cut out all the guff and just leave the important bits, with good grammar and the like. I'll reference both of them, just so you can have a look for yourself at what people said. I'll probably find the members' pages on Wikipedia, in case you want to find out about somebody.

So, I hope that gives you some background, before I delve into the Bill properly and give you a good summary of debates around the Bill. This could be a long process, but it's worth remembering that Parliament opens and closes every November, so if this Bill isn't passed by this November, it may have to begin again. Which would be fun...

The First Reading took place on 19 November 2009, shortly after the opening of Parliament. A lot of Bills were introduced that day, to give enough time for passage. No debate, of course, but the incredibly complicated title gives a hint of things to come. I'll be back to summarise the Second Reading, which took place on 2 December 2009. At the moment, we're well into the Committee Stage, and it plans to continue for a little while yet. So, no rush, then.