AS I forecast, we had some lively times last week as an alliance of Liberal Democrats, Tories, cross-benchers and a few Labour backbenchers defeated the government five times.

On Monday we defeated it three times on identity cards.

The most important was to call for a full independent review of the costs of identity cards -- signs are that the bill will be huge and far more than the government are saying.

The next day we inflicted two government defeats on the Terrorism Bill.

One amendment was to protect people such as librarians, universities and booksellers from being prosecuted for the contents of books they stock or supply to people without in any way "intending" to promote terrorism.

The other was to remove the rather silly offence of "glorification" of terrorism which no-one really knows what means.

But we don't win them all.

Liberal Democrats made an amendment to remove an offence of being "reckless" as to whether members of the public will be encouraged to carry out terrorism.

But when we put it to the vote Tories and abstained.

The problem with words like "glorification" and "reckless" is that no-one knows what they really mean.

Putting them in legislation results in vague laws which end up earning top lawyers vast pots of money, but gives juries all the reasons in the world not to convict.

The Terrorism Bill includes a proposal to make planning a terrorist attack a specific offence and that is probably sensible.

But most of it reads like another New Labour showpiece.

It shows they are "doing something about it" when in practice the new laws are either not needed (plenty of laws already against blowing people up), or they will yet again turn out to be unworkable because lawyers will be able to run rings round the sloppy wording.

On Wednesday we had the Third Reading debate and said goodbye to the Commons Bill.

We all congratulated ourselves on a good job done (with lots of clichs such as "it's what the House of Lords does well") and sent it off down the corridor to the other kind of Commons.